Step 4 — Generating Ideas (Part 1)

Blog 5/10

To kick off the idea generation phase we began with a virtual brainstorming session for our first ‘How might we’ statement — ‘How might we help people find fresh challenges to keep them on top of their game’. This involved 10 minutes of generating as many and as wild ideas as possible! Then 10 minutes talking through the ideas and voting on the favourites.

To mix it up we tried different activities to generate ideas, so the second part of the session involved Crazy 8’s. Crazy 8’s is a fast sketching exercise that challenges people to draw 8 ideas in 8 minutes. It’s really fun, but is actually harder than it sounds! Here’s an example of a final sketch…

To gather as many ideas as possible we ran three face-to-face brainstorming sessions, two in London and one in Scotland to include as many different employee perspectives as possible. Each session included a mix of HR colleagues, employees from different business areas, managers, leaders and some employees we’d interviewed at the Field Research stage to keep them engaged on our journey.

To get participants thinking ‘outside the box’, with no limitations, we did a two-minute brainstorm warm up, which got people coming up with ideas to the following questions ‘How might we solve climate change?’ or ‘How might we make a viral YouTube video?’ We generated ideas for the ‘How might we’ statements below:

1. HMW help employees find fresh challenges to keep them at the top of their game?

2. HMW make opportunities more visible and accessible for all employees?

3. HMW help senior managers see the benefit of team movement (inside or outside their areas)?

4. HMW enable experienced people to support and share their knowledge and skills with their colleagues?

These were some of the storyboards from the sessions:

The Scotland session tried a different approach called ‘Reverse brainstorming’. Reverse brainstorming flips the challenge on its head to help people think differently and develop ideas more freely. So, our existing statement ‘How might we make opportunities more visible and accessible for all employees?’ becomes ‘How might make opportunities less visible and feel exclusive?’ An example of an idea generated was completely restricting senior roles to one location, which when reversed, becomes implementing seniority diversity targets across all locations.

This has been a really fun part of the journey, not only for the core team but for others involved too. In fact, many participants have gone on to replicate the brainstorming sessions in their business areas.

What was interesting about these sessions is participants generated more wild whacky ideas during the warm up questions, but when brainstorming for the real challenge their ideas were more restricted and a lot more practical. Possibly because they know where the boundaries lie, so they think of ideas they know can be resolved within the current limits. As a facilitator, this meant using probing questions to remove any boundaries like ‘If you had no fear, and you couldn’t fail, what would you do?’ .

Next week, we’ll be voting on the ‘super ideas’.