How we disrupt ideation
Software companies push out new releases and respond to feedback at an ever-increasing speed. We’ve reached a point in our industry where we deal in micro-optimisations and micro-measured changes — it’s all very important work, but less likely to significantly move the needle or give us any breakthrough insights.
…too many clients spend huge amounts of money and resources trying to gain an edge on the competition by making incremental changes to their existing products and services.
This pattern of behavior is particularly common in successful companies operating in mature industries. They embrace incremental change because it supports their current business model. Reluctant to spend a bunch of money modifying their existing operations so they can make new things that will compete with their old things, these companies become complacent and stop innovating. — from Disrupt by Luke Williams
Compounding the issue is a continual need for new ideas to feed the optimisation machine. It takes a steady creative pipeline just to keep the wheels turning, regardless of whether the ideas will lead to game changing experiments and insights.
Paul Romer, an influential economist at Stanford University, defines ideas as “the recipes we use to rearrange things to create more value and wealth.” And the goal for any organization — no matter what the size — should be to generate a steady stream of new recipes — ideas that alter the trajectory of a business and revive stagnant markets or completely reinvent the competitive dynamics of an industry. — from Disrupt by Luke Williams
In my team where we constantly optimise purchasing-, identity- and more recently cross-product experiences — we’ve been thinking about this a lot. What if there was a way to come up with brilliant ideas, not just good ones? What if there was a way to generate them super-quickly? And what if ideas came from anywhere in the entire business? (After all, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas, we’re all capable of having them.)
Marie-Claire Dean, our design manager, took us on a journey to answer these questions. Basing our investigation on the book Disrupt by Luke Williams, we looked for ways to disrupt our designers and provoke idea generation. This led us to a new ideation session we call “disrupt sessions.”
We start together with “disrupt” to supercharge the design process, sketch together constantly, exploring multiple directions before refining and polishing anything. — Marie-Claire Dean
What is a “disrupt” session?
During a block of focused time, teams pair-up to ideate on a theme. At the start, they’re encouraged to think of broad ideas — anything goes, no constraints. Rapidly we introduce principles, constraints, and focus areas to narrow the parameters and generate more lateral thoughts. Every time a new principle or constraint is introduced it naturally leads to new ideas as it forces us into a direction we haven’t considered before. The end goal is to arrive at a “winning” set of ideas you’ll start work on straight away.
Design depends largely on constraints. — Charles Eames
Example disrupt session ingredients:
- Theme: Atlassian website; HipChat; Bitbucket.
- Focus area: voice only; mobile only; Windows desktop only.
- Constraints & Principles: user is outdoors; focus on ambiguity.
- Switching teams: every 15 minutes one person switches teams.
- Crayons: stickies; sharpies; wall space to present ideas.
The process of disrupting
Kick off
At the beginning of the session, provide a session overview and split your group into teams of 3–4 people.
Nominate a lead for each team — this is someone who won’t switch teams in the disrupt loop and will be your source of truth on every idea the team generates.
Provide a theme you want to generate ideas on (e.g. activation from your website).
Create 4–5 focus areas within each theme you want specific ideas on.
Warm up
Teams generate as many ideas as possible, with no constraints (5 mins). To spark creativity, let teams practice by clearing their minds of pre-conceived ideas.
Silent culling (5 mins). Allow teams to eliminate any of the other teams’ ideas. Culled ideas shouldn’t be revisited during the session.
Disrupt loop
Teams generate as many ideas as possible (30 mins). This is where the good ideas happen. Loop this part as many times as you need, 2–3 times should be enough.
During this time:
- Add focus areas (after 10 mins)
- Add constraints and principles (after 20 mins)
- Switch team members, except team leads (after 30 mins)
Culling
After the session, you should have a decent backlog of ideas. The trick is to be ruthless in getting rid of all the so-so ideas — you need to get to the brilliant ones, ignore the rest, and accept you’ll throw away anything not feasible or desirable.
It often takes many bad ideas to get to the good ones, and many rounds of thinking to get past the obvious. — Marie-Claire Dean
When figuring out which ideas to pursue, it helps to split them by time/effort — what can be achieved in 6 hours, 6 days or 6 weeks. It focusses the team on ideas they can pull off, or that represent great bang for buck.
Principles and constraints
To generate principles, we’ve used Mental Notes. They’re based on psychological triggers such as scarcity, curiosity, social proof, and delight, and have worked brilliantly.
For constraints, we’ve used a deck of Constraint cards. They’re aimed more at the web or craft phases, but are still very useful if you pre-select constraints that can be applied to software design and ideation.
Based on our insights from using constraints and principles, we’ve also created an Atlassian card deck specific to our own products and context. This is still a work in progress and we’ve released our first set internally that we’re testing during our disrupt sessions. Watch out for a future post where we’ll share these in more detail, as well as include a downloadable version that you can use.
Shoutout
Special thanks to Nick Doherty who shared his time to edit this article.
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