To have a great idea, you need to have lots of ideas

Ever been stuck for a great idea? You’re not alone, and the answer is almost always the same: you need more ideas, not better ones.

Ideation is the structured practice of idea generation, and it exists because inspiration alone is generally not a reliable process. Ideation gives you tools for producing more ideas, more varied ideas, and ideas that would never have surfaced if you’d just sat in a room waiting for someone to have a good one.

If you’re following a design thinking process, ideation sits after you’ve done your research, defined your problem and written your How Might We question. If you’re not, that’s fine too. The techniques in this article work for any situation where you need to get past the obvious and find something worth doing.

One of the most important things about ideation, and the part that feels completely counterintuitive, is that quantity beats quality, at least for now. You’d think the smart move is to focus straight away on the good ideas and skip the bad ones. But you can’t actually tell which ideas are good until you’ve got enough of them sitting next to each other to compare. The only way to find a good idea is to generate a lot of average and bad ones first.

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”

Linus Pauling – the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes

This article covers some of the most useful ideation techniques, why a bit of structure makes them work better, and how to get from a room full of ideas down to one worth testing.

What’s in this article:

• Who should be in the room
• Ideation methods
  • Brainstorming
  • The 5 Whys
  • Worst possible idea
  • Storyboarding
  • Mind mapping
  • Mood boards
• From many ideas to one idea
• Pick one to prototype
• Testing and iteration
• You don’t need an answer today

Who should be in the room

The mix of people in an ideation session matters as much as the methods you use. The instinct is to fill the room with the people closest to the problem, but those are often the people most constrained by how things have always been done. Years of experience and established processes are valuable, but they can also make it harder to see past the obvious. A marketing manager who has run the same Christmas campaign for six years will instinctively reach for what worked before. A founder who built the business on one core offer will struggle to imagine a different model. You aren’t going to find anything new if you keep doing what you’ve already done. That’s just how familiarity works.

Some of the best ideas in any organisation come from people who aren’t usually in the room when decisions get made. They’re not weighed down by the same assumptions, politics, or sense of “we tried that already.”

It’s also worth including people who are close to the problem but not close to the decision-making: the checkout staff who hear customers every day, the technician who knows exactly where things break down.

And sometimes the most useful person in the room is someone with nothing to do with the problem at all. They’ll ask the question everyone else stopped asking years ago. “What if we gave every family ticket a free popcorn?” The person who ‘knows’ the industry will have ten reasons why that won’t work. They might also be wrong.

For arts and creative organisations, this might mean including artists, board members, partner organisations, volunteers, or your audience themselves. The more varied the perspectives in the room, the more varied the ideas on the table.

We’ve seen a front-of-house usher come up with a marketing idea in a single session that ended up reshaping an organisation’s entire digital strategy. We’ve seen a marketing coordinator reframe what a CEO’s role could look like in a digital context. We’ve seen external artists in a roundtable reshape how an organisation thought about its communications from the outside in. And we’ve seen a ticketing manager, brought into a session about partnerships, identify collaboration opportunities with other venues that nobody on the strategy team had considered. That kind of contribution happens because someone outside the usual decision-making circle asked a question the insiders had stopped asking. It’s what happens when you stop assuming the people closest to the problem on paper are the best placed to solve it.

That willingness to not know which direction will work is what makes ideation possible.

“There are countless directions to explore, and we never know which one will guide us to a dead end, and which will lead us to new realms until we test it.”

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Ideation methods

The following methods work across most problem types and team sizes. Some you’ll use together in a single session, others suit particular kinds of problems better than others. Start with brainstorming if you’re not sure where to begin.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is the starting point for most ideation, but sitting around a table waiting for inspiration consistently underperforms. People tend to defer to the most senior voice in the room, the same handful of obvious ideas get repeated, and the session winds down before it’s really started.

A bit of structure fixes this. Here’s how to run a session that actually produces something:

Take one How Might We question. Set a timer for five to eight minutes. Everyone generates as many ideas as possible without evaluating or discussing anything yet. When the timer goes, share everything and group similar ideas together. Then move to the next question.

Generating ideas individually before sharing them is the part many people skip, and it can be the part that matters most. It gives everyone, including the quieter voices in the room, an equal shot at contributing before group dynamics take over and the loudest opinion in the room starts steering things.

A few rules that make brainstorming work

Defer judgement. No idea gets evaluated while ideation is happening. Even gentle scepticism shuts ideas down before they’ve had a chance to develop. Save the evaluation for later.

Encourage wild ideas. The point is to get beyond the obvious. Wild ideas often contain the seed of something useful, even when the idea itself won’t work as stated.

Build on the ideas of others. “Yes, and…” rather than “no, but.” Take someone’s idea and extend it instead of replacing it. The brainstorming term for this is piggybacking: taking someone else’s idea and using it as a launchpad for a new one.

Go for quantity. Volume is the goal in this phase. The more ideas on the table, the better your chances of finding something worth developing.

Use time as an accelerator. A timer creates productive pressure. It stops overthinking and forces instinctive responses, which is often where the most original thinking comes from.

Warm up first. Before working on your real problem, spend five minutes on something irrelevant. A classic exercise: how many uses can you think of for a fork? The goal isn’t the answer, it’s the mindset. Divergent thinking, generating multiple possible answers instead of converging on one right one, is a muscle. A short warm-up loosens it before you need it for something that matters.

Brainstorming tips

• Be visual if you can. A rough sketch communicates differently from words and can spark ideas that words wouldn’t reach. But if writing works better for you, write. The goal is to get the idea out of your head, not to draw it perfectly.
• One conversation at a time. Ideas get lost when people talk over each other.
• Stay focused. The facilitator’s job is to keep the group pointed at the question on the wall, not wherever the conversation has wandered to.

The 5 Whys

The 5 Whys is a root cause analysis technique developed at Toyota in the 1970s and widely used in design thinking and problem-solving. When you hit a problem, ask why it’s happening. Then ask why that’s happening. Keep going until you reach the root cause, which is often quite different from the surface symptom. Five tends to be about the right depth, though some problems resolve in three and others need more.

A simple everyday example: sales are down this month.

• Why? Our Google ranking dropped.
• Why? Fewer people are visiting the website.
• Why? Fewer people are finding us online.
• Why? We stopped publishing content three months ago.
• Why? The person who managed the blog left and nobody picked it up.
• Why? There was no documented process and no backup plan.

The fix isn’t “write more content” or “get more website traffic.” It’s “build a content process that doesn’t depend on one person.” That’s a completely different solution to the one you’d have landed on if you’d stopped at the first why.

Here’s a real one from our own work. A client came to us after their previous website built by a different developer had gone badly over budget.

• Why did the build go over budget? It took far longer than expected to complete.
• Why did it take longer? Large parts of it had to be redesigned partway through.
• Why did they need redesigning? The original structure was confusing and hard to use.
• Why was it confusing? The build was based on assumptions about what the audience wanted rather than evidence.
• Why were there no answers to check those assumptions against? Because no user testing had been done before launch.

The actual fix wasn’t “spend less money” or “manage the budget better.” It was “test with real users before you build, not after.” That one root cause changed how we approached the rebuild entirely and produced a website that was under budget and outperformed the old one dramatically.

The 5 Whys is particularly useful when a problem keeps coming back despite attempts to fix it, because it usually means the previous fix addressed a symptom rather than the cause. It also pairs naturally with How Might We questions: the root cause you land on often makes for a sharper, more useful HMW question than the one you started with.

Worst possible idea

One of the most counterintuitive and effective ideation techniques, particularly for a group that’s stuck or being overly cautious.

Instead of asking “what’s the best solution?”, ask “what’s the worst possible thing we could do here?” Generate the most disastrous, ridiculous ideas you can think of. Write them all down.

Then flip them. Take each terrible idea and ask what its opposite looks like, or what a version of it might be that actually worked. The worst ideas often point straight at assumptions you didn’t know you were making, and reversing them can produce surprisingly useful solutions.

Example: a gallery is trying to increase engagement with younger audiences.

Worst possible ideas:

• Charge triple the admission price
• Remove all the signage so nobody can find anything
• Open from 3am to 5am
• Have staff ignore every visitor who walks in.

Flipped:

• What if the gallery had a late-night opening?
• What if wayfinding was treated as part of the experience rather than an afterthought?
• What if entry for under-25s was free and funded through a different revenue model?
• What if staff were trained to start conversations rather than wait to be approached?

None of those came from asking “how do we improve our gallery experience?” They came from asking “how do we make it as bad as possible?” and working backwards from there.

Storyboarding

Storyboarding brings visual thinking into ideation. It’s a sequence of simple sketches that shows who a person is, what they’re trying to do, what gets in their way, and what happens once a solution is in place.

You don’t need to be able to draw. Stick figures are fine. The value is in forcing specificity: who is this person? What are they doing right before the problem shows up? What happens when they try to solve it themselves? What does it look like once your idea is in place?

A good way to feel how useful this is: storyboard something you think you already understand completely, like making toast. Slice it into every single step, from opening the bread packet to buttering it. You’ll almost always find a step you skipped over without noticing, because you do it automatically. That’s exactly what storyboarding is good for: surfacing the steps people assume are obvious, which are usually the steps where things actually go wrong.

Storyboards are especially useful for service design and customer experience problems, where the solution isn’t one single thing but a sequence of moments. They’re also a good way to share an idea with people who weren’t in the room, since a row of sketches is far easier to follow than a written description.

How to run it: grab some paper, sketch six to eight rough panels, and work through the before, during, and after of one possible solution to your HMW question. Share back. Compare and discuss.

Mind mapping

Mind mapping works best as a companion to brainstorming rather than a replacement for it. Once you have a cluster of ideas from a brainstorm, a mind map helps you see the relationships between them, spot gaps, and find connections you’d miss in a flat list. It’s also useful for individuals who want to explore a problem space before bringing ideas to a group.

Start with your central problem or HMW question in the middle of a page or shared digital board. Branch outward with related ideas, themes, or questions, then branch from those. Tools like Miro or FigJam work well for this, as does a large piece of paper. The visual spread lets you see the whole landscape at once in a way a linear list never does.

Mood boards

A mood board is a visual collage, images, colours, textures, words, that captures the feeling of a direction rather than a specific solution.

Where a storyboard shows a sequence, a mood board shows a vibe. It’s a way of asking “does this feel right?” before you’ve committed to anything. Take a small theatre trying to attract a younger audience. Before settling on a campaign direction, the team puts together two mood boards: one built around the warmth and nostalgia of classic cinema posters, the other built around bold, oversized typography and clashing colour. Looking at the two side by side makes the decision obvious in a way that talking about it never would.

Mood boards aren’t essential to every ideation session, but they’re a quick and cheap way to test direction before you’ve spent real time or money building anything.

From many ideas to one idea

By the end of an ideation session, you’ll have a large pile of ideas and need to get to a small number worth developing. Here’s a simple way through it:

Group and cluster. Gather everything from the session and group similar ideas together. Clusters will form naturally around themes or approaches.

Filter first. Before voting, run a quick pass with two questions.

1. Is it worth doing?
2. Can we actually do it, with the time, money and people we have?

Anything that fails either of these gets crossed out. If there’s no agreement on removing something, leave it in for now.

Evaluate against criteria. Once you’ve filtered the obviously unsuitable ideas, agree on what you’re judging the rest against. Six questions tend to cover most situations:

• How quickly could we do it?
• How significant is the benefit?
• How easy is it to implement?
• How cheap?
• How risky?
• And perhaps most honestly: do we actually want to do it?

The last one is important and is often skipped in evaluation processes. A team that doesn’t want to pursue an idea will find ways to let it fail, through under-resourcing, deprioritisation, or just never quite getting around to it.

Vote. Give everyone three to five sticky dots and let them mark the ideas they find most promising. Dots can go on any idea, including ones they didn’t come up with themselves, and can be spread across several ideas or stacked on one. The ideas with the most votes move forward.

Pick one to prototype

The goal isn’t to find the single best idea in the abstract. It’s to find one idea worth making tangible enough to test. You can always come back to the rest. Pick one and move it forward.

A prototype at this stage doesn’t need to be functional, finished, or even particularly legible to anyone outside the room. A sketch on the back of an envelope, a cardboard mock-up, a rough clickable screen built in an afternoon, a service interaction played out between two people: if someone else can react to it, it counts.

Rough is better than polished at this stage. When something looks finished, people are reluctant to criticise it. They assume decisions have been made and it’s too late to change course. A rough prototype signals that nothing is decided yet, which is exactly the permission people need to tell you what’s actually wrong with the idea.

The goal isn’t to show your best work. It’s to find out where the idea breaks down before you’ve spent serious time and money on it.

Don’t worry, be crappy!

That title shamelessly stolen from Guy Kawasaki’s brilliant (but dated) TEDx session on The Art of Innovation.

Do this

• Cheap
• Fast
• Clearly a draft – users aren’t going to judge your creative choices
• Feedback can be incorporated on the fly

Don’t do this

• High cost
• Long time
• Looks finished – users are unlikely to give critical feedback on a polished (seemingly finished) item
• Difficult to incorporate feedback

Testing and iteration

Ideation doesn’t end with one great idea – it ends with a direction worth testing, and testing nearly always means changing something.

Iteration means making something rough, testing it in front of real people, learning from how they react, and making it again. Not once, but several times.

“Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often.”

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar

A failed attempt at this stage isn’t the opposite of success, it’s information. Every time a prototype doesn’t land the way you expected, you learn something about the gap between what you assumed and what’s actually true. That’s what moves you closer to something that works.

Some principles worth holding onto through iteration:

You have to make something before you can test it. It doesn’t need to be a masterpiece. A sketch, a rough outline, a role-played interaction are all excellent examples of prototypes: anything tangible enough for someone else to react to. Making something forces a level of specificity that talking about it never does.

Credit belongs to the group. An idea that starts with one person gets built on and improved by others. Holding onto ownership slows everything down and makes people defensive about feedback they should be using.

Your first version probably won’t be right. Testing a prototype in front of real people, even rough, shows you what needs to change. Each round brings you closer to something that actually works.

“In this experimentation phase, we’re not looking at which iteration progresses the quickest or furthest, but which holds the most promise.”

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

You don’t need an answer today

One of the most useful things to hold onto during ideation is that you don’t need to have the answer by the end of the session. There will usually be healthy debate, competing ideas, and a fair amount of uncertainty about the right direction.

That’s the process working correctly as ideation is designed to expand before it contracts. A session that ends with complete consensus probably didn’t go far enough.