How to run an engaging ideation workshop

What is an ideation workshop?

An ideation workshop is a structured process for brainstorming innovative ideas and refining them into effective solutions.

For me, an ideation workshop is one of the best ways to go from zero ideas to great ideas that you can actually implement.

Typically, an ideation session will follow a process that begins with defining the problem and brainstorming potential solutions.

After initial ideation, groups will then refine those ideas and begin turning them into well-defined solutions. Once those solutions have been presented and explored, groups will tend to end a session by choosing one to move forward with or committing to further research and exploration.

While the exact make-up of the ideation workshop will differ based on the problem statement, team and solution space, they will generally follow a similar structure to the one detailed below. Here, we’ll explain each stage in a typical ideation session and offer a little advice for each step. Let’s dig in!

User research and data gathering

Generating ideas without a good understanding of the problem you are trying to solve is a surefire way of creating an ineffective solution. The most effective creative processes often start with research and gathering data to inform the innovation process before the date of the workshop.

You might conduct user interviews designed to surface problems and understand core needs – the user interview method below is a great source of advice for this.

You might also gather and collate quantitative data, explore the wider competitive landscape and more. We’ll explore this more below, but the key takeaway here is that you should always do some research before approaching any ideation process.

In some cases, you might even invite experts to your session so participants can ask questions before they generate ideas or supplement your research during the workshop.

In the Design Sprint 2.0 workshop, for example, the first day starts with a section on expert interviews that helps inform the rest of the session and provide a foundation for new ideas. These experts might be users, members of your target audience or simply those people in your team most familiar with the problem space.

Try and provide as much supporting information as you can to help define and contextualize the problem you’re solving while also providing valuable insights for creating solutions that will actually solve that issue.

Problem analysis and discovery

Once you’ve gathered all this raw data to inform your understanding of the problem, you need to make sense of it and set a direction for the rest of the ideation session. This can be as simple as creating a problem statement based on the findings, or opening up further avenues of discovery with the group.

The key here is that you and your team have a strong understanding of the problem you are trying to solve, even if the specific root cause is still elusive.

For example, let’s say you’ve created a fitness tracking app and your users aren’t renewing their subscriptions. What should you do? It’s likely that some initial ideas will spring to mind, but without first gathering insights from users, those ideas may not actually solve the issue and you’ll end up wasting time pursuing them.

Then, let’s say you’re running a cross-functional ideation workshop to help explore new ideas and create a solution. If you’re not aligned on the actual problem you’re trying to solve, it’s possible your teams diverge completely and again start ideating in the wrong place.

In my experience, a successful ideation workshop is one that moves between convergence and divergence at the right moments – get aligned on the problem you’re solving, but absolutely encourage your workshop participants to diverge in how to solve it, at least at the start of the session.

Ideation and brainstorming

This is the stage many people get excited about when attending an ideation workshop: the moment where everyone is encouraged to come up with as many ideas as possible in a free flow of creativity.

Typically, the facilitator leading the session will use their favored ideation techniques or brainstorming activities alongside principles like “no bad ideas”, “yes, and..” idea mash-ups and more to aid the free flow of possible solutions.

As discussed above, it’s imperative to have a proper grounding and alignment before you ask a group to generate ideas. I find it helpful to frame this as less of a (brain)storm raging in all directions and more as a way of directing the group’s collective energy to drive a wind turbine. Focus and a general direction are your friends here!

Once that’s in place, let the creative juices flow but ensure you have thought about how those ideas will then be shared, discussed and refined. If in doubt, try a technique like The Six Thinking Hats to build this kind of feedback loop into your session with ease.

For example, participants will brainstorm freely while wearing the green hat before changing to the grey hat to look at things critically or the yellow hat to consider the values and benefits of various ideas.

Clustering

This part of the ideation workshop is about making sense of the ideas generated so far, to begin noticing patterns and help set the stage for idea refinement. Typically, workshop participants will add their ideas to a shared space, perhaps briefly framing their idea and then together, the group will begin to cluster ideas and make sense of where they’re at.

In some settings, it’s common for a facilitator to use ideation techniques like mash up innovation or a form of brainwriting to have a stage of early refinement before clustering.

Personally, the decision comes down to our understanding of the problem, the level of divergence in the group, and the time available. If the group requires a bit more warm-up, I might have them create 10-20 ideas in a first round and then ask them to do a second round.

On the other hand, if the group I’m working with already has a strong understanding of the problem and have perhaps ideated before the session, we might move straight to clustering after a silent brainstorm.

In any case, I’d always recommend having a clustering and sense-making step before moving into refinement. A simple affinity diagram can help a group quickly turn an overwhelming mass of ideas into something more manageable.

The best ideas often come from a synthesis of others, and making the groups thinking visible can help facilitate alignment and excitement. It’s also possible to see that one idea or cluster is clearly rising to the top and so exploring that particularly solution space more deeply may be of interest.

Refinement

Remember what I said about coming up with ideas being easy? This is where you take all those first drafts and (potentially) horrible ideas with a seed of greatness and collectively turn them into something that will stick.

The refinement stage is the one most pliable to the needs of the group. Some teams will have a sticky note for each idea up on a board that everyone is encouraged to silently review before then undergoing a second round of ideation. In other teams, facilitators will put folks into groups to improve the most innovative ideas and turn them into something a little more concrete.

In our fitness tracker example, someone may have the idea to give people extra subscription time based on performance in order to help retain them as a customer. Okay, not bad. But what would that look like in practice? Could you take it further or refine it so that it matches your brand values and the specific problem statement?

While the ideation step was to get all the ideas out and share them with the group, refinement is about helping the best ideas rise up organically and beginning to turn them into something that you might deploy.

Depending on the group, you may run multiple rounds of refinement or even go as far as having groups start to build a business case or begin to scope the work necessary to deploy a solution. Often, the best bet is to refine enough to have a paper prototype, mock-up or clear vision you can share with the group, but not go too deep into implementation. Who knows – your idea might not make it or may be refined further down the line.

I think of the refinement state as taking a raw idea and transforming it into a potential solution. The aim is to shape, add depth and start to think about what that grand idea might look like in practice.

Presentation and voting

After the group has successfully refined their ideas, now comes the time to present them to the rest of the team. The format for this can differ based on the session you’re running and the nature of solutions you’re working with.

When we’re working on product ideas at SessionLab, we’ll create paper prototypes and hang them up in a space that folks can walk around like a gallery, leaving comments and sticky dots on the bits of the solution they like.

On the other hand, if we’re ideating on strategy and marketing items, a stand-up presentation is often a better way to help everyone understand the vision, ask questions and then qualify next steps.

After everyone has had the chance to present and/or review the various solutions, now comes the time for folks to share what they think and give an indication of which solution they would most like to implement.

In some cases, this is a democracy, where the group will collectively decide which idea to implement. In this case, a method like dot-voting is a fast, proven technique time and again by facilitators running ideation sessions.

It’s worth noting that even if there’s a single decision maker, it’s a great idea to give the group chance to share a snapshot of how they’re feeling. This can help inform the team lead’s decision and ensure everyone in the session continues to be engaged and included in the process. It also helps get an early sense of the roles various folks might play in implementation too.

Decision making

The culmination of a successful ideation workshop is usually the moment where you choose a solution you’re excited about and that the whole group is behind.

Sometimes, making a decision is as simple as getting folks to vote on which they think is most likely to resolve what came up in your problem statement.

In other ideation workshops, you may need to undertake a more involved process of ranking possible solutions. You likely consider possible impact and effort while thinking through the ramifications of possible solutions in order to pick the best one to work on right now.

With our fitness tracker example, it’s possible that you have a great idea for radical new features and diversifying business strategies, but you simply don’t have the capacity to implement them at present.

As such, your team might choose a simple solution in the short term while beginning to work on a larger project. (An impact/effort matrix is perfect for this!) Making the right decision means taking a little time in the ideation session to think about what it actually takes to make those ideas a reality and selecting a solution that solves your challenges while still being feasible.

Want to go deeper? Learn more about how to effectively make group decisions in this post on decision making techniques.

Next steps and closing

So you and your team generated a heap of new ideas, refined them as a group and then decided on a solution. Super! An effective ideation workshop also ensures that action is taken afterwards and that folks are best positioned to continue the momentum of the session.

I find it useful to have each person say what they’re going to do following the session and set a date for the next check-in meeting. This keeps things moving and ensures accountability and ownership.

As with any workshop, it’s also valuable to have a check-out round where people reflect on the process, share what they’re feeling and provide feedback. Symbolically closing your ideation workshops can help participants shift gears, putting aside those bad ideas they were attached to or adding them to a backlog and creating focus for the task ahead.

Though these steps are not exhaustive, they do provide a solid structure for an ideation workshop that you can tinker with further. I hope it’s given you an understanding of what to expect in an ideation workshop and how you might approach designing and running such a process.

Specific frameworks such as the Design Sprint also include steps for prototyping and testing you may want to consider too. As with each of the points above, consider what will best address the problem you’re working with and what is most feasible for the project and group present.

This ideation workshop template from the Board of Innovation is also a great example of how to approach the ideation process with a group. Check it out for inspiration or adjust to your needs!

Why run an ideation workshop?

In my experience, a diverse group of people will often be better than any single individual at solving a complex problem. Ideation workshops provide a powerful structure for helping a group quickly come up with new ideas and refine them into solid solutions that will actually solve the challenge at hand.

Running an ideation workshop is especially great when trying to solve important, complicated issues that have no obvious solution. If you find that a problem keeps occurring despite your attempts to fix it or you have a business critical issue that needs your attention, that’s a great trigger for a workshop.

So in short: if an issue is important to your business and you don’t know how to solve it, running an ideation workshop will help you discover how to solve it, get buy-in from your team and give you next steps too.

One misconception I’ve seen is that ideation and innovation workshops are only suitable for product teams or for folks that are building and designing things. While it’s true that the origins of these design thinking frameworks comes from product teams working to solve user issues, their application doesn’t stop there.

In my experience, a (tailored) design sprint or ideation session can be effective even when approaching any complex issue you want to solve collaboratively. This also applies to challenges like low employee morale, or complex systems issues and team conflicts.

While these frameworks aren’t quite one-size fits all, a skilled facilitator using a general ideation structure can help any group of people make progress on solving tough problems.

Tips for running an ideation workshop

So you’re running a dedicated session for ideation. Your room is booked, the right people are invited and you’re turning your mind to running the workshop and guiding the group towards the perfect solution.

In this section, we’ll share some tips and advice to help you and your group get the most out of your session. Not only will these help you in moment-to-moment facilitation, but they’ll ensure that you create a workshop structure and approach that is best suited to the problem space you’re working with.

There are no bad ideas (but there are irrelevant ones)

No bad ideas is one brainstorming rule you might have heard of. So what do we mean by bad ideas, and why are they okay? There are two main reasons:

1. Warming up.

Sometimes it’s helpful to think of ideation and creativity as a muscle. Before you go out for a big run or lift an incredible amount of weight, you warm-up and stretch. Not only does this help prevent injury, but it helps you achieve more during your exercise too. Not-so-great ideas are the equivalent of a warm-up for your creative brain.

This is also an extension of the quantity over quality principle. Don’t worry about whether they’re good ideas or bad ones, just get out as many as possible as quickly as possible in order to clear the way for better ideas to arise.

2. Creating a sense of safety.

The most effective ideation sessions I’ve ever been a part of have been ones where it’s felt safe to take risks, dream big and suggest something left field. Even if those first ideas that come out during the early stages aren’t perfect, feeling safe to suggest them helps the group go wider, think differently and keep moving.

In some groups I’ve also seen the term “negative ideas” used. This can mean “bad ideas” but can also refer to challenging ideas, or ideas which upset the status quo.

Sometimes, those ideas which challenge us the most are those which present new angles and help create genuine innovation. Make it safer for the group to truly innovate and solve business problems by letting all ideas exist in the space without being too quick to label them as good or bad.

So “bad ideas” are encouraged, but where I try and guide the group more carefully is when it comes to “irrelevant ideas.”

For example, let’s say we’re running ideation workshops on the subject of our fitness tracking app. During that session, one of the attendees writes an idea on a post it and presents it the group that reads “Soda should contain less sugar.”

Is it a bad idea? Technically no, but it is an idea that isn’t attuned to the needs of this particular ideation session. We don’t sell soda. Our users haven’t told us that soda is a problem they’re facing. The danger of an irrelevant question is that it splits the groups attention and sends folks down a rabbit hole that doesn’t serve the problem space you’re attending to.

All that said, an irrelevant idea is less dangerous than creating a sense of unsafety. No reprimands or public dressing down, please! In the above case, I’d gently try and move things along, guide the group back to relevancy and restate the problem space you’re working with.

Choose a wide or narrow approach

A framing question I find useful when thinking about running an ideation workshop is “how clear is the problem we’re trying to solve?”

The answer to this question will determine everything from who should be in the room to the ideation techniques you’ll use in order to find an effective solution.

Let’s take the example of the fitness tracker app with low user retention. You’ve got some background data but you’re not yet aligned on what’s causing the issue nor how should you approach it.

The cause of that issue is likely to be quite complex and so the specifics of the problem are unclear. As such, starting with the wider problem space of low retention is likely a better approach than narrowing immediately to an assumption like “our user emails have low engagement and that’s why retention is low.”

In this case, I’d advise the group to start wide and explore the low retention problem space before narrowing towards a solution.

On the flip side, if you’ve already done extensive research and discovered that your user onboarding emails are a big problem that deserves the team’s full attention, then the problem is clear, and so you can direct your attention to working on that explicitly with a more narrow approach.

Once you understand your level of clarity on the problem, then you can best choose who needs to be present.

If things are unclear and you need to do some big picture thinking, enlist those people in the group. Getting into the details of your entire onboarding program and need to discuss creative ways to personalize your communications based on user data? That’s likely a slightly different group of people.

Narrow and wide approaches are both extremely effective, but you’ll want to ensure you’re deploying the one that matches your challenge for best results.

Clearly frame the problem space you’re working on

We’ve established above that an ideation workshop can take a wide or narrow approach based on how much clarity you have on the issue. An effective ideation workshop is also one in which everyone is aligned on the problem you’re solving, regardless of their initial approach to solving it.

In the fitness tracker with low user retention example, you would frame either approach by saying that the the group will be working on the issue of user retention and then provide some supporting information. Why is this important? This framing ensures that people are focused and aligned on what to bring to the table. Without it, you might get great ideas that have nothing to do with the issue and find a lack of traction or shared understanding.

While you might have different perspectives on how to solve the problem you’re facing or even a different understanding of why a problem is occurring, it’s vital the whole group is aligned on the core issue you’re working on. Think of it as a north star you’re all travelling towards, even if the route is different for different participants.

Having trouble getting to the core problem you want to solve? Try The 5 Whys activity to help a group go deeper and frame the problem space effectively.

Work on the right problem

It’s one thing to have everyone aligned on the problem you’re working on, but it’s also vital that you are working on the right problem.

Narrowing down to a specific problem too soon or making an assumption without exploration can result in teams working on the wrong problem and, ultimately, spending time creating solutions that may not actually help address your biggest challenges.

So how do you avoid working on the wrong problem? Depending on how your organization works, you should have a way for challenges and initiatives to be recorded and to rise to the surface.

At SessionLab for example, we have a quarterly planning session where we choose what to work on in order to achieve our company goals. In this framework, challenges go through a consistent process of validation, background research and consideration before the planning session and even more during it.

Aligning your problem discovery process with your company goals is a great first step, but beyond this, you’ll also find that creating a well-defined problem statement, conducting user research or doing a root cause analysis before or during the session is helpful.

If you’re taking a wide approach to ideation, try starting the workshop with an exploration what your participants consider to be the biggest contributors to the issue.

The Sailboat exercise is a fantastic example of an ideation technique you can use to explore a problem space with a team and narrow down to the right problem in an informed, practical way.

Do your (user) research and gather data

Good data and user research are vital for any ideation or problem solving process. They are foundational pillars you’ll use when crafting a problem statement and also when informing new ideas and the solutions you develop.

In many cases, user feedback and data is what triggers the ideation session in the first place. Whether that’s consistent feedback about broken features or data to show a consistent decline in new subscribers year over year.

Whenever possible, bring data and user insights to share at the start of your ideation workshops and to support the framing of your challenge. This can help ensure you’re solving the right problem and also orient folks towards the root cause or even start the creative gears turning.

Whatever you do, ensure you’ve done some data analysis or can rattle off a summary to help folks make sense of what you present. I’ve seen ideation sessions get derailed by vast swathes of data that isn’t actually relevant or which would have been better presented in the form of a summary.

It’s also important to note that it’s not always possible to source deep user research to inform every idea or problem. Some times, you actually need to move faster than data gathering permits. In these cases, having experts and well-informed, smart people in the room is a good stop gap.

The final thing I’ll say on data is that there are times in an ideation workshop where making a decision on two great ideas feels impossible without first doing some further research to validate some assumptions.

In these cases, create a focused research task to be done at the first available opportunity and defer the final decision a touch until you can get at least a little validation.

Document everything (and make it accessible)

In both my personal and professional life, diligently recording ideas and taking notes has been instrumental in making projects become a reality.

A lot of ideation techniques involve each team member writing ideas on sticky notes and then sharing them with the group.

Take a photograph of the completed idea boards or ask a note taker to record those that resonate with the group and any connected conversations. It’s unlikely that you’ll implement all potential solutions immediately, and so these notes can be helpful when a product manager needs to remember that one great idea that now makes sense but which you can’t quite remember.

If working with an online whiteboard board or document, this is especially easy. Simply ask all workshop participants to add ideas to the virtual board, drag in inspiration and leave comments for everyone to see. You’ll also find online workshop tools that can help create summaries or transcriptions of your online chats to ensure nothing is missed.

The idea of documenting everything also extends to using a parking lot to capture conversations and ideas that might be peripheral to the problem at hand, but are worth coming back to. In a tightly structured ideation workshop, it can feel important to stay on topic. A parking lot means that anything that comes up while running an ideation technique isn’t lost, and you can circle back to it when it’s appropriate.

Balance solo and group thinking

Ever been in a session where one person speaks for an hour before you get chance to contribute or even have space to reflect? Not the best environment for new ideas, is it? Round robin brainstorming techniques can be incredibly exciting and effective at producing as many ideas as possible. Be sure to balance these group activities with time for reflection and solo ideation for best results.

Solo thinking and reflection time is also vital for avoiding group thinking and giving time for divergence to really occur. Particularly in groups with strong personalities and loud voices, this personal time can ensure that all areas are properly explored and you don’t double down on a particular solution just because the boss like it.

1-2-4-All is a great example of a technique that helps balance solo and group thinking while also ensuring everyone in the group is able to participate and have their ideas heard.

Engagement is key

When everyone in the room is fully engaged in the process, it can feel a little like magic. One person suggests something that challenges a long-held assumption and something clicks. Ideas come thick and fast and people step up to take ownership of deploying the solution. Getting participants fully engaged in the process and the problem is a large part of what facilitates this outcome. So how do you engage your group?

A well-designed agenda with varied ideation techniques is a great start. Try using brainstorming techniques that encourage visual thinking and critical thinking alike so that people with a broad set of skills can take part.

Workshop facilitation best practices can also help create an engaging atmosphere that positions the session for success. You’ll want to ensure you guide discussions effectively, solicit input, create space for reflection and much more. For more tips on facilitating engagement, read our guide on how to run a workshop.

Conclusion

When you bring the right people together with a common purpose and an effective structure, you can create genuine innovation and solve tough problems. An ideation workshop provides the ideal structure to make that happen.

Whether you’re looking for the perfect ideation technique to inform your process or some advice for leading the group effectively, I hope this guide has helped provide some practical examples you can bring to your next workshop.

Looking for an example ideation workshop as inspiration? Design Sprint 2.0 is a tried and tested process you can run over 4 days, including time for prototyping solutions and validating those prototypes via testing.

Need help understanding how to put together your ideation workshop? Explore our guide on how to plan a workshop to start making your session a reality.

James Smart Head of Content

James Smart is Head of Content at SessionLab. He’s also a creative facilitator who has run workshops and designed courses for establishments like the National Centre for Writing, UK. He especially enjoys working with young people and empowering others in their creative practice.