Collaborative Ideation Tools

Anonymous Voting
Aimed at overcoming the main disadvantage of Brainstorming (the same applies to focus groups, btw): peer-pressure, peer-predominance, shyness and/or feelings of inferiority, inadequacy.
When plenary voting for preferred ideas, members may not express their true believes, which is avoided by asking to rank them on a balloting paper and by creating sufficient space for participants to feel free of third party scrutiny.

Bodystorming
A type of projective identification, sometimes used in collaborative ideation for product design, where the designer “embodies” – imagines to be – the final product. See also: Observer and Merged Viewpoints.

BrainSketching
VanGundy, Techniques of Structured Problem Solving (1988). Group work tool in which a group of people – seated in a circle – draw a number of sketches on how the given problem could be solved, passing them on to the person on their right when finished. The passed-on sketches are then either further developed, or used as a stimulus for new sketches. At the end of the exercise, the sketches are collected, explained if necessary, categorized and evaluated, after which the best, or most appropriate for solving the given problem are selected.

Brainstorming
Osborn, Applied Imagination (1967). Currently, the best-known and most widely used collaborative problem solving method, which has engendered a large offspring of similar group work tools. Its fundamental concept is postponing judgement during the process of ideation.

Tools & Techniques for Ideation

Introduction to Ideation
Before briefly describing creative thinking tools or techniques, there are three points which need attention.

One: the old adage that two know more than one is most certainly true for creative thinking.
It is no coincidence that the advertising industry introduced the concept of so-called Creative Teams (Art Director and Copywriter) in the early 1960’s, that tools for collaborative systematic inventive thinking or group work are – after ideation – by far the largest group of related tools, nor that the most universally used and well-know model for collective ideation – Brainstorming – was created by an advertising man, BBDO co-founder Alex Osborn.

Two: Listing is extremely useful in virtually any structured, systematic thinking and/or Ideation effort. Listing synonyms, antonyms, advantages, disadvantages, alternatives, assumptions, bugs, categories, limitations, opposites, parts, relations, rules, suppositions and so forth, is practically always a good starting point for personal and collective thinking processes.
Listing is an integral part of many of the systematic creative processes or methods described here, because – as established earlier – quantity is, especially at the initial stages of the creative process, more important than quality.
Fluency – the ability to generate large amounts of ideas or alternative solutions for a problem – is also an integral part of virtually all creativity tests, for starters the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT).
In my experience Listing is the simplest, most practical and most productive precursor for creative thinking, even with totally untrained subjects or individuals with exceptionally well developed creativity inhibitors. After all: almost anybody can make a shopping list.

Methods and Tools for the Creative Production Process

The following is a series of methodologies to structure the problem solving or creative process.
I describe them here briefly with the purpose of indexing the methods I have found.
If you want to know more about a particular one, I'd suggest you Google the term, since the majority of them were found on the Web during my research.

15 Sparks
A method originally used for internal staff training by the advertising agency McCann Erickson, but by now extensively tried by myself and others in academic practice throughout Latin America.
Although oriented at, and illustrated with, examples from advertising and marketing, it has also proven useful in classes and seminars on branding, innovation, strategic thinking, and so forth.
As the name suggests, it consists of 15 statements directed at changing the mind-set: Instead of asking who we are talking to, ask who we are NOT talking to, Turn your biggest threats into opportunities, Co-create with your consumers, How can your brand, product or service become a tangible part of culture? and If you product were a service, what would it be?, among others.

Problem Definition. The Most Critical Step.

It is no casualty that “Problem Definition” – in some wording or other – is an integral part of all the step-models described in a previous post.
However, considering Kevin Kelly’s tenth paradigm: “Opportunities before Efficiencies” subtitled: “Don’t solve problems; seek opportunities”, problem-definition seems to be too limiting a term in many of today’s competitive environments of accelerating change.

Moreover, an organization may not have or perceive to have any particular “problems”. This does not mean to say that it can sit on its laurels, though, even if only because competition, changing customer preferences, technological breakthroughs or even an ad-hoc crisis may present any given organization with a “Houston, we have a problem” moment at any given point in time, more often than not when least expected.

Therefore, I feel it is more adequate to speak of “Problem Definition & Opportunity Finding”, especially because these two are not in any way mutually exclusive.
In fact, the realization that an opportunity has presented itself to the organization, then turns into a “Problem” in the classical strategic-creative context, because it constitutes the problem definition that focuses the creative effort: How to take advantage of it?

Solid problem definition is of absolute essence, whether when solving problems or finding opportunities, because a badly focused, fuzzy problem- or opportunity definition leads inevitably to bad “output”: poor, or – worse – useless ideas and a waste of precious time, thus, resources.
This may not be a disaster in the case of a failing advertising campaign, however, in the case of corporate strategic planning, it may well mean the difference between life or death for an organization.

216 Creative-Strategic Thinking Tools, Classified into Categories.

Since my original research into models and theories for applied creative thinking – almost ten years ago – a number of new models have surfaced, while the associated list of concepts, methodologies and tools has grown considerably; apparently for two reasons:
1 - The inclusion of the Strategic Thinking parameter in the research field.
2 - An explosive growth of interest in “Creativity” since the turn of the millennium. In the first place from local and/or national governments and researchers, but also from corporate leadership, educators and parents.

As a result of this renewed interest, a large number of publications and studies address the topic and at least three Web sites contain extensive compilations on creativity, strategy, problem solving and most everything related.

On the other hand, being Advertising the oldest and by far the largest of all the so-called Creative Industries, it is a little disappointing to have to come to the conclusion that its contributions to a better understanding of creativity and creative thinking are scarce, in spite of its long-standing collaboration with the cognitive sciences, particularly anthropology, psychology and sociology.The most important individual contributions to the field come from advertising agency BBDO co-founder Alex Osborn, who is the father of Brainstorming, still – by far and large – the most widely used tool for collaborative ideation, Creative Problem Solving (CPS), 7-step model, and Osborn’s Checklist.

Models for the Creative Production Process

The creative process consists of a series of identifiable stages, documented in models such as the 5-step model (Wallas - 1926), 7-step models (Rossman - 1931; Osborn - 1953), 3-step model (Creative Problem Solving or CPS; Osborn - 1979), 6-step model (revised CPS model; Isaksen/Treffinger - 1985), and the “Model for Creative Strategic Planning” (Bandrowski - 1985), the latter aimed at achieving a better balance between the creative and analytical aspects of the afore mentioned models.
The existence of many more models – like the Basadur Simplex Process, for example – has been confirmed through desk research, however, none of these appear to contain significant new insights into the processes as described in the mentioned models; they generally either recombine steps from one or more of these, add intermediate steps, or are a combination of process and method, as is the case of TRIZ (Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadatch), for example.

The following models are universally recognized by experts and educators as either the most relevant or easiest applicable theories on the subject.
As their names aptly suggest, all consider a series of sequential processes or steps, some of which coincide, while others not.

What is creativity?

The term creative is “fuzzy” – in others words – means many different things to many different people.
This makes it necessary to clarify both the meaning and context of the word within the framework of this blog.
There are numerous definitions of the term, but English creative education expert and Ambassador for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation – Sir Ken Robinson – defines it so: “The process of having original ideas that have value”.

This is a practical definition for two reasons:
1 – It establishes that Creativity is the result of a process.
2 – It establishes that the Creative process is directed at generating valuable, original ideas.

Derivative of this definition is that the quality, originality and value of an idea are “umfeld” – environment – determined: where it may have value in one context, it may be worthless in others.
Moreover, where it may be unoriginal in one context, it may be original – thus – valuable in others; this explains why the “copy/paste method”, that is: copying an idea from one context to another, is a basic, yet useful creative tool.

Am I creative?

Popular believe has it that creativity is reserved to the so-called “Creative Elites”, located at the top of the white-collar chain in so-called “Creative Industries”, e.g. arts, advertising, design, motion picture, engineering, R&D, and so on.
This conviction is probably the most undesirable of all collateral damages caused by industrial-revolution education, and nothing could be less true.

Human beings are born creative, human evolution is the result of that creativity and people apply it in every aspect of their everyday lives.
People consciously or unconsciously use creativity to solve every day problems, but probably the most obvious example of human creativity is lying: the ability to present others with more or less elaborate constructs of alternative truths.

Unlike the many creative skills extinguished by industrial-revolution schooling, lying is the one universal creative social skill that upbringing and education are apparently incapable of eradicating, even though it is most likely the first “do-not-rule” parents and educators bring to bear on a young child: “Thou shalt not lie”.
The richness of the concept and its deep embedding in universal culture is best illustrated through language.
An article on Wikipedia identifies no less than 21 different types of lies, while cognitive science has busied itself with the phenomenon ever since Augustine of Hippo’s “Taxonomy of Lies” (± AD 395).