Ideaflow, Part 2
Innovation sessions, or how to Ideaflow as a group
A key part of my work, both in the past at Intellectual Venture’s Invention Science Fund and Microsoft currently, is creating the conditions for intelligent people to innovate sustainably. One of my favorite ways to do this is through a process I call Innovation Sessions. (If you have a better name, let me know because it’s lackluster.)
The old chestnut, “Ideas are a dime a dozen.” is true. To innovate sustainably, you must develop an idea creation and triage process. As a rule of thumb in product management or startup venture studios, 2000 ideas become 100 working prototypes. Five of those 100 working prototypes will become commercial products, and only one will succeed.
2000:100:5:1
What does that tell you about your idea generation machine? You’ll need a lot of ideas to be sustainably successful. Of course, it’s not just the ideas; it’s also the winnowing and validation pipeline you continuously feed them into. More on that pipeline in my next post. How do we generate that many ideas continuously? Enter Innovation Sessions.
Innovation sessions are a methodology for generating high-quality solutions to deeply understood customer problems.
Assemble the right mix
Everyone in the room should have visibility into the customer problem, relevant experience, and expertise to offer helpful contributions. I keep the group size to 12-15 people and break them into groups of 3-6 for many of the actual ideation exercises. I find diverse perspectives vital. When I run sessions inside the enterprise, I’ll seek representation from design, engineering, research, product, and customer-facing roles to account for the complete lifecycle of the customer problem space.
It’s also essential to have representation from the group(s) responsible for prototyping, building, and launching the idea. They need agency over the creation path, and the closer the builders are to the idea, the better.
Gather initial suggestions
People, in all their wonder and complexity, are the symphony you’re bringing together in this set of sessions. As a facilitator, you set the conditions for each individual to bring their fully informed self to a mutually creative meeting of minds. To do this successfully requires some care.
Before meeting as a group, sending out a few prompts individually allows you to develop your understanding of the group. 1:1 initial suggestion responses set a level playing field for introverts and extroverts. It helps guard against anchoring bias limiting the entire session’s eventual scope. The questions you ask here are intended to stoke curiosity and provide the context or frame necessary for true innovation.
I mentioned anchoring bias here, but understanding the interplay of all the cognitive biases and how to mitigate them as they crop up over the course of these endeavors gives you superpowers as a facilitator.
Get everyone in the right mindset
All the sessions I’ve run begin with context-setting homework. We’ll gather any relevant customer research in the area we intend to innovate within. We’ll generate market landscape analysis, startup trend analysis, current technology roadmaps and trend deep dives. We’ll perform further customer problem empathy sessions with all the attendees present to really soak in the problems with (and our hypotheses about) our customers. We’re getting the whole group into a similar base problem mindset so that we have a common problem language and broad market/technical space language to utilize with each other through these sessions. Ideaflow calls these defined problem sets and their associated background materials “scaffolds,” a delightfully insightful term I intend to adopt.
The sessions themselves are best started with a few warm-ups to orient everyone to the insight mind space. Ideaflow gives a few examples, and there are deep wells of knowledge in the design thinking space, among others, to draw from as a facilitator. The goal is to set the free-flowing idea expectation that this is a safe space intended for wild, divergent thinking and that we’re setting aside our internal judge or critic in this innovation space.
Split into teams and assign facilitators
Double down on the diversity of team subsets, thinking (as Ideaflow puts it) “like a wedding planner approaching a seating chart: break existing connections up wherever possible to create the greatest possible diversity of viewpoints: age, race, gender, role, department, place in the hierarchy...” the more, the better. Mining for good perspectives and shaking up your own internal perspectives is a study in itself. For example:
Can you explain the problem you’re trying to solve to a five-year old?
What if you brought in someone from a different field or company?
If you observe a masterwork at a museum over the course of an hour, what changes in your perspective? Would this work for observing your customer’s problems?
How do you know you’re working with the most valuable problem?
How can you deepen your empathy for your customer’s problems? How can you deepen your empathy for the contributions your colleagues make in the pursuit of the solution?
I’ll save a deep dive into the cognitional and social dynamics of problem and solution perspectives for a future post.
While facilitators can be assigned from each of these groups, I tend toward seasoned facilitators who can
Set the pace
Keeping the group’s flowstate optimal, encouraging the popcorn of ideas, mitigating biases, and ensuring equal participation is complex, active, and intense work but pacesetting is crucial to the session's success. If people divide attention, lose focus, observe “usual office politics” play out, feel that their ideas aren’t being given the care and attention each individual deserves, then this “time away” from the pressing needs of the calendar and inbox can feel like a huge waste.
Expert facilitators can read these dynamics in the group and optimize the activities, the tenor, the breaks, and the balance of the sessions to make the most insightful use of everyone’s time. Sometimes this means alone time for the individuals to mull, sometimes this means stretching the tension of inquiry to painful extremes, sometimes this means reframing the question sets in rapid, radically different views.
Capture, marinate, reassemble
The hardest part of building an innovation pipeline is the careful, meticulous capturing of the ideas generated during and outside of these sessions, the intentional rhythm of checking in with the participants post-session to observe and capture the inevitable hallway conversations and neighborhood walk insights, and the assembled notes and artifacts produced that encapsulate all the time spent in these sessions into a reference and spark for continuous ideas.
What happens next?
Without an innovation pipeline for capturing and triaging these ideas into testable hypotheses and rapid prototypes for iterative customer feedback, this whole endeavor is an exercise in “innovation theatre.” Everyone claps at the end and the cast goes on to a new show.
An Innovation Pipeline is what turns this cultural motion and novel idea generation mechanism into a sustainable innovation powerhouse. Stay tuned for Part 3 which will explain this final, crucial step of operationalizing Innovation.
Loved part 2 as well. I delighted in all of the expert considerations you seasoned each insight with, which another expert can spot as hard-won experience. Each tersely communicated axiom struck me as disciplined mastercraft. Thanks for writing this!