How to get 100 ideas in 10 Minutes without discussing for hours?

Goal: you have a topic and you want to find with 10 people a lot of ideas in just 10 minutes

There are many ways of finding ideas once you have decided it’s time for it! I have several preferred ones and will share one in this post.

Situation:

It can be you have to find the root cause of a problem first or jump to the rephrasing it in a solution-oriented question (this you find out here how to do it) or jump directly to solution ideas if your topic is a simple one that does not require a lot of analysis.

If you want to try something new with your team and you know they are open to this then this might be the right ideation approach.

If your team likes to talk a lot and does not have a problem with this, then this approach might not fit them.

Why is generating ideas taking a lot of time usually?

When a group of people in a team meets to find solutions or generate ideas for a topic means a group of persons with different perspectives and needs meets to create something together.

What is happening in this setting quite often?

• there is competition between participants, but sometimes not in a constructive way happening

• the person with the loudest voice insists that his idea is the best one

• people bring up arguments about why an idea is good or not during ideation

• judgment of ideas is happening immediately after someone speaks up / writes it down

"That’s a good idea and here’s why” - or how NOT to kill creativity from the start

If you want to avoid the above situations check the Facilitator hints area at the bottom of this post.

If you want to get more behind the scenes, about what happens that teams act in the above way and why then check out this detailed post here.

What are the simple steps to generate 100 ideas in 10 minutes without discussing them for hours?

🎲 Show the participants 3 examples of how the ideas could look so that they understand what you want from them before they start writing.

🎲 Tell them: You are going to get a short amount of time to write down lots of ideas. Don’t worry about the quality, just the quantity. You just write ideas, do not judge them. As the next step after this session, we will curate some of the strongest ideas.

🎲 Instruction: Write only one idea per sticky note and please keep your handwriting clear (if you are doing this in person)

🎲 Generate ideas:
Ask everybody to produce at least 10 rapid-fire ideas in the 10 min timeframe.
Keep reminding people that they don't need to produce good ideas, just lots of ideas.
Encourage people who stopped writing to continue generating ideas until the time is up.

🎲Visualize Ideas:
Ask participants to stick all their ideas on the wall/surface. If you are using a virtual whiteboard then you can skip this step as the sticky notes are already there.
Don't categorize the ideas, just remove duplicates without discussion.

🎲 Vote:
Give every participant 10 dots.
Let them silently read and vote on the ideas they like the most.
Tell them that there are no voting rules. They can vote on their own ideas, they can put multiple dots on one idea, etc

🎲 Revisualize:
Take the top 10 ideas with votes on them off the board.
Place the ideas in the order of most votes next to the board.

Facilitator hints:

• The exercise above is called “10 for 10” - A simple, fast but powerful Note and Vote exercise that's all about producing and curating ideas.
  You can tweak it depending on how much time you have into “5 for 5” or “15 for 15”... you got the idea.

• You can split your group into smaller groups (3-4 persons) and each group generates ideas, then vote on the ones they love most and then bring together the top voted ones from the smaller groups onto a big wall and vote there with the whole group. In this way, you go one step after the other reducing the number of ideas by choosing the most relevant ones.

• In this exercise, the activities are done in silence. That means no talking. Express this as a set expectations part at the start of the session and share with your team that it could be uncomfortable for them to work without talking and generate ideas in a fixed time. Tell them you want to avoid hours of discussions and this is a quick way to arrive at the outcome.

A variation of this exercise is after splitting into small groups and first voting is happening to ask the small groups to generate new ideas after they get inspiration from each other from reading and voting on them. In this way, you guide them in building ideas on ideas together.

What if this does not fit or does not work with your team?

• It can be that your team is used to talking and gets really frustrated if they work in silence - if you tried silent work already and they are not getting the right outcome, then I would suggest trying another way - stay tuned for the next newsletters, I will share other ideation methods that might fit better for your team

One-phrase summary:

When you want to have a simple, very fast way of getting a lot of ideas from your team without discussions, this method works great. It is to be used for producing ideas and then deciding which ones are the ones you want to use further. This method uses silent work which means everyone will work together, but alone on the same topic.

Do you want to try other ideation methods as well or find other ones that fit better to your team? Then stay tuned for the next newsletter posts!