5 Activities You Should Absolutely Try in your Ideation Session

8 min readOct 14, 2022

Ideation is the fun part of the Innovation Process, but it can be tricky to get right.

Your job as Facilitator (I’m assuming if you’ve clicked on this, you’re the Facilitator. If not, get out.*) is to get those creative juices flowing. But popping the lid off the ideation process can be easier said than done, and if you don’t prepare for the session properly, you might find your participant's enthusiasm dwindling with each passing second.

Luckily for you, I’ve collated some of my favourite tools from my ideation toolkit, in the hope that it will take the sting out of trying to plan your own Really Good Ideation Session.

Bonus — they’re all already in the suggested order I’d run them in a half-day Ideation Session. You’re welcome.

*I’m kidding… I’m Kidding! Please stay and give my article more views. 🙏

1. Brain Warm-Up: “Alternative Uses”

In order to get the ball rolling, you’ll need to whip out the social lubricant that is The Warm-Up.

Alternative Uses is a warm-up that encourages divergent thinking — that is, the ability to generate ideas or solutions from a single idea or a piece of information. It’s simple really — you need to think of many different uses for an everyday object, outside its usual function.

How to use Alternative Uses:

Grab something to write on. You can also use MURAL or Jamboard in a virtual setting.
In 3 minutes, note down as many ideas as possible of how alternate uses for the chosen object.
Ask participants to present their favorite usage of the item to the group.

Here’s an IRL example where we chose a period pad for our object (my personal favourite here is “kidnapping aid”):

Why use Alternative Uses?
Alternative Uses requires your brain to overcome functional fixedness — a cognitive bias that makes it hard for people to see how an object can be used in any way other than the one in which it’s traditionally used.

As children, we don’t have functional fixedness (parents who have children who like to draw on walls, thinking that your wall is a perfectly acceptable art canvas, can attest to this) so this exercise can help us approach our work with a more childlike curiosity — which is great for seeing new possibilities.

When do you use Alternative Uses?
Use this at the start as a warm-up exercise in idea generation and problem-solving workshops where creative thinking is required.

You can also use this as an individual warm-up tool. Just set the timer for three minutes and generate as many ideas as you can. (Though it’s much more fun to plan abduction via period products with friends)

2. Group Optimization Tool: “Shifting”

A tool you can use in workshops is Shifting which is a group optimisation technique that helps improve the creative thinking behaviour of groups.

Essentially, you give people space to work on their own in the session but they do so together, in the same IRL or virtual space as others. The idea is you’re “shifting” from one mode (collaboration) to another (individual).

I learned this one from the innovation agency Inventium.

How to use Shifting:

Instruct participants to generate ideas individually first for 5–10 minutes.
After that time, instruct individuals to shift back into ‘group mode’ (which will usually require 20–40 minutes) — sharing their ideas one by one, and discussing and building on each other’s ideas.
If the group gets stuck at any other point, ask people to shift back into individual idea generation to stimulate more thought, and then shift back to group mode after five or so minutes.

Why use Shifting?
Traditional brainstorming — where people get together and shout out ideas and someone writes it all down — has a few problems. It often causes groupthink (defined below) and isn’t great for introverts or people who need time to reflect before they speak — Shifting is a way we can avoid this. By having alone time, individual thinking is not prematurely influenced by others. During group mode, everyone can share their ideas, helping to ensure more introverted people have a voice too.

Groupthink = is a psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group. In many cases, people will set aside their own personal beliefs or adopt the opinion of the rest of the group.

When to use Shifting?
You can use Shifting as an exercise on its own as an activity or combine it with other activities which require group discussion and sharing. You can also use Shifting outside of a meeting environment. For example, you can share the problem via email and give people a couple of days to think about it individually. You can then schedule a meeting for everyone to share their thoughts.

3. Ideation Activity: “Lightning Demos”

When it comes to creativity, research has shown that exposing ourselves to a wide amount of information increases our ability to generate creative solutions.

Lightning Demos is a Design Sprint tool that taps into this research by exposing people to a diverse amount of information in a short space of time. The crux of this activity is getting your participants to do some research during the session.

How to use Lightning Demos:

Task participants with researching inspiring products and services relevant to their innovation challenge. Each participant researches individually (using their laptops) and comes up with 2–3 examples that they think the team can use as inspiration (25 mins)
Participants present each inspiration (max 3 minutes per concept) and take notes about the key points. By the end, you should have a whiteboard with ten to twenty ideas. (30–60 mins)

Why use Lightning Demos?
Lightning Demos is a good exercise to fill knowledge gaps in the group. For example, if the group is not tech-savvy but there’s a great opportunity for technology-based ideas to solve the challenge… then this is an opportunity for people in the group to do some upskill themselves a little on tech solutions.

It’s also a great way to get the group on the same page.

When to use Lightning Demos?
Lightning Demos is best used as the first of several idea-generating activities as it fills knowledge gaps which can help participants later on.

You actually don’t need to limit yourself to ideation sessions — Lightning Demos can also be introduced in other meetings where you have smaller-scale challenges too.

4. Ideation Activity: “Crazy Eight's”

Adding visuals to your ideas is an engaging, interactive way to create understanding. It empowers teams to plan, brainstorm, design, and share.

In-person, you can use flipcharts, whiteboards, and sticky notes to draw up visuals of your ideas, and virtually you can use MURAL, PowerPoint, or grab some images from a search engine to help show your thinking.

Crazy Eights is a fast-paced, sketching exercise to get participants thinking broadly about the problem you’re trying to solve.

Each team member folds their piece of paper and folds it into eight sections
Set the timer for eight minutes
Individually, each team member sketches one idea in each rectangle, trying their best until all sections are filled
When the timer goes off, all pens are down

Why use Crazy Eight’s?
The goal here is to push beyond your first idea — frequently the least innovative — and to generate a wide variety of solutions to your challenge.

Crazy Eight’s is another activity with a Design Sprints origin story, so some team members without a design background may find this method intimidating at first. It’s helpful to reassure everyone that these are rough sketches, not good ones (ugly drawings welcome!) so the visualization is just there to just help communicate the idea.

It’s also important to remember that the ideas don’t even have to be that good. This exercise is about quieting the inner critic and giving our creative impulses space to flourish. Weird, impossible, and impractical ideas often give way to Actually Pretty Good ones.

When to use Crazy Eight’s?

Crazy Eight’s usually fits nicely in the middle of an ideation workshop as one of your ideation exercises.

You can also use it during prototyping workshops!

5. Idea Optimisation Tool: “Newsflash”

What do you do when you arrive at a great idea, but you’re not sure how to develop it further or explain it to the group?

You can use Newsflash when you want to generate ideas or solutions to a specific challenge to ensure you are capturing tangible outputs.

How to use Newsflash:

Participants start by identifying an idea that your group is enthusiastic about
Newsflash the idea by grabbing a blank A4 sheet of paper — you will need one sheet of paper per idea.
Turn this A4 piece of paper to landscape and draw lines in the shape of a ‘T’ to divide the page into three sections.
Within the top area, give your idea a ‘headline’ that sums up the idea in a phrase or short sentence. On the left-hand side block, describe in bullet points how the idea would work in practice. On the right-hand side block, draw a picture or symbol to bring the idea to life visually.
If you’re performing the exercise virtually, you can use MURAL or MIRO to create a template you can reuse for this (see mine below 👇)

Why use Newsflash?
A big problem with idea-generation sessions is that people often walk away with half-baked thoughts as opposed to actual ideas. Newsflash forces people to think more deeply about their idea and consider how their idea would work, which ensures that idea-generation sessions produce meaningful outputs.

Having a tangible idea is also the first step towards idea prioritization and shortlisting. You won’t be able to decide effectively if you should pursue an idea or not if you don’t fully understand it.

When to use Newsflash?
Even if you’re using other ideation activities, it’s a good idea to introduce and explain the tool so that you can encourage people to Newsflash their best ideas. This makes sure ideas in all activities are captured and fleshed out in a meaningful way.

Setting Newsflash as a group activity works well toward the end of an ideation session. It’s an opportunity for participants to develop and present the ideas they might have been nurturing throughout the session. If you do this, make sure you leave enough time for people to fully present their Newsflash ideas.

So, there you have it…

These are my top 5 activities to try in an Ideation Session. Let me know if you try any of them out (or if you too, can’t believe the price of wallpaper these days) in the comments below 👇