90 Opportunities that may change your fortunes

Innovation is a process, it’s a naughty word and it’s value can often be misunderstood. In my experience this is especially the case in the corporate landscape. However, change is afoot. People and businesses are championing innovation and even the most corporate of businesses are embracing innovation strategies to look for their next big idea. There are still hundreds of organisations, even seemingly innovative ones, that do not have an innovation process or understand the simplest of tools that could project them forward.

With this in mind I’d like to start by sharing a simple game that is a starting place for a creative process. It enables you to generate ideas. I’ve found it works as a stand alone way to collectively generate ideas and gain consensus or be used in a wider innovation process (the topic of another post I think!).

In the book Game Storming (David Grey et al) they share a method of generating ideas called “Post-Up”. It’s something that was introduced to me years ago when I attended a local innovation network in my home town of Sheffield, UK. I was blown away by it’s simplicity and also the energy it brought to the room.

With as little as one individual to 50 people this game can really get some good ideas going. In my experience, it works great with around 10 people. Here’s the steps.

1. What question do you want to answer?

Or what problem does your group want to generate ideas for? For example, “How can we maximise our revenue of product X?” or “What are our makes us great?” or “What could we have done better on this project?”

2. Get the right equipment

Give everyone a bunch of sticky notes (I prefer Post-Its) and a pen.

3. Silently, together, capture your ideas

Instruct the team to silently write down their ideas to answer the question, this should be time boxed and could be 5 mins or longer depending on the size of the group. One idea per sticky note.

Doing this in silence is important as it give people time to think on their own, this lets the less vocal get their ideas down but more importantly studies have shown that the traditional ways of brainstorming, where people shout out ideas, does not yield as good quality results (See this post by Jake Knapp)

4. Collectively Share your ideas

Invite each member to stick their ideas on the board and present them to the team. This should be quick and not go into much detail. This tends to spark other ideas from the team, they should capture these on their sticky notes.

5. Look for commonalities

You now have a ton of answers to your question that you have collaboratively collected. You will probably be able to see common themes, group these together on the wall. This is a great place to start, a bigger group of related stickies indicate a more important or interesting answer.

This is a great place to start your innovative journey, but this is just scratching the surface. Let me know your thought and if this has worked for you.

Why “90 Opportunities that may change your fortunes”? It’s simple, a standard pad of Post-It’s has 90 sheets!!