Worrying about waste: lessons in ideation

If you remember anything from this post, let it be this: the path to a transformative idea is rarely the first path you followed, and that’s OK.

Ideation is the act of blowing open the solution space in order to access all the ideas that might create value for your customer. To some, this is an exciting time full of freedom and possibility. For others, this causes stress and worry. What if we’re not on to the right idea? What if we spend time on the wrong stuff? What if we follow our inspiration but get too far away from our research findings?

For some of our current clients, these fears are grounded in the idea of waste: wasted time, wasted resources, wasted effort. This is especially true for our clients who are new to the innovation game. And we get it. The ambiguity of good innovation work is hard and we have worked most of our lives trying to avoid going in the wrong direction, or making mistakes. Following an idea until it breaks can feel discouraging, and if not handled well can derail your creative efforts.

What we need to remember is that some of our best learning opportunities (which can lead to innovation) are found at the point where your idea breaks. If you hang out with experienced innovators, service designers, and other creative folks, you’ll hear them saying things like “ok, let’s go with that!” or “alright, I see where you’re going with that. Let’s follow that for a bit.” Experienced innovators know that you don’t need to know that you’re on to a good idea. Confidence in an idea comes when you make time to explore it.

The key to getting great innovation done with those pressures is to enter and stay with ideation with the following question in mind:

How might we get to the largest pool of innovative ideas to solve our problem, while not being reckless with our time, resources, and money?

There are a few helpful practices for honouring both sides of that question:

1. Get real about how much time you are actually using to ideate. Is 4 hours of time really too much time if you’re working on something really important to your current business challenges? Is a month too much time to do the job right? Answers to your questions will depend on how important finding innovative solutions is to your business. If it’s mission-critical, allocating time, money, and resources is reasonable.
2. Acknowledge that your worry may be based on emotion and in particular a lack of comfort with the ambiguity of ideation. When we’re under pressure, this is a common phenomenon. When you acknowledge your discomfort, you can figure out whether it is emotional or rational.
3. Remember that when you are ideating you are not deciding. At least not yet! Much of the ideation activity will likely involve exploring ideas that in the end don’t bear fruit, but lead to a better question or a better idea. Ideation doesn’t mean commitment, so avoid blocking novel ideas too quickly.
4. When you are ideating, you can’t work on desirability (do customers want it?), viability (can it work?), and feasibility (can we do it?) at the same time. Usually you are working on ideas through a desirability lens first and are holding of on the “can we do that?” and “can it work?” until later. If you bring those questions in too soon, the seeds of your best ideas may end up in the recycling bin before they had a chance to bear fruit.
5. Innovation work needs to be resourced. Count on it taking time, money, and people to do it right. Talk to some experienced innovation designers to help you figure out a timeline and budget that makes sense within your business constraints.

As a closing thought, remember that ideation happens before prototyping. This post is not advising you to follow moon-shot ideas right to pilot or launch without checking to see whether they are both feasible and viable. That’s nuts — and not good business! Be smart throughout your innovation work. One way to do that is to ensure that you give time and space to every stage of the design process.