The ideation magic field — Fast thinking vs slow thinking
Ideation is the most critical part of any design process. Ideation is at its root a creative process for generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, whether they are visual, concrete, or abstract ideas.
Once you have a clearly identified problem statement within a given context, comes the ideation process. Ideation is a full thought cycle that encompasses several stages, from innovation, to development, to actualization. The ideation process can be done individually or in groups. However, in design thinking and creative problem-solving, it is better to ideate in groups. Unlike philosophical or creative ideas, finding tightly coupled problem-solution ideas and innovative solutions ideas is best done in a co-creation and collaborative setting.
In the ideation phase, we get to use the first and second system of thinking. Which means that we have to use our fast thinking in a divergent phase to generate as many ideas as possible, and then we have to use our slow thinking to analyse and curate the ideas. The graphic above depicts how you transition from a divergent to a convergent phase when working in the problem or the solution space. The divergent part is where you are actually brainstorming and shooting as many ideas as possible, while the convergent part is where your structure all these ideas and select the ones you are going to test out. The transition between these two parts is called the groan zone and one of the trickiest parts is to wrap up the divergent part to move on to the convergent one.
To master the ideation process, you must master its three components:
- Divergent thinking
- Groan zone
- Convergent thinking
Divergent thinking or the brainstorming process
For the divergent thinking phase, in order to get as many ideas as possible in the most efficient way, I favour brainstorming. Brainstorming is a group creativity technique for solving a specific problem by gathering as many ideas as possible, generated spontaneously by a group of people.
The term brainstorming was popularized by Alex Faickney Osborn in his 1953 book Applied Imagination. Basically, brainstorming is a situation where a group of people meet to generate new ideas and solutions around a specific domain of interest in a safe space. By removing inhibitions and criticism, participants are able to think more freely and they suggest as many spontaneous new ideas as possible. All the ideas are noted down, no criticism is allowed and the ideas are only evaluated after the brainstorming session is over.
According to Osborn’s theory, there are two principles that lead to “ideative efficacy”:
- Deferring judgment
- Reach for quantity
The purpose of brainstorming sessions is to increase the overall creativity of the group by stimulating idea generation while reducing social inhibitions among group members. Following Osborn’s two principles there are four general rules for an effective brainstorming session:
Go for quantity: This rule is a mean of enhancing divergent production, aiming at facilitation of problem solution through the maxim quantity breeds quality. The assumption is that the greater the number of ideas generated the bigger the chance of producing a radical and effective solution.
Withhold criticism: In brainstorming, criticism of ideas generated should be put ‘on hold’. Instead, participants should focus on extending or adding to ideas, reserving criticism for a later ‘critical stage’ of the process. By suspending judgment, participants will feel free to generate unusual ideas.
Welcome wild ideas: To get a good long list of suggestions, wild ideas are encouraged. They can be generated by looking from new perspectives and suspending assumptions. These new ways of thinking might give you better solutions.
Combine and improve ideas: As suggested by the slogan “1+1=3”. It is believed to stimulate the building of ideas by a process of association.
The groan zone
The transition between divergent phase and the convergent phase is known as the groan zone. It is a tricky floating moment of uncertainty of whether we have enough enough information to move on to the integration and consolidation modes in the convergent one.
Many meeting facilitators miss the groan zone or have issues managing it. This always leads to endless and unproductive meetings where participants don’t get to closure and feel that they are wasting their time. On the other hand, some teams tend to fall into the other extreme and tame the divergent zone, which can lead to missed ideas and team members losing faith in the brainstorming process. Taming the groan zone is an art that when mastered can lead your team to brilliant solutions.
For those who often have not yet developed the instincts for identifying and managing the groan zone, I advise using helper techniques such as time-boxing or scope-boxing. Time-boxing can be very effective to help curb perfectionist tendencies in the team but it also generates a healthy level of stress than can spark creativity and increase focus. Scope-boxing on the other hand, can be used when time-boxing is not applicable to define a hard threshold at which you decide to switch to convergent thinking and start consolidating and refining ideas.
Convergent thinking or the focal point
Whilst the purpose of the divergent thinking phase is to get as many ideas as possible in the most efficient way, the convergent thinking is all about focusing on one idea. The focus required in this phase is key to identifying the best candidate idea to prototype and test.
When you know that, on average, only 1 out of 3000 ideas are successful in the business world. You want to really select the ideas that have the most chances to succeed without falling into the usual traps of team members subjectively favouring their pet projects or fall for the herd effect. To avoid that, you need a common understanding of what is a good idea and put in place the tools to scientifically select ideas. This way people are in the right collaborative mindset of “Let’s look at all these good ideas and find the optimal one”, instead of the argumentative mindset of “it’s my ideas against your ideas”.
In the best situations, if the brainstorming session was very productive, you would end up with a large amount of ideas to choose from. Which means that your team has the challenging task to select the right idea. This can be a daunting task for you and your team for several reasons:
- Ideas can look a lot alike and go in the same direction
- Ideas can be solving a problem different than the one in the problem statement
- Ideas can be interpreted differently
My first go-to technique is, as my maths teachers taught me, that when you have a large and complex problem, you must break it down into smaller problems. For that, I use a clustering technique. The purpose of this technique is to group ideas in different buckets by using an agreed upon classification method. For one, agreeing on the classification method and putting ideas in boxes makes it easier for the group to have the same understanding of the ideas. Second, by clustering ideas you can group the same ideas together and exclude the ideas that are out of scope.
As mentioned above, using a scientific technique such as the clustering technique allows your team to efficiently select the right ideas without wasting time and energy in unnecessary argumentative discussions. In addition to that, the clustering technique gives you the flexibility to define your own grouping criteria, so it can be adapted to your organisation’s mission and suit any business case.
