Week notes 15th — 19th June

On the menu, this week is ideation.
With 10+ people,
In 10+ locations,
Where time is limited.

In the Citizens Advice lab team we often do ideation as a long workshop with everyone in the same room. I wanted to try something different on our current project which my colleague, Leanne talks about in this post. The challenge was 10+ people spread across the UK who all have limited availability and busy schedules. So I chose an approach that enabled flexibility, limited admin, and need for facilitation that empowers group ownership. The approach worked and here’s what I learned along the way.

This task gives headspace

Each day felt fresh, as instead of doing an ideation task in a limited time period. Everyone had up to 24 hours in between, thinking sessions. Allowing other influences time to seep in and to re-read the background research. So if you think there’s someone on your team who could feed into this you had time to talk to them. Whereas in a typical ideation session you wouldn’t have this opportunity.

Flexibility

The ability to let ideation fit around your schedule.
There was one daily timing constraint in this method. It was that you had to have completed your part by 4 pm the following day. So every team could approach this task at their own pace as long as they were responsible about the deadline. If you missed the deadline you’d be blocking another team from working on the next installment.

Strengthens relationships

This task enabled us to step back and let other bonds form. As the Lab team, we facilitate a lot of the conversations in workshops that we run. This approach required teams self-organised when they would work together and what entries they’d put in. They got the chance to learn more about how each other think and approach situations than they necessarily would have if we’d been facilitating all the conversations.

No surprises

Everyone gets a chance to see and to have thought about everyone else’s ideas. So when we move on to shortlisting ideas there shouldn’t be any surprises and hopefully will enable deep, richer conversations.

Reduced barriers to start with

We’ve learned in other workshops that people aren’t always comfortable drawing during a brainstorming session. This method is based on writing your ideas out and then allowing others to evolve what’s been written. It was definitely less of a barrier.

It doesn’t need to introduce new software — we used Google sheets which everyone was comfortable with.

It gives options to how people prefer to work. If you prefer to think on your own before discussing ideas you can do that. If you think when you talk you can do that. If you have all your best ideas whilst running you can do that (you just need to discuss them at some point with your team). This method really enables variety in approach.

Challenges

As a team of 4 agreeing on 3 ideas to start with and then how to evolve others' ideas was a challenge. We’re used to throwing our ideas individually into the mix rather than having to listen and evolve as step one. When ideas conflicted it made us, pause and work through them together to agree on one solution.

Time

As the team running this project we’ve all got other responsibilities to keep this work flowing and responsibilities outside of this team’s project work, plus video call fatigue is a real thing. To combat this we’d copy the work we had to access into a google document and add our thoughts and ideas below, so when it came to the discussion we’d already done some of the thinking and spent less time in discussions.

Conclusion

I honestly think this may have changed the way we approach ideation in the future s it's so versatile. The challenges we faced as a team actually addressed some of the issues that have been raised in our team's previous retrospectives. Such as we don’t spend enough time together and since working remotely I don’t always understand your train of thought. So it’s a winner all round.

Here’s a link to the method that I adapted.