The process for our ideation and create stage was unlike any process that I have had before. It was entirely different because of the fact that the brainstorming part of the create stage was entirely different, and I absolutely loved it. It gave everyone a voice during the process. Usually, one person can take over and say what they want about any topic. Instead, this forces general communication from everyone, and allows for ideas that may not be brought up prior to be discussed. It gives everyone a voice instead of just one person. It was similar to the how might we statement generation, but the ideas in general and the generation of those ideas was entirely different.
The one major takeaway from this exercise was that the crazy ideas were something that are needed in every group discussion. They really help think of more ideas that would be useful to our topic or how might we statements. Without the crazy ideas, I don’t think we would have had good ideas coming out really. The ideas that we had in phase one were suitable, and got the job done, but none that were really exciting. Most of the ideas that we put in during stage one got taken away because they were not as exciting as the ideas we had later on. The crazy ideas not only gave us better ideas, but it also gave us more innovative ideas that we could build off of. Some of the crazy ideas that we had were obviously very out there, but we were able to curtail them and edit them so that they were more useable in the long run. It was fascinating to see our discussion on the crazy ideas, because we would read them and think they were not as crazy as we thought, and could be a potential innovation. These ideas caused us to think out of the box, we were not just coming up with any idea. We forced ourselves to think differently to try to incorporate the crazy ideas, and that made the process especially special. Two of the ideas that were considered “crazy” ended up making our final ideas, because we thought outside of the box and found a way to incorporate them. Once we have the general format of the process and get a lot of idea generation, the group was able to thrive and work as a cohesive unit. It helped us communicate better as a whole as well. Instead of just being silent and generating ideas, as soon as we finished generating ideas, our communication was easy and thorough. We trusted each other with our ideas which I found to be the most eye-opening. We had over 40 ideas from the first idea generation, and once we created our axis, each person got their own set of ideas and put them where they thought they should go on the axis. That was a big step for our team because that is a lot of trust for people to just use your ideas and put them where they thought it should be. We interpreted the ideas and placed them on the graph, which allowed for an unbiased opinion, and helped us understand in general what our ideas were trying to say. For example, someone put my idea farther down on the graph than I thought it should be, but I decided to trust my teammates idea and stick with their placement. My group trusted everyone’s opinion, and really bought into the entire process that we were using throughout. We would ask each other questions, but instead of giving pushback or complaining, we would go with the flow and try to incorporate everyone. I think this process lend itself well to communication, as well as creating more trust among the group. We had great ideas because people trusted one another and knew that they could talk freely, and not be scared about being shut down. Overall, this process was completely different than any in the past, and I loved being able to use it to our advantage.
The biggest challenge I ran into throughout this process was trying to narrow down the ideas. Through both stages of ideation, we somehow were able to generate over 90 ideas total. Of course there were some that overlapped, but we had so many ideas over the course of two days. The first day it took us a huge amount of time to narrow down the ideas because we were not familiar with the process, nor did we know how to really show which ideas we thought were best. Just in phase one alone, we had to do multi-voting three different times. That was the most startling part to me because we had so much trouble narrowing down our ideas since there were so many. Even combining was hard because we did not want to lose the originality of the idea. Combining we tried at every point, yet that never seemed to make a dent in what we were doing. We could never choose just one idea either, and had to stop with about four ideas for both how might we statements. The biggest part that we had to keep track of was keeping the originality of the ideas. If we took an idea and combined it with others, we run the risk of losing the originality of our idea that could be completely altering. That is the point of doing all of the idea generation, was to get those different and exciting ideas. If we combined them, then it would go away immediately. We realized that the generation part would be hard, just not the part where we had to narrow down all of the ideas. Getting our ideas down to four or five from 50 ideas in both categories is an absolute feat. We know it has to come down to one idea, but getting it down to four for each statement made us feel like we had accomplished a big amount in the ideation process. Overall, creating ideas was extremely difficult, but the process was perfect for communication and trusting of each other that we were able to generate great ideas and should be on track as a group.