Where do good ideas come from?
Brainstorming, extensive research and empathy mapping are great tools to bring creative ideas to life.
Frist step is BARINSTORMING:
Brainstorming isn’t something about giving answers; instead, it focuses on gathering questions. Brainstorming leaves some questions like how people can learn from their own experiences rather than focus on others’ practices. Should we work on grassroots efforts in an organization or implement policies from the top management? The fresh questions that participants or employees ask to bring up a whole chapter of questions and ideas. Recasting your problems helps in adopting creative thinking. This approach can help you in any way; either you’re sitting alone pondering over something, or you’re discussing problems in a group.
Some steps in brainstorming can help you to generate different ideas and get helpful answers which are as follows.
1: First of all, you need to identify the challenge which bothers you or the problem which is the main center point of your discussion. Allow people to contribute to your question to suggest solutions or respond to others. Second, no prejudgments during questions should be made because it would confuse the listeners.
2: You need to brainstorm the questions by setting up a stopwatch for four minutes relevant to your problem. You can list 15 questions within these four minutes, but these questions should be used to refine, reshape, and solve against a challenge rather than create too much hassle.
3: Identify those question(s) that have captivated your attention and which might resolve your problem.
Secondly, EMPATHY MAPPING is a crucial tool for idea generation; after identifying a challenge, it is essential to look at the pain points and gain points from different perspectives. Both customer segments and key stakeholders’ points of view are critical to see the real opportunities and value provided.
Empathy mapping follows a seven-step approach for different perspectives to identify the pain and gains.
1. Who are we empathizing with?
2. What do they need to do?
3. What do they see?
4. What do they say?
5. What do they do?
6. What do they hear?
7. What do they think and feel?
These seven questions provide essential insights into the root cause of the problems, leading to idea generation.
Thirdly, although it might be perceived as a support activity, in my professional life I have seen the benefit of learning from others' mistakes and experiences as a great way to get things done faster and better. EXTENSIVE RESEARCH is an essential tool for management consulting and provides people some advanced base to flourish better ideas. Extensive research and identifying the potential solutions and grouping and distributing them, taking successful parts, and eliminating the features which are not successful is another way of the thinking process. We see the benefit of extensive research in the same or similar fields that can inspire solutions to a problem.
I think good ideas come by first identifying the challenge and then doing extensive research to deeply understand the potential solutions and ways to address the problem. Meeting with the customers and key stakeholders to understand their pain and gain points, freely brainstorming, and iterating on a sprint approach to come up with solid ideas with trained people on the subject are the necessary steps to develop creative ideas. It is an iterative process and needs to go back and forth to test the concepts quickly.
Sources:
https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/updated-empathy-map-canvas-46df22df3c8a