Ideation: Creativity Beyond the Brainstorm

I remember the first time I heard the word “ideate”, which means to form an idea, imagine, or conceive of something. It was a few months ago. My partner casually tossed it into a conversation, and I snorted: “Ideate? What kind of a word is THAT? That’s exactly the kind of made up business-speak that drives people crazy.” Melis, no shrinking violet, shot back that it was a very common term in her Intel world and suggested I might, now and again, consider crawling out from the rock under which I seemed be living. In a huff I looked it up. As usual… she was right. It turns out not only is ideate a real word (the etymology goes all the way back to the 17^th century in English), but it’s a crucial step in any design thinking process.

Worse, I discovered not only is ideate a real word…it’s a helpful one. There’s really no synonym for ideation. The closest word I could come up with is brainstorm. But while brainstorming is certainly a form of ideation, brainstorming is just one tool among many for design thinkers.

Here are three practices to try to up your ideation game beyond the brainstorm: SCAMPER; experience mapping; and ask a crab.

SCAMPER (substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, reverse, or rearrange) is really seven ideation methods in wrapped up in one fun acronym. SCAMPER gathers together a set of fundamental questions that skilled design thinkers find helpful when trying to come up a new solution. What could I substitute to meet the need? How could I combine what we’re doing with some other practice? What can I adapt or copy from someone else? Can we modify what we’re already doing? What if we magnified what we’re doing? What if we eliminated something or eliminated the practice entirely? What’s the reverse of what we’re doing? What if we rearranged something?

Not all of these questions will bear fruit, but all of them are worth asking. They have a way of turning a situation over, around, and upside down freeing you to imagine possibilities you didn’t see before. Years ago, the church I serve wrestled, as many do, with the question of Sunday school as the right model for educating children. At the time we held the education time concurrent with worship meaning our children and adult teachers were largely excluded. Some wondered if worship is one of the most important hours of the week, why were we kicking our kids out? Others noted that many of the parents appreciated the arrangement as a time to refresh themselves for the week. A gazillion churches have had this same tired conversation. This time, however, a new person asked this question: “Well, what if we just stopped have Sunday school entirely? At least for a period of time? What would happen? The world wouldn’t end, would it? And we might learn something.”

The room just stopped. Everyone looked at one another. THIS was…different. Without knowing it, this leader was asking the SCAMPER question about elimination. We were feeling stuck between two fairly uncreative options, and this question totally broke us open and took us to a new place. Now, I’d love to tell you we had the guts to follow up on this suggestion and try a Sabbatical from Sunday school, but ultimately we decided for the safer but less interesting route of moving the education hour before worship…only before moving back several years later. But hey, we at least uncovered the possibility of doing something different, which is no small thing. (If you don’t know the story of Kara Root and Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church, she told her story of a people taking the road less travelled at the NEXT conference a few years back. https://vimeo.com/93041207)

Experience mapping offers another creative way to see the world through a different lens. When we experience map we are imagining what it’s like for someone to walk through the experience we are designing for them. Experience mapping is particularly helpful in the congregational context where innovation is less focused on building things than creating an experience.

When Amtrak wanted to create a high-speed line from Boston to Washington DC, they hired IDEO to help. At the stage Amtrak invited IDEO into this Acela project, they had already made huge decisions- what they really wanted was IDEO’s help in designing the seating in the trains. While this was a worthy goal, IDEO’s design thinkers started with an experience map. Putting themselves into the shoes of travelers, they traced their journey from their homes to the stations to their destinations. In all IDEO discovered ten complete steps in a typical journey, and passengers only encountered train seats at the eighth step! IDEO wound up helping Amtrak to look at the entire process, and made major improvements to ticket purchasing, originally one of the most frustrating steps, and something initially not even on the radar screen of Amtrak.

What if you conducted an experience map of what’s it’s like to experience your congregation? What if you put yourself in the shoes of different kinds of people trying to make their way into your community for the first time. Can they find parking easily? Is your entrance obvious and accessible? Once they enter the building, what is the greeting like? Is it absolutely clear where to find a nursery or bathroom? Is it clear to parents whether they SHOULD be looking for a nursery or what kinds of services are offered for children? Most churches spend hour upon hour niggling over worship details, but like Amtrak, I wonder if we aren’t overlooking a lot of the critical steps it takes for people to even get to worship in the first place.

Finally, asking a crab. (Hee-hee, I love this one.) One of the BEST design thinking books out there about improving creativity is Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko. (If you don’t have it…get it. While these days I normally read on Kindle, like a lot of design books I recommend the soft cover version. It’s not meant to be read in a linear way and I find this more easily done with the actual book.) The crab comes from a frustrated Japanese CEO of a perfume company. He asked his team to come up with ideas about how to survive in lean times. Each of them just came up with the same old tired ideas they’d been stuck on for years. No one had anything new. So…he gave them each a picture of a king crab. (I have no idea if this actually happened, but it’s a great story.) He gave them a picture of a king crab and told them to study the crab and apply what they noticed about the crab to come up with new ideas for their company. Some noticed the crab could rejuvenate lost claws and suggested they spend more time coming up with backup products in case their lead products faltered. A crab can see in every direction, and some pointed out their company was often way too focused on themselves and needed to broaden their understanding of the larger market and the world itself. And so on. The crab didn’t give them any of these answers, of course, the crab was just weird enough and different enough to stimulate them to think in new ways.

So, the next time your session or board wants to settle for a brainstorm…maybe have a picture of a crab handy. You never know…