Leading Libraries Series: Leading for Innovation

Ideation and creativity

 

Getting creative together: Effective techniques for groups

The single most effective way of generating a divergent field of possible ideas is to bring a diverse group of people together to do so. But it can feel very daunting to run a huge workshop around your challenge. Luckily, we can, as always, just start safe and small – perhaps by trying out a new technique in a meeting or asking a couple of colleagues to come and brainstorm with us over a coffee. Whatever setting you choose, remember those '7 rules of ideation' – perhaps have them visible as a reminder as you work.

Most of the techniques listed below can be done on your own as well but you will find it much more fun and productive to have at least one other person in the conversation with you! If you feel you need a bit more inspiration before you begin, you can find even more tools to enhance your creative process at:

• the Service Design Tools website (a free crowd-sourced resource, curated by Roberta Tassi and colleagues from The Service Innovation Academy at Milan Polytechnic
• the 'This is Service Design Doing Method Library', another fabulous free resource offered by Jakob Schneider & Marc Stickdorn, at 'This is Service Design Thinking'
• the Design Kit – more methods and tips, offered by ideo.org, the not-for-profit global design studio.

We've selected these sites as they focus specifically on service design in public or not-for-profit contexts so they are relevant to your challenge. You'll also find a huge range of inspiring case studies, free trainings and other resources if you want to learn more about Design Thinking and how you can use it in your work.

 

Creative thinking approaches

Here we focus on five of the DT techniques that are the most widely used in innovation and collaborative design processes.

 

Co-design workshops (bringing diverse voices together)

Co-design workshops are creatively facilitated events in which relevant stakeholders including users and staff, use specific tools to design or improve elements of a service. This phase of rapid idea generation and testing is a great moment to involve your users as designers. There are lots of different ways of doing this.

Why? Engaging stakeholders in all parts of the design of an idea provides new insights, stronger engagement and ensures services are relevant to the people who use it.

How? Co-design workshops require carefully designed stimuli to keep discussion on topic and to capture information. They can involve many of the methods detailed in this module.

 

Rich pictures (using our visual imagination)

A Rich Pictures exercise asks participants to draw service ideas, a vision or mind maps.

Why? Drawings can capture the complexities of any given situation, from an emotional or attitudinal state to the elements of a service or system. They are powerful tools to facilitate collective visioning sessions, especially when the people around the table come from diverse backgrounds or speak different professional ‘languages’.

How? Visual tasks can include:

• free and creative drawing of specific service ideas or of a vision for the future
• mind maps surrounding certain topics.

To gain meaningful insights, be sure to ask why the participant drew his or her picture in the way that he or she chose, remembering to capture keywords and quotes alongside the visual elements.

Bring along blank pieces of paper and multi-coloured pens. You might also think about bringing along magazines and newspapers for collages.

 

User journey maps (understanding what it is like to live the experience)

User journey maps map the actions, interactions and touchpoints that service users experience, as well as the supporting systems behind the scene. Journey mapping is a powerful method for getting detailed feedback on your idea and for generating key information on which to base your design. In many ways user journey mapping connects user experience and strategy very directly.

Why? Journey maps are a powerful way of facilitating detailed conversations about how a service is experienced by people. They can be used at the research stage, to understand and analyse existing services. This activity might for example follow a service safari, or an interview with a professional or a service user, in order to summarise your insights in a visual way.

Journey maps are also very useful when trying to generate specific ideas or high-level principles about new services. They can help to flesh out and communicate new service ideas, based on the ideal journey we want service users to experience

How? To get the most from journey maps, it is best to use them alongside a persona, and to refer to the persona throughout the exercise by asking questions like ‘How would Jonny feel at this stage? What would Jonny need to respond to that need?’

 

Different worlds (thinking from a different perspective)

Different Worlds is a group-based exercise in which participants think about how people from a different organisation or background would deal with the challenge.

Why? This activity stimulates creative thinking about a challenge or a topic.

How? To facilitate this exercise, you will need to write or draw the brands of several different organisations and think about how they would deal with a specific challenge. The idea is to use these to encourage participants to brainstorm fresh solutions to the challenge. An example might be, "If John Lewis ran children’s centres, what would they do differently? or if we brought in an architect to look at our library, how might they change the way we present things?"

A similar exercise is De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, which assigns different, pre-defined modes of thinking to each participant as part of a creative discussion.

 

Competitions and challenges (getting other people to generate ideas for you)

Competitions and challenges are processes ending in rewards for participants.

Why? Competitions and challenges are a great way of involving people in a creative process, for example through engaging service users in a competition to redesign aspects of the service. Competitions are often used to engage schools, teachers and students. People are more eager than one might expect to get creative and apply design thinking to real challenges.

How? Competitions and challenges can take many formats which you can adjust depending on what you need. To recognize people’s work you could consider setting up a space - physical or online - to display the winning proposals.

 

Deep dive - Running an ideation workshop

You can organise co-design workshops to ask potential users, staff and other stakeholders to design their own solutions to your briefs. Their way of expressing ideas, and their perspective on the kinds of touchpoints they would like to experience is the most valuable feedback you can get. In an ideation workshop you can:

• get people's feedback on your initial ideas and insights
• identify any issues you need to be aware of in your design
• make sure any idea you take forward has potential.

It's good to make sure that you have a clear understanding of where you want your workshop to focus before you begin. You can create an 'Ideation brief' to guide your design and to communicate the workshop objectives to the people you are inviting. We have created an Ideation brief template to help you do this.

 

A rapid ideation process

Rapid ideation is a process that is a tried and tested technique for generating our initial list of 'wild ideas'. Rapid ideation 'forces' each participant to:

• create as many ideas as they can
• build on each other's ideas
• work within a strict time frame.

All of these aspects can spur on our creativity – we recommend you run the process exactly as it is described here – ideally with at least 4 participants in each group. We have created a Rapid ideation template which you can share with participants so that they can capture the ideas that they generate.

 

Deep dive - User journey mapping

Another technique that is particularly useful in an ideation workshop, is to share and discuss a series of User journey maps. You and your participants can create these maps live or you can bring some maps created in your Research phase for people to review and discuss in the workshop. We have created a User journey map template to support you in this process.

Begin with a 'persona' that you identified in the Reflect stage of your cycle, or a real person who represents the group you want to target with your service. Then map out what experiences you would ideally like them to have across various stages of your proposed service. For example:

• How should they hear about it?
• What would make them want to get involved?
• What would their first interaction with the service be like?

Then against those ideal experiences, describe the barriers and enablers to that person really having those experiences. This is the key information for you to design around. Finally, describe the things that your service needs to do in order to avoid the barriers and build on the enablers to ensure the ideal experience. These functions you identify are the things that you can begin testing in the Experiment phase.

 

Selecting ideas to run with

You are now ready to begin thinking about which ideas you want to invest further time and energy on in the final part of the innovation cycle. There are lots of good reasons to select an idea for further investigation in your Experiment stage. You might want to select ideas that:

• have the potential for the greatest impact on your target users
• generate a new way of looking at the issues you identified in your research
• are most likely to unlock new resources
• are most unusual, and therefore represent the greatest learning opportunity
• challenge some functions of your organisation that you would like to explore creatively.

It's usually best to select between 5 and 10 ideas to take forward – from small to large, easy to difficult, so that you have a wide range of options to experiment with. But before you move into the prototyping phase it's useful to think about how you are going to communicate your ideas to the people you want to involve in testing them. The next segment in this module will help you do that.

 

Pause for reflection

Consider the process you have just been through to generate new ideas from your insights.

Which ideas are most appealing to you? Which do you currently have the most energy for? (These ideas are the ones you should take forward to the Experiment stage)

Which ideas would you not 'want to lose'? (These might be things that are outside the scope of the challenge you have set yourself but are still intriguing or potentially useful)

Has anything changed in your own perspective on the challenge you have set yourself as you have used the techniques here?

Which insights and opportunities are you most excited to communicate to other people – service users, colleagues or other stakeholders?

 

Continue to: Sharing your innovation ideas