Why do our ideation sessions produce a wall of sticky notes and nothing else?
Because the room was never safe enough to offer a bad idea out loud, and nothing was ever tested. Sticky notes are what a group produces when it is managing risk instead of making. Ideation that transfers runs the whole cycle several times in two days: generate, take the idea apart, build something, test it in front of a real audience, discard it cheaply, start again. By the end most groups have abandoned more ideas than they kept, and that is the part that transfers.
The short answer. Because the room was never safe enough to offer a bad idea out loud, and nothing was ever tested. Sticky notes are what a group produces when it is managing risk instead of making. Ideation that transfers runs the whole cycle several times in two days: generate, take the idea apart, build something, test it in front of a real audience, discard it cheaply, start again. By the end most groups have abandoned more ideas than they kept, and that is the part that transfers.
- Its name in a budget line
- Innovation capability. Creative problem solving. Ideas that survive contact with the business.
- The programme
- The ideation programme. 1.5 to 2 days, for any team of eight or more. Above forty the room splits into parallel groups.
- Where
- On your own site, in Kochi and across Kerala, and elsewhere in India for a full day or more. Eight people or more. No artistic background is assumed and nothing is graded.
What is actually going on.
Watch the first ten minutes of an ideation session and you will see the whole problem. Everyone waits to see who goes first. The fear of looking foolish suppresses contribution long before capability does, so the ideas that get written down are the safe ones, and the safe ones are the ones everybody already had. That waiting is the single most expensive habit in the room, and it is cheaper to dissolve it than to argue with it.
The second half of the problem is that nothing is tested. A sticky note is an idea that has never met an audience. The first review it meets is the first test it has ever had, and an idea that has never been tested does not survive its first test. The skill most teams are missing is not generating ideas. It is abandoning an idea cheaply, early, in front of people, and starting again without loss of face.
The angle you did not choose is the one your idea was hiding from.
What a session does about it.
The day opens with games, because a group that has already been slightly ridiculous together will offer a bad idea out loud, and a group that has not will wait. From there the cycle begins and it runs several times rather than once. A group generates from a prompt drawn out of your own situation, in your own words, gathered before the day. They take the idea apart from angles they did not choose. Then they build something, a prototype, a scene, a song, an object, whatever the idea needs in order to exist outside the person who had it.
Then they test it in front of the room. A real audience, in the same building, within the hour. The room responds honestly because it has been made safe enough to, and the group leaves with either a feedback loop worth following or the confidence to discard the idea and start again.
Nowhere in the two days is a diagram of the design cycle shown. Participants run it, several times, with their hands and their voices. If it is useful afterwards to name the stages they have been through, that naming takes four minutes and lands, because it is describing something they did.
How you would know it worked.
Named behaviours rated by managers or peers thirty to sixty days later. Does this person now bring an unfinished idea to a meeting. Does this team now build a rough version and test it before it commits.
Psychological safety on the seven item team scale, before and at thirty days, because a room in which nobody offers a bad idea is a room in which nobody offers a good one either.
What we do not claim.
We do not claim that a two day session raises innovation output, patent counts or revenue. Those depend on what your organisation does with an idea once someone has it, which is out of our reach.
We claim that participants practise generating, testing and discarding, and we invite you to check whether they do it afterwards.
The full list is on one page, alongside the evidence and the claims we have retired.
In Kochi and Kerala.
In Kerala the prompt is usually a real one: a product line that has stalled, a process everyone complains about, a service a hospital or a college wants to redesign. Bring the actual problem. The session works better with a prompt the room cares about than with an exercise, and the prototype that comes out of it is yours to keep.
We work from Kochi and run sessions on the client's own site anywhere in Kerala. Elsewhere in India we travel for a full day or more. If you would rather meet before you book, here is how.
Related questions.
Why do our ideation sessions produce a wall of sticky notes and nothing else?
Because the room was never safe enough to offer a bad idea out loud, and nothing was ever tested. Sticky notes are what a group produces when it is managing risk instead of making. Ideation that transfers runs the whole cycle several times in two days: generate, take the idea apart, build something, test it in front of a real audience, discard it cheaply, start again. By the end most groups have abandoned more ideas than they kept, and that is the part that transfers.
Is this design thinking training?
It is the design cycle, run rather than taught. Participants generate, analyse, prototype and test several times over two days without ever being shown a diagram of it. If your team has already sat through design thinking training and still produces sticky notes, that is the reason we do it this way.
Do we need to bring a real problem?
It helps a great deal. The prompt is drawn from your own situation, in your own words, gathered before the day. A group works harder on a problem it actually has, and the prototype it builds is one you can use.
What about a team that says it is not creative?
Creativity is a set of deliberate choices rather than a trait somebody either has or does not have, and the research on that is solid. Most people who say they are not creative mean they have not been somewhere it was safe to be wrong. The first hour of the day is spent building that room.
Ideas are cheap to test in a room and expensive to test in a market.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.