The final step in the process covered in the workshop focussed on generating ideas for potential solutions to the challenges and problems that each group worked on.  Creativity is central to this phase and it’s critical to ensure that the groups are seen as a safe space where multiple ideas can be shared and no idea is seen as a bad one.

In this development stage you’re encouraged to bring together the understanding and insight from diagnosis and discovery steps to help start creating ideas that will answer the needs of users and address your challenge.  Initially some of the ideas you generate might be a lower quality, you want go for quantity over quality to create a full and wide spread of innovative and ‘outside the box’ ideas. You can  then quickly iterate your ideas and move from quantity to quality. At the end of the process you should aim to have a well thought out idea that you can then present to the rest of the workshop.  If we had more time and were able to carry on for a further day or several further session the next stage would be to begin to prototype and test with stakeholders in delivery.  Following prototyping there’d be some further reflection and some of the steps in he design thinking process might be re-visited.

There are various tools that can be used to help support idea generation and you explore some of these in the links that we’ve given to additional resources.  In the workshop we used the Policy Lab’s Idea Development template.

If we’d had more time we could also have used the Policy Lab’s Change Cards. These are designed to encourage thinking outside the box and can help bring in new perspectives, unblock tacit barriers, generate new insightsand help you work in an agile and iterative way.

Next – Additional Resources

Image credit – Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash