Creating A Winning Ideation Event — Advanced Basics Part 2

Six things can make or break your ideation event from a design perspective.

1. Getting Leadership To Champion The Event (pt.1)
2. Deciding On The Type Of Event (pt.1)
3. Determining The Scale Of The event (pt.1)
4. Setting Expectations
5. The Right Rewards For The Right Things
6. Planning For What Comes Next

Before we continue on from part one, I want to take a moment to dig into why I am labeling these two articles something as convoluted as ‘Advanced Basics’.

The six areas we are exploring are basic components of any ideation event. You will be forced to consider them at some point in the planning process no matter what you do. Despite that, they can get lost in the shadow of the more exciting or pressing tactical aspects. Tasks like: promoting the event, logistical planning, creating a registration system, exploring the ideas, coordinating teams, facilitating the pitches, picking out swag, curating materials… Those and many more are important, but they lack the systematic impact of the six areas we are exploring. While basic building blocks, these six require advanced consideration to get right. A margarita pizza consists of simple ingredients, dough, sauce, cheese, basil, oil… but you can tell by the first bite the consideration that went into it.

Advanced because we want to go beyond the basic nature of these critical aspects to get the most out of your event as possible. You know you need mozzarella for that margarita pizza; will it be Kraft pre-shredded? Hand-pulled? Made in-house? Lactose-free? Vegan? Buffalo? In both cases, a simple component will have many options, and the choices must align to achieve the desired outcome.

In part one, we discussed three aspects that help lay the framework or the foundation for your event.

1. Getting Leadership to Champion the Event — To get the most out of your event, you need leaders to champion it, not just approve of it.
2. Deciding on the type of event — Will your event focus on a specific problem, have a theme, or be entirely open to any and all ideas?
3. Determining the scale of the event — How far does your event reach? Company-wide? Divisional? Regional? Are people outside of the organization invited to participate?

I wish I could fabricate a clever metaphor for how these first three relate to the following three, but it is not coming together, so I will simply be frank.

• You need all stakeholders to be aligned on the expectations regarding how far participants take their ideas and what they present.
• It is not just about how you incentivize but what you incentivize.
• When the event concludes, it is not the end, it is the start. Having a plan for what happens next is crucial.

SETTING EXPECTATIONS

You must decide upfront what you expect participants to produce and how far they should take their idea. A napkin sketch and a 3-minute pitch is likely insufficient. On the other hand, a full-blown business case is almost certainly too much.

My advice is to lean into the wisdom of legendary management thinker Jim Collins and his idea to “Fire Bullets then Cannonballs”. Focus your event on gathering many ideas quickly and then decide which to pursue, which to investigate further, and which to tuck away for another day. Requiring participants to create detailed business cases with a complete set of financial projections, risk assessments, timelines, and KPIs is the equivalent of requiring participants to lug a cannonball’s weight in work into a situation where it might miss entirely. Instead, have them provide you with a cache of bullets you can fire to see what hits the mark. Not only will this avoid wasted time and effort, but it will reduce the pressure on both the judges and participants, providing space for creativity and idea evolution. Significant value can be lost by asking participants to overdevelop their ideas; see: Ideation events are about more than ideas.

Try focusing on these 5 things. Remember, you can always request more if you decide to move forward.

1. What is the problem being addressed?
2. Why is it important, and what benefits might be realized?
3. What is the proposed solution?
4. What MIGHT it take to execute the solution (at a high level)?
5. What are the next steps if we decide to go forward, and what might those take?

While all of these are excellent questions, I want to dive deeper into the intent and purpose of number five as the value is not as self-evident.

Number five comes down to the cost of firing a bullet (if we are sticking with the bullets/cannonballs theme) vs. what we might learn. The question you should encourage adjudicators to ask is.

“Is this compelling enough that the investment in the very next step would be worth it?”

Let’s unpack this

Compelling Enough — Does it have a strong why? Is the logic sound? Does it align with the organization’s goals/vision/mission? Is the value proposition compelling? IF (and that is a big if), this idea were to go the distance, would it be valuable to the organization?

Investment — Time, energy, focus, capital, people hours, etc. You can pursue many avenues with minimal financial commitment, although they still come at a cost.

Very Next Step — The immediate next step. That might be validating ideas, creating a prototype, having a cross-functional working session, creating a business case… NOT every step from pitch to launch.

Worth it — What is the return you expect from taking the next step? Could you learn something that can help you outside of the idea? Is validation needed to move this idea forward?

Why is this a valuable question to ask? In short, it promotes an agile approach to exploring the idea. You are not committing to the entire idea, only the next step. Based on that, you can decide to take another step, then another, until either you arrive somewhere you want to be, or the cost of taking the next step is not worth the potential return.

Credit to Henrik Kniberg and his article ****Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) — and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable** for this insight that made MVP and the concept of agile click for me.

Very rarely, like politicians keeping all of their campaign promises rarely, should you expect or set the expectation that the winning idea is guaranteed to be implemented when promoting the event. In fact, I would suggest saying this specifically in your registration package. It is easy for people to equate winning with an endorsement to implement. In parallel, an idea that did not win should not be written off. Be clear about this upfront.

Note: If you have the type of event where the goal is to solve a specific problem (like a traditional hackathon) the expectations you set might be very different than what I have outlined here. In that case, you are looking for something specific and will need participants to demonstrate their solution. That does not mean that you can not consider the above, but it might not align perfectly with what you need participants to deliver. The most important thing is that expectations align with what you are trying to achieve, and what you are trying to achieve aligns with the scope and scale of the event.

THE RIGHT REWARDS FOR THE RIGHT THINGS

Incentivization is not only a question of how and how much but what it is that you want to incentivize.

First, let’s discuss rewards. The most common and arguably powerful reward is cash. The amount of which not only serves to attract participants but also sends a signal about the value of the event in the organization’s eyes. A $100, $1000, and $10,000 commitment sends very different messages. Of course, not all organizations have the budgets to lean on cash prizes. That is not an issue, but you have to be realistic about the amount of work you expect participants to put in. There has to be a balance. A simple test, ask yourself: “Is the reward compelling enough that my supervisor and their peers would consider participating?” Participants don’t have to be Jedi to sense when the force is out of balance.

Of course, other rewards outside of cash can be used to augment or entice participation.

• Prestige — If you have strong leaders championing the event, there will be a certain prestige inherent in participating. However, prestige only counts if it allows participants to raise their profile within the organization and help them on their career journey.
• Performance Review — Can you come to an agreement with HR that participation will have a material impact on a portion of participants’ performance reviews.
• Mentorship — Can you create genuine mentorship opportunities for winners. Something that lasts longer than a 30-minute lunch.
• Additional Training Dollars — It parallels cash, but it is directed and can benefit both the organization and participants.
• Charitable Donations — What if part of the prize is a donation to a charity of the winner’s choice?
• Extra Time Off — Another possibility that does not come straight from the budget

Get creative! There are many options out there. Depending on your organization, there could be products or services you could offer. Just remember, if the reward is a pizza party, don’t be surprised if you get napkin sketches in return.

Now that we have covered rewards, let’s get to the advanced portion of the discussion: What are you incentivizing? The easiest way to illustrate this will be to provide you with some food for thought.

Imagine you’re running an event where people can compete as a team or an individual. There is one prize of $X for the winner. One of the organization’s values is teamwork. If an individual wins, they are rewarded with $X; however, if a team wins, they are individually rewarded with $X/(# of team members). Does your reward structure align with the organization’s values?

Speaking of rewards and values, here is a story of bringing the two together. I worked for a bank going through a brand change. There was a new internal mantra gaining steam: “Build A Better Bank” we wanted people to keep this in mind as they brought their ideas forward, so we crafted categories around the theme. Those categories were:

1. Build a Prosperous bank — this category focused on incremental innovation, products and services, and process improvements.
2. Build a Bold bank — this category focused on big bold ideas, even if the bank could not implement them. It was designed to help stretch thinking and explore the art of the possible
3. Build an Inspiring bank — this category focused on ESG, culture, community, and learning ideas.

Additionally both bold and inspiring were organizational values (as in Purpose, Vision, Mission, Values…)

But that is not all this structure did. There is a desire in business for big bold ideas; however, the closer the idea get’s to being implemented, the more the gravity of practicality pulls it back to the mean. This is natural. People have to be able to quantify ROI and defend the risk-reward tradeoff when making choices. This is not a bad thing. That said, it can make it difficult for a big bold idea to compete with a practical, implementable idea. By creating three categories and providing an equal reward for each, we overcame this challenge. It was important for the organization to create space for people to bring forward bold, inspiring, and prosperous ideas and have the potential to be rewarded for doing so.

If you want something specific out of the event, you have to incentivize it specifically. The unseen forces which drive decisions in your organization will exert their will on your event unless you protect it. Being purposeful about what you choose to incentivize is extremely important.

HAVE A PLAN FOR WHAT COMES NEXT

Nothing is more disheartening and confusing for a team than not knowing what will happen to the idea they put so much work into. Do you want your event to be labeled as disingenuous? Because not having a plan for what comes next is how you get your event labeled as disingenuous. Further, without an onramp into the corporate pipeline of projects, the ideas you put valuable time and energy into extracting will remain in ‘great idea!’ purgatory indefinitely.

Some questions you will want to explore when designing the event:

• What happens to the winning ideas?
• What happens to ideas that did not win but that may have significant value?
• How are they prioritized against ideas already in flight?
• Is there a specific budget for them?
• Who will support their development?
• Who will bring them to life?

I wish I had a golden bullet for you on this, I really do. The reality is, that every organization is different. Some may have robust innovation programs with resources, budgets, and the skills to bring ideas to life. Others may be resource-strapped and need to think carefully about how they can integrate what people have brought forward.

That said, I can help you with an effective system for categorizing ideas. For each idea that comes forward, place it into one of three buckets:

1. Not Right Now… Honesty is the best policy. If there is a slim chance the idea will be pursued, close the book on it. Be clear, be fair, be firm. If the door is left open, even a crack, people will keep trying to get a foot in it. But don’t throw these ideas away; archive them. Just because the resources, technology, market, capacity, skills, etc. to execute on it do not exist today, it does not mean they will not exist in the future.
2. Tell Me More About X… The idea as a whole may not be feasible, but the organization could benefit from exploring specific components of it. This is where you might encourage some additional desktop research, rapid prototyping, or customer conversations. Light, low budget, agile with the goal of discovery, not implementation.
3. We Should Invest In This… Sometimes an idea clicks and the organization is ready to put proper resources behind to move it forward. When I say proper resources, I mean time, budget, and a place on the corporate to-do list.

TWO FINAL THOUGHTS

One. You will have to say no to many good ideas and eager people. This is a good problem to have.

Two. If this is your first ideation event, you might hit a home run and find an idea that will change the organization. However, like any other capability, innovation is a muscle that needs to be developed. If at first you don’t succeed, keep going! Ideas breed ideas, breed ideas, breed ideas, breed ideas…