The ideation process felt smoother the second time around. We all knew what we were doing and what to expect from the class time, so it was easier to get into the right mindset. Originally power over time management was a source of concern. I wasn’t sure whether we would allocate our time well, but we gave reasonable amounts of time for each section and had wiggle room if anyone felt they needed extra time.
A personal challenge was that I was running a little dry on ideas. I wasn’t worried about them being ‘good’ or not, it was just a slow brain day. We still got an impressive amount of post-it notes on the board, but it just took me a while to ‘wake-up’ and generate ideas during the brainstorming sections.
This time I felt we were better at verbalizing confusion and being honest when one of us didn’t think an idea would work. We spent some time just going through the ideas and taking out ones which weren’t viable, which we did in a considerate manner. I was very appreciative of our group’s ability to compromise, listen to everyone’s needs, and be respectful towards people’s ideas. Our ability to look for patterns and similarities has also improved. We had a lot of ideas that were addressing similar areas. I like that we all saw the same problems and were on similar wavelengths on how to solve them.
While I enjoyed our ability to get rid of ideas that wouldn’t work, that did alert me to a slight problem. The economic viability of some of the ideas was poor. That made me realize that while it is important to think from and for the consumer perspective, we also have to keep in mind that we are suggesting something for a for-profit business that needs to make money in order to continue existing.
Happy with the group dynamic and progress. Can’t wait to see what idea we settle on and how that develops.