The 3 Pillars of Good Ideation—Fluency, Flexibility, and Originality

Ideation sessions can sometimes feel like a waste of time. Your ideas are just minor incremental improvements or copies of features that competitors have already implemented. You’ve invested a huge amount of time and effort gathering everyone together but you haven’t uncovered the features that will enable your product to stand out in the market.

Sound familiar?

The good news is that it doesn't have to be that way. With the right approach, ideation sessions can consistently generate new, and innovative, ideas. This is where the three pillars of good ideation come in.

Fluency: The Power of Quantity

The first step to any successful ideation session is fluency, or the ability to generate a high volume of ideas.

Why is fluency important? The initial ideas that come to mind are, by their definition, the most obvious. They are the ideas that everyone else is likely to think of as well. But by forcing people to generate a high volume of ideas, you increase the likelihood of uncovering unique perspectives and unexpected solutions.

Many psychologists studying creativity, such as Paul Torrence, J.P Guilford, Alex Osborn and more, end up with a similar finding that ideation typically follows three stages:

1. Obvious ideas (1-10 ideas): These are the low-hanging fruit, often the most conventional or widely accepted solutions.

2. Interesting ideas (11-20 ideas): As participants dig deeper, they begin to explore ideas with more nuance and creativity, building on existing concepts or combining them in new ways.

3. Innovative ideas (20+ ideas): This is where originality peaks. These solutions are surprising, impactful, and often redefine the problem entirely.

To encourage fluency, set a target of 20+ ideas per person, per problem. This will be difficult because it requires people to push beyond the obvious and come up with truly unique ideas.

But just pushing people to create more ideas, without giving them some pointers on how to think differently about a problem can result in minor variations on the same idea. This is where flexibility comes in.

Flexibility: Breaking Out of Rigid Thinking

While fluency focuses on quantity, flexibility emphasises variety. The easy way out of having to come up with lots of ideas is to keep doing little tweaks on the same theme. You want to encourage people to break free from this single train of thought.

For example, let’s say you’re brainstorming ways to improve public transportation. Without flexibility, all the ideas might center on infrastructure improvements, such as building new stations or installing new routes. With flexibility, you’d explore diverse solutions, such as mobile apps for better scheduling, incentives for carpooling, or partnerships with ride-sharing services.

There are a number of different tactics that people can use to encourage flexibility in ideation.

1. Change constraints: Ask “what if” questions to reframe the problem. For example, “What if resources were unlimited?” or “What if we could only use existing assets?”

2. Use analogies: Draw inspiration from other industries or systems. How does nature solve a similar challenge? How might another profession approach this problem?

3. Reverse assumptions: Identify key assumptions and challenge them. For instance, instead of assuming a product must be purchased, explore how it could be rented, shared, or given away.

4. Systematic perspective rotation: Look at the problem from other perspectives such as geographic, industry or temporal lenses. For example, how would emerging markets approach this challenge? How might this problem have been solved in the past? What can we learn from other industries?

5. Structured ideation techniques. Techniques like SCAMPER can help to push people beyond their initial ideas and into the interesting and innovative spaces.

6. Diverse audience. One easy way for teams to improve flexibility is to involve more people from different backgrounds such as researchers, designers, and engineers because they each bring different perspectives.

By introducing flexibility techniques in your ideation sessions, you increase the likelihood of uncovering original solutions.

Originality: The Spark of Innovation

The ultimate goal of ideation is to find ideas that solve the problem in a meaningful and impactful way. Originality, in this sense, is about moving beyond the obvious to uncover insights that lead to better solutions - not necessarily completely new ones.

Many teams mistakenly equate originality with wacky, novel or revolutionary ideas. Originality isn’t about being different for the sake of it; it’s about solving problems in ways that others haven’t yet explored. Small, thoughtful twists on existing concepts can often deliver the most practical and innovative outcomes.

To encourage originality in ideation, make sure that people maintain the focus on solving the customer problem:

• “Does this idea solve the problem better than existing solutions?”

• “What twist or addition could make this idea truly impactful?”

• “Are we solving the right problem?”

By framing originality as a deeper exploration of the problem rather than a quest for something entirely new, you can shift the focus toward ideas that are both creative and actionable.

Bringing It All Together

Fluency, flexibility, and originality are not isolated elements: they work in tandem to create a robust ideation process. A high volume of ideas (fluency) provides the raw material for exploration. The ability to shift perspectives (flexibility) ensures diversity of thought. And finally, the focus on solving the problem in new ways (originality) leads to solutions that stand out.

So the next time you start an ideation session, remember: Start with quantity, embrace variety, and focus on impactful solutions. The result might just be the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.