The YForest Creative Process
Part 2: Ideation
As we move from Part 1: Inspiration to Part 2: Ideation, each individual will organize their inspiration. The good and bad ideas are important to capture.
Seth Godin stated:
"If you want to complain that you don’t have any good ideas, please show me all your bad ideas first. Befriending your bad ideas is a useful way forward. They’re not your enemy. They are essential steps on the path to better."
Read more about ideas from Seth here: Here’s why you need to have more bad ideas | (ted.com)
Step 1: A Mindmap is a an effective way to organize your ideas. It can add some clarity to the abundance of ideas while still remaining in the Divergent stage.
Step 2) Separate into groups based on creativity levels. It is easier to add to the inspirational ideas before narrowing down the best ideas within groupings of similar creativity types.
Here are the possible creative groupings, it will vary based on the number of people involved in the creative process. These creative groupings range from Divergent Creative to Convergent Creative based on first and second core value rankings: These contribution types help organize everyone into groups.
Creative
Intuitive
Community
Independent
Cognitive
Practical
Step 3) After dividing into groups the next step is for each person to present their ideas and get add-on ideas from the group.
Step 4) Narrow down the ideas and select the top ideas from each group. Then the top ideas will rotate and top ideas will be selected by a new group. This process will continue until the most popular ideas become obvious. Everyone will vote on every idea through a survey or by placing green, yellow, and red stickers next to each idea. The criteria for implementation of these ideas is based on ease of implementation and level of creativity. Difficult to implement ideas that are not creative would be the least desirable and easy to implement ideas that are extremely creative would be the most desirable.
During this Ideation Process we have gone from individual ideas presented to choosing the best ideas to implement. Part 3 of the YForest Creative Process will be Implementation.