Now its time to ideate and create ideas. In the last step we defined our point of view. Defined our position and collected a lot of information about the problem we want to solve. In the end of the third step we created the problem statement. This will assist us in the ideate phase now.
Follow the Problem Statement
Now it is important to have a well defined and formulated problem statement. This one will now kick off the ideate phase in the design thinking process. All progress we will do now will follow this statement to create a lot of useful and creative solutions. This guidance will help us keep on track in the next sessions.
Get up to speed
Before we start to collect ideas it can help to do some warm up in the team. Do some quick sessions to bring the team up to speed and prepare our thinking to generate ideas and work in creative way. To be in a great mood and open your mind is very important to think out of the box and generate all kind of solutions. For example you can do a quick storming about your next companies summer party. What do you need. Think positive and also include some fun stuff. Silly stuff and impossible things as well. include everything you can dream off. This will help you to open your mind for the required out of the box thinking and wide thinking.
Start your first session
Now as you have completed your warm up you can now start your first session solving your target problem. Again take your problem statement and put it on a wall where everyone can see it. Repeat it so everyone is familiar with it. Now schedule your first session for generating ideas. For this you can use the classical brainstorming. Important schedule a time frame for it. Hit the go…..
Generate ideas! Collect everything you can think of. Everything which can help to solve the problem and collect these on the wall next to the problem statement. It is important to visualize the idea and speak about it. So the other team members can benefit of it. They can work with these ideas and put further ideas on top of it. You should use the standard rule set when doing a design thinking set. So no idea will be rated or cancelled during this step. You will see after a short while you will be able to ideate a lot of very interesting ideas.
The team coach will guide them
The team coach should follow the process and is responsible if the ideate process will left the track given by the problem statement. All ideas should make any sense in regards to the problem statement. If the session is leafing the track to much and gets lost in silliness you need to interrupt and bring them back. But at the end you will have simple ideas, some ideas for major ideas and also some silly ideas. But these are also part of our solving process. When the time has come stop the session and look what you have.
If you are not happy yet or you need to do some adjustments in the thinking you can prepare and do another session.
Summarize after the ideate phase
In the end of this step you will end up with wall full of ideas. A lot of great and interesting ideas. Some of are maybe similar and some are them are some kind silly. But we will not rate them yet. To have a closer look on the results will be the next step in our design thinking process. We will group them together and start to rate and classify them in regards to some indicators. But this will be done in our next step.
