Idea generation is a core part of the design thinking process. When asking your team for more insight and innovation, you’ll need to provide design thinking prompts and questions to start the collaborative process. If you’re struggling to hold meaningful brainstorming sessions, you might need to get creative.

These seven exercises can get design thinking teams innovating, communicating and developing.

Empathy Mapping

Empathy mapping is a visual brainstorming tool. Grab a big sheet of paper, and segment it into four quadrants. Each square comes with a label: think, say, do, or feel. Place a circle at the confluence of those boxes to represent your customer.

Now, open up the field for discussion. Ask your team to shout out terms or circumstances that have a place in each box.

You may notice inconsistencies between quadrants, says Sarah Gibbons, chief designer at user experience group, Nielsen Norman. "This is when empathy maps become treasure maps that can uncover nuggets of understanding," she says.

Think of a team designing a new type of cell phone. A potential customer may say that mobile devices are intrusive. But that same person might use their phone 15 hours per day. Digging into that conflict could help you design a product that's perfect for this person.
The exercise is helpful for all design teams, but particularly useful for groups with access to a great deal of potential customer data. The more you know about your market, the more you can fill in those boxes with authority.

"Gather reports from user interviews, diary studies, or qualitative surveys, and ask each team member who will participate in empathy mapping to read through the research individually prior to the session," says Nick Babich, automation lead at RingCentral and editor-in-chief at UX Planet. 

Six Thinking Hats

To use this parallel thinking process developed by Edward de Bono, you'll assign six roles. You can identify each person with a hat, or you could use slips of paper to set them apart. Assign:

• A black hat. This person is critical and conservative.

• A blue hat. This person is your project manager.

• A green hat. This person generates new, fresh ideas.

• A red hat. This person leans on emotion and intuition.

• A white hat. This person is the fact-checker and reporter.

• A yellow hat. This person is positive and a natural cheerleader.

Then let the brainstorming begin. Every idea is examined by each hat-wearer. The group focuses on one viewpoint at a time, determining if it has validity or moves the project forward.

"The real key here is that rather than circular or deadlock debates, you focus the group on a particular viewpoint at a time," says J.D. Meier, author of “Getting Results the Agile Way” and director of digital business transformation at Microsoft.

The yellow hat is the most powerful role in this exercise, according to Scott Jeffrey, leadership coach and founder of CEOsage.com. The person in this role must see the good in every idea. By being forced to look for the positive, hidden gems within ideas that seem silly at first glance might well be uncovered. As Jeffrey writes: “We are far more accustomed to shooting down ideas than seeking the positive attributes to them.”

Study Your Customers

Your customers are at the core of any design thinking process. For example, Professor Steven Eppinger, codirector of the System Design and Management Program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, explains how design thinking keeps the customer in mind. "We center the design process on human beings by understanding their needs at the beginning, and then include them throughout the development and testing process," she says.

But if you make a miscalculation about who they are and what they want, the resulting product might not even come close to meeting customers' needs.  

Customer surveys can fill the knowledge gap, but customer brainstorming sessions could also help. Ask your team to think about who your potential customers are and what they want. Try to walk a mile in the shoes of your customer, and think about all the ways your potential product will get used (or ignored).

"Ask people to keep thinking and building on session ideas. Provide the summary output to everyone and encourage them to build on the ideas or develop new threads. Provide a way for input to be added and shared with others," says executive coach Art Petty.

Your one field trip could turn into dozens of ideas that merit closer examination via more creative exercise sessions.

Examine the 5 Whys

The word "why" often appears in brainstorming sessions. By using this statement-question technique, you'll get to the heart of a tangled customer issue. 

This process works best with a facilitator, says design and innovation consultant Rafiq Elmansy. "The facilitator role is to ensure that the process moves from one step to another with an in-depth analysis of the findings at each stage." The role is critical because you'll be asking many questions during the process. The facilitator will ensure that the right questions are asked, and that notes follow each answer.

To use the 5 Whys, think of a crucial design issue the team grapples with. Phrase it in declarative form, and follow it with the question “why.”

Returning to the cell phone design example, your conversation could begin with this statement and question: “Customers feel they spend too much time on their cell phones. Why?” After five rounds of answering and asking, your final response should pertain to the root cause of the issue.

At the end of a successful 5 Whys session, you should have several potential solutions to your issue, says Amit Kothari, CEO of workflow software provider TallyFy. If your team changes just one answer, the last sentence shifts.

In our example, your team could program phones to a default silent mode and ship them that way. But if your team determines that the reason the phones are constantly notifying customers is because those customers have too many connections, you have a different issue to examine.

Classic Brainstorm with a Twist

We all know how to brainstorm. Teams head into one room, and they toss out ideas for debate. Your team could use this method, or you could make a few subtle shifts to make those discussions more meaningful.

Rikke Dam and Teo Siang at the Interactive Design Foundation suggest placing creativity at the helm of your brainstorming team. "If the process begins to slow down and people seem to be running into a dead-end, the facilitator should impose constraints," they write. For example, the facilitator could ask the team to think about the product with a core feature removed or from a different user perspective. That shift could get the conversation moving again.

Keep a close eye on the clock, recommends Neil Wadhwa, marketing associate at HarperCollins. "Brainstorming for an hour and walking away with only 2 or 3 ideas may be a sign that too much time is being spent on dissecting, debating, and over-analyzing ideas during the brainstorming process," he says.

Keep things snappy by encouraging later analysis. Your goal is to write down as many ideas as you can, rather than vetting all of them.

The next step is to condense that list of ideas. "Take the big list, come up with a simple criteria for evaluating the ideas, and go through them. Get the number down to 3 or 5 or 10, and bring this list back to the next brainstorming discussion to use as the starting point," explains Scott Berkun, author of “The Myths of Innovation.”

Journey Mapping

How do your customers move through their interactions with your company? What will they do at each and every step? Write this data down, and you have a map of your customer's journey.

The steps are important, says customer service consultant Adam Toporek, author of “Be Your Customer's Hero.” Some, however, are more significant to customers, he adds. “I like to view these touchpoints as pressure points—those moments of truth that truly impact the customer experience." If you're selling ice cream, for example, the moment when the dessert touches a customer's tongue is arguably more important than how easy it is to open the carton.

Your team should spend more time talking about those important moments than about the lesser points. And know that you may need to make more than one map.

In fact, Gibbons recommends creating one map per customer type to keep the narrative tidy. Different age groups or economic brackets may take different steps, and their competing data can clutter your insights.

Think of your completed maps like customer personas that focus on questions and tasks, says user experience designer and consultant Paul Boag. The data you glean can help you develop a good product and even to deliver it to your customers in a way that gives them the best experience.

SCAMPER

This acronym stands for: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put To Other Uses, Eliminate, Reverse. With this approach, you apply one of these elements to every core feature in your proposed product. For example, with the first element (substitute), you think about replacing a part, person, rule, color or material with something else.

"I've found that when I use SCAMPER, I always seem to come up with ideas that are much better than the one I started with," says Phil McKinney, creator and host of the podcast Killer Innovations. By examining your product from so many angles, you could come up with something entirely new. Or you could shave off costly features that just don't matter to your potential customers.

This technique works best when your team has a clear starting point, writes Chuck Frey, director of content marketing at Cultivate Communications. You should be able to summarize your product or problem in just a few words.

Make the Most of Your Creativity

Working through the design thinking process is time consuming, and it's not unusual for teams to feel a little weary in the aftermath. Rohini Venkatraman, business designer at Ideo calls this the "brainstorm hangover." It's common among design teams.

By documenting and prioritizing ideas and then committing to how you’ll proceed, your team will not think of brainstorming as an exercise in futility, when ideas are generated only to never be heard about again. In fact, moving forward with the ideas and crafting strategy based on the best palpably demonstrates the usefulness of your team’s hard work and makes them anticipate the next brainstorming session.