Moving Forward with Innovative Ideas

Kerri Price

Jan '23 in Workshops & Exercises 🍔

It seems there’s a lot of teams that are getting pretty good at idea generation.

✅ They’re leaning into creative processes.

✅ They’re banning ‘yeah but’ and embracing ‘yes and’.

✅ They’ve discovered the power of going wide, before going narrow.

💡 And they’re cracking out some awesome thinking and brand-new ideas.

The problem is, once all their thinking is on the table, they resort to sticky dot voting and settle on a safe bet.

All those innovative ideas get left on the table!🤦

𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗴𝗼 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲:

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟭: Give each team member two sets of dots, in two different colours, and ask them to vote on their favourite ideas. One set of dots is for ideas that make sense and seem do-able. The other set is for ideas that sound amazing, but feel unrealistic or infeasible.

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟮: Invite team members to form small groups of 2-3 and ask each group to choose an amazing (but seemingly unrealistic) idea that they would like to explore some more.

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟯: Give groups 30 minutes to run the idea through a Constructive Evaluation process. (If you’re not familiar with this process, let me know and I can email you a template.)

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟰: Invite each group to share back their findings to the whole team, including their recommendation for ‘the one decision we can make right now’.

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟱: Celebrate how do-able those seemingly unrealistic ideas actually are! 🥳 💥 🚀

Wrap up the session using whatever process you usually use to decide on next steps.

I’m willing to bet that “more exploration of those ‘unrealistic’ ideas” makes the list.

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