In ideation, people generally focus too much on coming up with a variety of ideas before they are clear about their goals and intentions. This can cause a variety of problems in the ideation process. For instance, brainstorming is a technique that will quickly turn into a futile exercise, if it is used in isolation. Here is why:
You may have read about the why; this short piece is about the how. I wrote about abstractions weakening your message but I would like to make a little differentiation here to make my point crystal clear.
Lately, I have noticed a behavior that sabotages its own purpose. Within the development process, prototyping is very important both to visualize ideas and concepts and to test them. Yet, the activity itself seems to create a misleading perception. Here is why:
Raise your (virtual) hand, if you have ever sat in a presentation, thinking “what the deuce is this person talking about?”
Oftentimes, we are so focused on delivering facts and conveying information, that we forget what’s important in our communication. Think of how you tell your significant other about your day. Do you list your daily activities as a fact-sheet or do you tell stories?
When talking to CEOs of established companies, it is interesting to note how they define their business. It is important to focus, of course, yet I feel that most have a very narrow definition of what they do. They put their business into a box, stating that they are a “shoe company” or a “health bar producer” or some other well-defined category.
In my last project, we had collected a lot of data, yet were still having problems sorting it out. Affinity diagramming helped to identify connections between issues and to place our findings into a meaningful spatial arrangement. This participatory mapping method clusters elements related to the researched topic in order to find significant innovation opportunities. Read More
