How to Ideate as a Team
“Almost all product development is done in a team setting, owing largely to the strongly held belief that the collective thinking of a group outperforms that of “the lone genius.””
Almost all product development is done in a team setting, owing largely to the strongly held belief that the collective thinking of a group outperforms that of “the lone genius” (watch Reimagining the Shopping Cart). Let’s acknowledge, however, that working in a team can be difficult. Teamwork requires compromise, coordination, patience with different working styles, different levels of passion/commitment, and more. Within the team environment, we can also encounter the destructive realities of team members vying for control and pushing personal agendas. For many of us, these difficulties can make working in a team very frustrating. Yet these difficulties don’t outweigh the potential benefits of working in a team. One of the great advantages of teamwork is that the collective experience, knowledge, skill, insights, and creativity of the team make it possible to solve really tough problems. It’s just plain unrealistic to expect one person to have all the experience and insight to solve modern complex problems.
Ideation is one product development activity that can benefit significantly from good teamwork. But getting the most out of team ideation is not trivial. There are subtleties that make or break team ideation. Below are a few tips and methods that will help.
Healthy practices for team ideation:
1. Develop an explorer mindset.
a) Believe that to get a good idea you first needs lots of ideas – dozens if not hundreds. This means the team has to work hard to explore the design options. It means that thinking about just one idea or one way to solve the problem is not good enough. It means forcing yourself to “loosen your grip” on your preferred way of solving the problem, and to be open to the idea that the final solution has not yet been discovered by the team.
b) Believe that the best idea will emerge from the team as team members add meaningful layers to an idea seed. Trust that the best ideas will not emerge fully from just one person on the team. This means that you have to abandon any thoughts that group ideation is a stage to show others how clever you are. It means you need to see the ideas of others as springboards for additional ideas. Train yourself to say “Yes! And…” to ideas you hear offered up by someone else. Practice authenticity by truly looking for the piece of the idea that has merit, and then adding something to it. In this way, force yourself to see the result of team ideation as a team outcome, not an individual outcome.
2. Assign an ideation facilitator.
a) The ideation facilitator (one of the team members) will organize and lead the effort. He or she should make sure a problem statement is written and distributed to the team approximately 24 hours before the team ideation. This will allow team members to begin pondering on and researching how others have solved similar problems in the past. The problem statement can simply tell the team what you’re trying to accomplish during the team ideation session. An example: “The purpose of this team ideation session is to generate dozens of ideas for products or services that can be sold to individuals, schools, or school districts to reduce bodily harm during school shootings.” This kind of statement captures a problem, indicates a context, establishes the customer, and importantly, gives the team some direction relative to what the team should try to create (dozens of ideas for a product/service). Other meaningful things can be added to the problem statement as needed, for example, other design constraints, or the ideation session meeting time/location, or special instructions relative to what team members should bring.
b) The ideation facilitator keeps the team on track during the ideation. For example, the facilitator helps the team refocus on products/services when they start generating ideas about policy (since policy is not a product or service that is sold to individuals, schools or school districts). The facilitator helps the team focus on creating ideas, and keeps the team from evaluating those ideas. The facilitator encourages the exploration of the design space by suggesting the team consider wildly different ideas than those already considered by the team.
3. Dedicate time/resources to team ideation. Ideation will take time and resources. It won’t be something you do really quick, and you certainly don’t want to do it just to check off the box. In my experience, you should plan for at least one or two one-hour-long team ideation sessions. Let this be an uninterrupted time, and plan it for a productive time of the day/week.
4. As a team member, fulfill your commitment to the team by coming prepared for the team ideation session. Be prepared by reading the problem statement beforehand and preparing any needed items. Be prepared by showing up with an explorer mindset. During the ideation session work with and not against the facilitator to accomplish the goals of the ideation session.
Two simple team ideation methods:
The classic team ideation approach is Brainstorming. It is classic for a reason, it is easy to understand and seemingly easy to do. To do it well, follow the traditional brainstorming rules: Focus on quantity, withhold criticism, welcome unusual ideas, combine and improve ideas (Osborn, 1963). If you choose to use brainstorming to ideate, understand that brainstorming almost always favors the voice of the loudest, most outgoing, person on the team. This can make it very difficult for quieter, more introverted, individuals to make the contributions they are capable of. A good facilitator and conscientious team members can help mitigate this. Alternative methods, such as the one described next, reduce this problem significantly.
An alternative to brainstorming is a process called brainwriting. As its name suggests, it is a team ideation method that happens primarily through writing and sketching, as opposed to the group discussion that accompanies brainstorming. Brainwriting has two significant benefits: the first is that it allows the voice of quieter people to be heard. Second, it allows collaborative brainstorming to happen in parallel, which importantly makes it realistic to generate more than 100 ideas in an hour as a team.
To do brainwriting as a team do this:
Prepare and deliver the problem statement to the team.
Purchase 150 3x5 cards or similar.
At the ideation session, sit the team in a loosely defined circle where everyone has a writing surface.
Give each person blank 3x5 cards. Each person needs this many cards: three times the number of team members.
Ask each person to individually generate and write down/sketch three ideas in 5 minutes total – where each idea is written on its own 3x5 card.
Ask people to pass their three idea cards to the person on their left, and receive three idea cards from the person on their right.
Each person then spends 5 minutes (total) individually generating three new ideas that are based on the idea cards passed to them. To facilitate organization and evaluation of ideas – which will be done after ideation – write each new idea on its own card and write/sketch enough so that each idea is understood from just that card.
Repeat steps 6 and 7 until the team has completed as many rounds as there are team members. At this point, the original three ideas would have gone all the way around the circle and returned to the original creator. Importantly, by the end of the process, the original ideas have been used as seeds to create multiple new ideas. In this way, the process is subtly collaborative.
Brainwriting is often called Method 635 because if working with a team of 6 people, each person generates 3 ideas, that are then further developed by the remaining 5 people on the team. In my experience, Method 635 (Brainwriting) is an effective and efficient way to generate a hundred ideas as a team very quickly. It too is not without drawbacks, which include it being more difficult for facilitators to get a sense of how the team is doing during the ideation process.
Keeping the End in Sight
Whichever method or combination of methods you choose, the outcome of ideation is a set of ideas/concepts. The hope of team ideation is that the generated set has a large variety, which comes from drawing on the diverse experiences, knowledge, insights, skills, and creativity of the individual team members. Ideally, the generated ideas have been touched/influenced by various team members as idea seeds are built upon. If done well, the best ideas will have only been possible by the collective thinking of the team. I have experienced this many times and the beauty of it is that it becomes virtually impossible to pin-point whose idea is whose. I believe that the healthy practices listed above, used with either of the methods described here, are capable of helping the team generate an excellent set of ideas/concepts.
Osborn, A. (1963) Applied imagination; principles and procedures of creative problem-solving. Scribner.
