Ideation sessions

High quality ideation sessions are built around design concepts crafted to explore complex or ambiguous challenges, surface new ideas, or stretch thinking into new spaces. This page will walk through one particular ideation session design built for a group of executives.

Trends & tensions

The session in this case was built around trends and tensions that allowed the executive attendees to explore the merits and pitfalls of opposing views across a number of trending topics.

Mindset & perspective

Ideally, session include people arriving with different perspectives — planners, strategist, vision driven, etc, and frames the time so there is a shared goal. This session started with a reflection on attendees personal experience with shopping. This allows attendees to draw from their experiences to create a range of content to draw from, and allows attendees to get to know one another better.

Seeing around corners

The work for this session started before the main gathering with an investigation of consumer and experiential trends to inspire attendees. This was done through secondary research to gather insight and pluck real-world examples to illustrate where momentum was growing.

Creative tensions can relieve attendee tension

Once several trend areas were identified, they were paired into opposing tensions. These trends under tension led to an activity where there was no ‘right’ answer — only options that could be explored and explained to unpack attendee thinking. This opens up more fluid dialog as attendees have no fear of sharing a wrong answer.

Designing a tangible artifact

To inspire attendees, physical books were handcrafted that laid out the trends and tensions while providing examples of how different brands brought the trends into the world. Having a personal tactile element changed the environment for attendees, gave them space to develop their own point-of-view, gave them the freedom to revisit trends at their own pace, and stopped group-think as attendees recorded their answers on their own form independent from the view of others.

Developing an exercise

Building on the exploration, an exercise was developed for attendees to plot colorful dotted stickers on a spectrum where they believed aspects of our business could go in the future. For some added surprise and delight the exercise cards were built into the back cover of the tangible booklets and could be pulled out and personalized once the exercise started after the initial exploration.

Stirring the pot

Once all attendees had weighted in, the physical sticker dots were transformed into digital slides that compiled the votes of every individual — plotting potential directions across the spectrum of each tension. Discussion was facilitated from there pulling on the tensions and the merits of leaning one way or another with all attendees discussing the various points-of-view they embedded into their choices.

Skimming the cream

After robust discussion, the top reasoning and arguments in pursuit of particular tensions and trends were themed out from the larger discussion and plotted for additional deep dives to explore what pursuing them may look like for our business in real life. This wrapped the ideation session, but marked the starting line for where the surfaced ideas could go moving forward.