How Your Team Can Establish a User-Friendly Ideation Process

The art & science of increasing the odds of innovation happening

Let’s assume, for the moment that your team values big ideas — the kind that have the potential to make a big difference. Let’s also assume that your team is not at a loss for big ideas and that intriguing new possibilities regularly make their appearance in team meetings, brainstorming sessions, Slack channels, WhatsApp threads, and one-on-one conversations.

That’s the good news.

The not-so-good-news is that most of these ideas have to go through the kind of obstacle course that would make a Navy Seal end up in a puddle of tears: premature evaluation, neglect, organizational indifference, bureacracy, rabbit holes, and analysis paralysis, just to name a few.

Spontaneous idea generation is great. So are ideation sessions, late night noodling, and Zoom calls. That’s not the problem. The problem is that your team’s process for developing, evaluating and implementing new ideas is often inelegant, confusing, or non-existent.