Better Odds: Prompt Ideation
Ask better questions to get better answers
Last time I broke ideation down into five contributing factors – idea quality, ideation rate, target idea quality, time spent, and number of ideas required. Ideation being a probabilistic process, each of these factors influences the odds of success – that is, the odds of coming up with enough good enough ideas.
Today I want to talk about what any business can learn from creative agencies in having better quality ideas – which improves the odds of good and great ideas.
As a side note, consider that this probabilistic nature of ideation does mean there is no magic formula for guaranteeing a great idea. Another thing I like to do in training agencies is ask for examples of great ideas. The room lists various brilliant ad campaigns. Then I ask who came up with them – they list various agencies. Then I ask, is every idea from those agencies a great idea?
And… no, they’re not. The agencies who produce great ideas also produce good ideas and middling ideas. If they had found some magic formula for producing great ideas on demand, every idea they have would be great. (Ignore for a moment any agency complaints about clients never letting them do cool shit.)
But agencies who produce great ideas tend to produce better ideas overall, more good than middling, even if they’re not all great. There are exceptions, where an agency knocks something out of the park when the rest of their work is pretty average, but that’s to be expected – in a world of probability, some spins get lucky.
Anyway, let’s look at something any business can learn from creative agencies when it comes to having ideas.
Unsurprisingly, one way to improve success rates of good-enough ideas by a deadline is to improve the average quality of the ideas being generated. While there’s often room for improvement, most creative agencies have evolved methods to do just that. And anyone in any industry who needs to come up with good ideas can learn from those methods.
I say “most” and “creative” agencies, because I still encounter smaller and non-creative agencies using this method:
Get briefed by client (or boss).
Get everyone in a room together.
Try to come up with ideas.
Remember, ideation is stochastic. So sometimes this method does work – given a challenge, one or more of the ideas produced by the room (or an individual) may be good enough. The odds are just relatively low. With higher standards for what’s good enough or more ideas required, the odds are even lower again.
Creative agencies and many consultancies (McKinsey, for example) have better methods for prompting ideation than this, and they basically come down to two things: guardrails and asking better questions.
Guardrails ensure that no time is wasted in coming up with wrong ideas. When I say “wrong idea”, I mean any idea or plan that either cannot achieve its intended objective or breaches constraints of some sort. For example, an idea or plan is wrong if…
It achieves some other objectives without achieving the actual objective.
It requires more budget than is available.
It requires more time than is available.
It breaks some relevant regulations, brand guidelines or company values.
It conflicts with the broader strategy of the organisation.
These may seem obvious, but if those constraints are not identified, captured and taken into consideration when generating ideas – or at the very least when shortlisting them – a lot of time can be wasted. And every wrong idea brings down the average quality of ideas.
(There is some value to consciously disregarding constraints in ideation. I’ll cover that in a different post.)
While guardrails provide no-go areas, asking better questions offers direction and inspiration to ideation. Compared to the original objective (“How will we achieve this outcome?”), better questions tend to have two qualities: being pointier and/or more interesting.
Better questions are pointier when they’ve focused attention to a more specific area than the whole scope of the original objective. They’re generally the result of breaking down the situation and identifying factors within that situation which are particularly influential, influenceable, or both. (Note that I did this with ideation itself in the previous post.)
For example, imagine you’ve been tasked with this objective: how might we improve the customer experience of our restaurant? You could jump straight to coming up with ideas to do this – improve the food, change the decor, incentivise staff to go above and beyond, etc.
But a customer survey reveals that wait times are the biggest complaint about the restaurant experience. So you narrow down to that. Your new pointier question is, “How might we reduce wait times in the restaurant?”
That’s obviously a very simple example, but because the pointier question is focusing attention on the factor with the biggest impact on customer satisfaction, the ideas you have will – on average – be more effective than a range of ideas that include ones addressing less relevant factors.
A more interesting question is one that inspires more creativity by being basically more fun to answer, or by looking at the problem in a way that might otherwise be overlooked, while still meeting the objective. It’s often the result of reframing the situation or introducing an interesting piece of information. (Either of these could be called kinds of insights.)
For example, with our restaurant situation, we narrowed down to focusing on wait times. But what if, instead of trying to eliminate wait times, we challenged ourselves: how might we make waiting the best part of the restaurant experience? We’ve reframed the situation by – at least temporarily – questioning our assumption that waiting must be a bad thing. (Questioning assumptions is a great way to reframe situations.)
This counterintuitive provocation is an interesting challenge. We start thinking… well, what if waiting could be fun? What might that look like? Could the tables themselves be entertaining? Could we do something to make pre-dining conversation more interesting and fun? Are there particular customers who would love to spend more time before food arrives? Do customers have to sit at the table while waiting or could they do something else?
In large enough creative agencies, the task of developing pointier and/or more interesting questions is typically the work of a strategist or planner. The output of their work is a creative brief, which differs from the original client brief by adding this kind of thinking to the process (and often removing extraneous elements). They tend to focus their research a lot on understanding their audiences, because that’s where interesting new pieces of information can be found to prompt more interesting questions.
Because so many agency projects are communication tasks, their ideation prompt is often a particular kind of prompt called a single-minded proposition, which is basically a pointier and/or more interesting thought to convey than the original communications objective. (Also, for reasons I’ll cover another time, creative agencies should aim for more interesting questions over merely pointier, where possible.)
But even if the role of “strategist” doesn’t exist in an organisation, the task of asking better questions itself cannot be skipped if you want to focus ideation for a more effective generation of better ideas.
It doesn’t need to take too much time. Even a few hours spent on pointier questions1 before you get a team in a room to come up with ideas will yield big improvements.
If you’re interested in reading more about ideating with better questions, a good book on the topic is Brainsteering by ex-McKinseyites Coyne and Coyne. Chapter 3 of the incredible Hey Whipple, Squeeze This is also a good read in prompting creative comms ideas.
I say a few hours on pointier questions, not on more interesting questions, because coming up with insights for more interesting questions is a bit less predictable. Because… you guessed it, it’s also stochastic. But we’ll worry about that another time.