The Ebb and Flow of Ideation and Its Role on Brainstorming

In this week's episode, Ricardo shares a concept he saw in a Design Thinking course he did recently: The Ebb and Flow of Ideation.

Dev Patnaik introduces this straightforward and effective concept in the Product Development Best Practices Report. It is centered on the concept that better ideas are interspersed with absurd ones during ideation, and a wild idea is the fuel to generate new brilliant ones.

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Episode transcript

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Ricardo (4s):
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 5 minutes podcast. Today I like to talk to the app and flow of ideation and its role on brainstorming. And I learned these recently when I was doing the IBM design thinking course, and I saw that idea chart and the ideation chart, and I felt, Oh God, this is so good. So I want to share this with you today. This was developed by a guy called <inaudible> and he put this in such a nice way of understanding that it became, you know, like easy to understand why so many brainstorms failed. So let me start on, what do you want with a brainstorming or any ideation process you want to foster creativity.

Ricardo (50s):
You want to make people think out of the box. You want to make people think in an unconventional way. But the problem is that we were raised to think in a conventional way, we were not raised it to challenge or to think in absurd ideas. And these is our biggest problem. So what he said in his article about this ebb and flow is that imagine a chart. Okay. And then on the X axis it's time. And then on the Y axis on the top side, it's brilliant ideas. And on the bottom, it's awful absurd ideas. So what is this app and flow process? It's you go up, you go down, you go up, you go down, you go up, you go down, imagine like a roller coaster.

Ricardo (1m 39s):
So what is the main point here is that between brilliant ideas, you must have absorbed. What's the problems that we want only to have brilliant ideas. And we don't want to pay the price of having absurd ideas, but absurd ideas. It's what brings energy for you to bring brilliant ideas to life. And this is for me, the most brilliant concept of that. For example, the admin fluids is exactly like that. So there is no app if there is no flow. For example, when you are talking about the tides in the ocean and it's the same here. So he put in his article, this perfect example, he said, Oh, the first 10 ideas where we're okay, then the next 10 to 20 were okay, not so good ideas.

Ricardo (2m 30s):
Then after this 2030 ideas, we came with a really good ideas. And then after that terrible absurd ideas and then mastered that brilliant ideas, then extremely abstract ideas. And finally the outstanding ideas. So these up and down is what makes the brainstorming process so hard and so unique because we are not very comfortable of saying and putting ideas that could be perceived by our peers as absurd. And then we stay silent. Or we always tried to provide ideas in a box, you know, something that is inside a social, in a cultural context.

Ricardo (3m 15s):
And what happens is that you don't get additional creativity. So you need really to push the boundaries from one side to the other, to come up with really different ideas. For example, when we're talking about design thinking, I know that many people think, okay, sometimes you are building mock-ups that are just baseless. You know, they are not smart, but for you to have these brilliant ideas, sometimes you need just to produce some dumb stuff that will unleash for you. A piece of the potential for a great idea. And this was for me, imagine I'm an engineer. So for me, it's very hard to think extremely out of the box.

Ricardo (3m 57s):
So this was a great way to see how this flow will happen. So the energy of the absurd ideas is what becomes the fuel for the brilliant ideas. So think about that, think about this chart and think about this connection between extreme creativity and apps, with brilliant ideas, brilliant business opportunities, and brilliant approaches to solve the problem that you want to solve with your project. So think about that. And this is why design thinking is so interesting when you want to improve your innovation capability. Okay. I hope you enjoy this podcast. That's your next week with another five minutes podcast.

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