Setting the Stage for Great Ideas

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Setting the Stage for Great Ideas

All too

often, creative sessions fall flat right from the start because the

participants are offered a stale and overly complex challenge to work through,

which does little to stimulate bold ideas.

How much

does this brief fire your imagination?

“We need

ideas for a returnable format which will engage female audiences over 60 and

introduce the concept of prioritising self-development as they consider

retirement. The ideas should be informative and educational whilst remaining

entertaining and accessible to viewers outside the target audience.”

It’s

cluttered and overly formal and feels tricky to solve. Here are some tips on how to soften and liven

up this brief.

Keep it simple

Express

challenges as SIMPLY as possible. Think; “How would my mum express this?” “How

would a ten year old express this?” Thinking simply takes jargon and management

speak out of a challenge and thus gives you a far clearer idea of what’s

expected of you when it comes to generating ideas. There’s nothing more certain

to take the energy out of a room than a challenge full of clichés and vague

generalisations.

The magic of ‘How Might We?”

Whatever

your brief, beginning the challenge with ‘how might we?’ is a great open and

inviting way to draw your participants into a session. It’s subtly less intimidating than ‘how can

we?’ or ‘how will we?’ It offers the idea of multiple solutions and invites

people to be a little more playful.

Create lots of different options before

settling for ‘the one’

It’s

worth generating several options for expressing your challenge rather than

settling for the first that comes into your head. Look at your brief from different

perspectives (it’s always worth looking at it from the audience’s perspective

as they’re the people you’re trying to appeal to) and try expressing it in

different ways.

With this

in mind let’s look at our retirement challenge again.

How might

we make retirement feel like the best years of our audience’s lives?

How might

we offer an irresistible pick and mix of retirement opportunities for our

audience?

How might

we inspire our mums to break all their habits and try something new?

How might

we create content that makes retired women fist pump?

Once you’ve

got a great list of challenges, converge and select one to generate ideas around. If you have time and teams are enjoying

themselves offer a second challenge to see if that takes people in a slightly

different direction.

"How Might We ..." is a well used opening for creative sessions across the innovation industry. IDEO are world leaders in innovative design - here's what they have to say about the magic phrase ...

http://www.designkit.org/methods/3

And this is what the Stanford Design School offer as a quick tool for generating great "How Might We" statements. Stanford Design School offer one of the leading design programmes in the world.

http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/HMW-METHODCARD.pdf