7 ideation techniques to supercharge your next workshop
No more Groundhog Day! Mix it up with some fresh ideation techniques
We’ve all been there, doing the same technique over and over again, things become stale, mundane even.
Like learning to drive, at first, it’s exhilarating, fun albeit a bit scary but over time, driving day-after-day things don’t quite seem to have the same spark as they once did.
For most things, this isn’t too much of a problem but when it comes to creativity, things becoming stale and mundane can really stifle innovation.
So here are my top 7 go-to ideations techniques. Hopefully, there’s something new here for you to expand your toolkit and hopefully supercharge your next ideation workshop!
1. Crazy 8’s
- Difficulty: Easy
- Length: Medium
Crazy eights have got to be my favourite ideation technique and is usually my go-to at first. This technique has become mainstream with the rise of Design Sprint’s, and in my experience has become common practice.
The reason why I personally love it because we draw and the fact that you are time-constrained — both fun and fast!
The mechanics usually work something like this:
- Fold a page in half, in half again and then one more time, creating 8 boxes.
- Set a timer for 8mins.
- Each person now has 8 minutes to draw 8 different ideas — that’s 1 minute per idea and it goes quicker than you expect!
As easy as that! Bonus points for completing all boxes and for the craziest idea!
When I took John Zeratsky’s Design Sprint course he taught sketching as a silent activity one where you use the time to iterate and refine your potential solution all without talking or collaborating. Much of the Design Sprint process has been created to be rapid and industrialised but in practice when you have the luxury of time (i.e. more than 5 days), I often find that taking a break and each person sharing their ideas back to the group can be extremely beneficial — I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone else idea and it’s trigger an idea in my head but it’s a lot!
Hot tip: If you have the time, do multiple iterations! Sketch 8 ideas, share back to the group and then go again. Make converging easier by shortening each iteration — i.e. in the second round only sketch 4 ideas. Then if you do a third narrow it down even more and only sketch your best 1 or 2 ideas!
2. Mission Impossible
- Difficulty: Medium
- Length: Short
This one is a great ideation technique when you’re strapped for time. Not only is it quick but it’s also an ideal technique for generating ideas where you have real constraints like time or materials, etc.
The idea is to leverage existing or potential constraints and dial them up to a point where they becoming seemingly impossible to overcome.
“How do we build a house in a day?”
“How might we increase our customers by 10x overnight?”
“What if we had to do it with zero money?”
So take your existing problem space and convert it into a seemingly impossible question, like those above. Set a timer and ideate around that question for several minutes. If needed, you can do multiple iterations with different impossible questions.
Hot tip: It can be beneficial to do a few iterations each with a question that leverages a different constraint — time, space, technology, environment, etc.
3. Negative Brainstorming
- Difficulty: Medium
- Length: Medium
The way negative brainstorming works is that you take your original question/problem space and you invert it — for example, rather than “how might I write the best blog?” I invert it to “how might I write the worst blog?”
Once you have your inverted question spend several minutes ideating around the new question. You can do this as a group or individually — my preference is individually and then for each person to share back to the group.
Once you have collated all the negative ideas, take one of them and ideate ways you could invert that solution back to be solving the original problem.
4. Association
- Difficulty: Easy
- Length: Short
Association is super fun! Mostly because it’s unpredictable which means you often get to have a good laugh but also because you can rapidly generate some super wild ideas!
Basic mechanics looks something like this, pull a random word or image (can use a dictionary, google images, or a random word generator — google it you’ll find one!) and generate ideas for anywhere between 30 seconds to 2 minutes, then pull a new one and go again.
Hot tip: If a word of image isn’t generating ideas after 30 seconds just move on. Energy and momentum is best for this one!
5. Mash-Up
From Hyper Island Toolbox
- Difficulty: Medium
- Length: Long
Mash-Up is super fun and one of my favourites! The idea is to generate ideas by combining two different elements/concepts together.
The first step is to generate a list of different elements — e.g. Technology, Laws, Existing Services, Society, etc
Second step is to then ideate around each element — for example;
- Technology = Phones, Laptops, 3D printers, etc
- Society = Trains, Cars, Schools, etc
Now comes the fun part. The third step is to now mash 2 or more of these generated things together to build an idea — for example: iPhone + Doing Laundry + Uber Eats = a Uber-like service where people come, pick up and do your laundry for you returning them clean the next day.
Hot tip: If you have time, it’s great for each person to sketch out their idea, give it a catchy name, etc. However if you are tight on time, a more rapid approach is for team members to shout it out and capture it on a post it note.
6. Unintended Consequences
From Hyper Island Toolbox
- Difficulty: Hard
- Length: Medium
This one in my experience can be a little tricky but is very powerful when you can get it right. Much like #3 Negative Brainstorming, the idea is to flip the question but this time rather than flipping your question you are exploring potential solutions and thinking about any unintended consequences they might have.
The way this runs looks like this. As a group first spend a couple of minutes creating a list of recent innovative businesses like Amazon, Netflix, Instagram, etc. Once you have a list of businesses, individually spend a couple of minutes ideating unintended consequences these companies may have — like Netflix increasing obesity due to more and more people staying indoors and binge-watching tv.
The final step is to look at the unintended consequences and suggest new business models for them — for example, Netflix could encourage a discount for limiting screen time.
The intention of this activity is to think outside the box and understand alternative business models. This is a great way of ideating alternative and unconventional business models.
Hot tip: You can do this with you own product — consider unintended consequences it may have and then ideate around that. This is a great way of coming up with adjacent product ideas and even potentially disrupting yourself before others do!
7. How would Google do it?
- Difficulty: Easy
- Length: Short
Explore your problem space as if you were the CEO of a company like Google, Amazon, Apple, a Kickstarter project, the United Nations, Ikea, etc.
It’s doesn’t get much simpler than that!
Hot tip: it’s best to choose a company that is in a completely different industry than you. This helps provoke out of the box thinking and gets those creative juices flowing a lot better!
Honorable Mention
I deliberately kept the list to things that you could easily prep right now and do. All are free and require no more than paper, a couple of post-it notes and sharpies.
However, if you have some lead time and have some cash to spend then I’d also suggest checking Trigger Cards out.
There are a few different ideation card decks out there but I’ve fallen in love with Trigger Cards, because of the design but also because of their different types of decks.
Ideation decks are super fun and super easy to use. They do however require an investment, but once you have them I’m sure they will get plenty of mileage!
📣 FYI: I’ve increased by availability for virtual 1:1 PM coaching. If you’re interested — perhaps you’ve started a new role, looking for guidance or want to level up your PM skills — get in touch at antmurphy.me
I’m also launching an online learning platform with deep dives into specific PM topics, like Stakeholder Management, Prioritization, Product Strategy, etc.
Get updates at productpathways.com.
