Activities for Ideation and Problem Solving
From problem to proposal — one the group will actually implement
Most groups arrive at an ideation workshop with the problem poorly defined and leave with too many ideas and no clear next step. The result: no one knows what to do on Monday. This collection organizes the complete process: understand the problem deeply before searching for solutions, generate ideas with structure, converge without the loudest voice winning, and close with a plan that has an owner and a deadline.
Who is this collection for?
- Corporate Trainers facilitating innovation workshops
- Design Sprint facilitators and creative process leaders
- Team leaders with a concrete problem to solve collaboratively
- Consultants supporting improvement or transformation processes
Deep Problem Understanding
The most common mistake in ideation workshops is jumping to solutions before understanding the problem. When a group starts generating ideas without exploring what's actually causing the situation — or without looking at the problem from the perspective of those who live it — they end up solving the symptom instead of the cause, or designing solutions nobody will use. This phase invests time in understanding before creating.
Root Cause Analysis
Root Cause Analysis uses the fishbone diagram to identify the main causes of a problem and promote effective solutions.
The Iceberg Model
The Iceberg Model is a mindful methodology that analyzes both visible and hidden aspects of products and services to foster sustainable and strategic design.
Empathy Map
The Empathy Map helps to better understand people's emotions, thoughts, and behaviors to design more human-centered and effective solutions.
The Nine Questions Technique
The Nine Questions Technique is a participatory methodology that provides a comprehensive structure for designing, planning, or evaluating projects. It promotes collective reflection and collaborative work by addressing all essential aspects of a project in an integrated way.
Customer Journey Mapping
Visualize a person's complete experience with your service step by step, uncovering emotions, pain points, and improvement opportunities at every touchpoint.
Inquiry Workshop
Discover how the Inquiry Workshop fosters critical thinking and collective exploration by generating key questions that guide research, project design, and problem analysis.
Problem Framing and Reframing
How a problem is framed determines what kinds of solutions appear. A problem framed too narrowly produces incremental solutions; one framed too broadly produces nothing actionable. This phase works on the question before searching for the answer: it turns the problem into an invitation to create, and explores different angles to make sure the group is solving the right thing.
How Might We (HMW)
How Might We is a Design Sprint methodology that transforms pain points into positive, collaborative questions, guiding the team toward creative solutions.
Six Thinking Hats
Edward de Bono's parallel thinking method: 6 structured perspectives — facts, emotions, caution, optimism, creativity, and process — for more complete group decisions with less conflict and cognitive bias.
Force field analysis
Force field analysis is a participatory analysis tool developed by Kurt Lewin that helps a group identify the forces driving a desired change and those restraining it, in order to design strategies that strengthen the former and weaken the latter.
Solution tree
Solution tree is a collaborative activity to analyze problems, identify root causes, and develop actionable solutions. Ideal for fostering teamwork, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving.
Anticipating Challenges
Anticipating Challenges is a participatory activity in which teams imagine that their project has failed and analyze the possible reasons behind this scenario.
Fishbowl discussion
Fishbowl is a participatory dynamic where a small group dialogues in the center while others observe, promoting active listening, multiple perspectives and deep reflection on complex topics.
Divergent Idea Generation
The divergent phase has one rule: quantity before quality. Judgment kills creativity; wild ideas generate good ones. The activities in this phase are designed to get the group producing the highest possible volume of ideas in the shortest time — moving past obvious thinking and activating unexpected connections. Selection comes later. Here, the goal is to fill the board.
Crazy 8
Crazy 8 is a fast-paced brainstorming activity designed to spark creativity and generate innovative solutions by sketching eight ideas in eight minutes. Perfect for teams aiming to think outside the box!
Brainstorming
Brainstorming fosters collective creativity and collaboration by generating multiple proposals to address a specific challenge.
Think – Pair – Share: Individual Reflection, Pair Dialogue, Group Sharing
A 3-step dynamic that activates everyone's participation: think alone, talk in pairs, share with the group. Guarantees equitable engagement in education, training, and facilitation at any scale.
Idea boxes
Idea boxes is a participatory activity designed to foster creativity and collaboration by collecting, sharing, and discussing ideas in a group setting.
Collaborative mind map
The Collaborative mind map is a visual tool that allows groups to explore, organize, and connect ideas on a topic in a creative and participatory way.
5-Minute Ideas
Ideas in 5 Minutes is a rapid presentation activity that facilitates idea generation, knowledge sharing, and agile collaboration to address specific challenges.
Exploration and Enrichment
Before converging, it's worth taking ideas to a richer level: mixing them, combining them, exposing them to other perspectives, and borrowing inspiration from different contexts. This phase doesn't generate ideas from scratch — it works with what's already on the table to deepen it, cross-pollinate it, and find combinations nobody had seen yet. It's where individual ideas become collective proposals.
World Café
A structured conversational process where small groups rotate between tables and layer ideas collectively. Surfaces shared intelligence and consensus in groups of 20 to 100+ people.
Innovation Workshop
The Innovation Workshop fosters creativity and collaboration to generate novel solutions to specific challenges in a dynamic and participatory environment.
Bizarre Bazaar
A creative game to spark imagination: in Bazaar Bizarro, the most ordinary objects become extraordinary products through improvisation, humor, and persuasion. Perfect for energizing groups and boosting self-expression.
Investment Roulette
Investment Roulette is an activity that assigns proposals to random categories, fostering creativity, strategic analysis, and collective decision-making.
Open space
Open space (Open Space Technology) is a group self-organization methodology in which participants themselves create the agenda, choose the sessions, and define the topics of work, radically liberating collective intelligence without a pre-established program.
Convergence and Selection
After divergence, the group has too many ideas to move forward with all of them. Convergence is the process of going from many possibilities to a few solid proposals. It needs to be done with method: first cluster what's similar, then evaluate with explicit criteria, and choose using mechanisms that distribute decision-making power among all participants — not among those who talk the most.
Affinity diagram
The Affinity Diagram is a visual and participatory tool that organizes ideas into categories to facilitate group analysis and informed decision-making.
Dot Voting
Dot Voting is a participatory technique that combines analysis and prioritization to identify the most relevant proposals within a collective process, promoting collaboration and group consensus.
Impact and feasibility scale
The Impact and feasibility scale is a participatory tool for evaluating proposals based on their potential benefit and ease of implementation, promoting strategic and consensus-driven decisions.
Impact vs. Effort Matrix
The Impact vs. Effort Matrix helps prioritize actions and decisions by evaluating them based on their impact and required effort, promoting efficiency and effectiveness.
Heat Map Voting
Heat Map Voting is a visual and collaborative technique for prioritizing key aspects within a set of ideas by distributing multiple votes across specific elements.
Nominal Group Technique (NGT)
Participatory technique combining silent idea generation and anonymous voting to produce ranked priority lists free from hierarchical influence and social pressure.
Development and Prototyping
A selected idea is not yet a proposal. Rapid prototyping is the process of making the idea tangible — a sketch, a storyboard, a paper mockup, a role play — so the group can see it, discuss it, and improve it before committing resources. A rough prototype that can be improved is infinitely more useful than a brilliant concept nobody can touch.
Design Thinking Workshop
Innovation methodology in 5 phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. Learn to facilitate Design Thinking workshops centered on people's real needs.
Prototype gallery
The Prototype gallery is a participatory activity that allows teams to present initial models of their ideas, receive feedback, and collaboratively refine their proposals.
Benefit Map
The Benefit Map is a visual tool that connects projects with the positive impacts they generate, helping to prioritize actions and maximize results in participatory contexts.
Participatory Service Blueprint
A co-design tool that maps a service's full anatomy — visible interactions and backstage processes — built together by the people who use and deliver it.
Model Building
Model Building is an activity that allows participants to represent ideas or solutions using simple materials, fostering creativity and hands-on learning.
Validation and Risk Management
Before committing to a proposal, it's worth trying to break it. Prospective risk analysis is not pessimism — it's the process by which the group identifies what could go wrong while they can still do something about it. A proposal that survives pre-mortem scrutiny is a more robust proposal with stronger team buy-in.
Feature prioritization
Feature prioritization is a participatory exercise designed to identify and organize the key elements of a project or design, ensuring a focus on the most relevant and viable aspects.
Force field analysis
Force field analysis is a participatory analysis tool developed by Kurt Lewin that helps a group identify the forces driving a desired change and those restraining it, in order to design strategies that strengthen the former and weaken the latter.
Action Plan and Commitments
The workshop ends when someone knows clearly what they're doing, by when, and how we'll know it happened. Without this phase, the best ideas in the world go to sleep in a photo of the whiteboard. Action activities turn the selected proposal into concrete steps, assign ownership, and create the follow-through mechanisms that transform the session into real movement.
Now, Next, Later
Now, Next, Later organizes tasks based on their temporal priority to promote clarity, focus, and efficiency in planning.
Backward Planning
La Planificación retroactiva ayuda a identificar los pasos necesarios para lograr un objetivo trabajando desde el resultado final hacia el presente, promoviendo la estrategia y la claridad grupal.
Learning Contract
A co-designed agreement between learner and facilitator that defines goals, strategies, resources, and evidence of achievement. Builds metacognitive awareness, intrinsic motivation, and accountability.
Keys to an ideation workshop that produces real results
1. A poorly defined problem is enemy number one
Most ideation workshops fail before they begin: the group arrives with a problem framed as a symptom ("we need more sales", "communication is bad") instead of a cause. Spending 20 minutes reframing the problem with a well-built How Might We is worth more than an hour of brainstorming on the wrong problem.
2. Separating divergence from convergence isn't a trick — it's the difference
When a group generates ideas and evaluates them at the same time, critical thinking kills ideas before they're born. The rule is simple: during divergence, everything is allowed and nothing gets discarded. Evaluation has its own moment, with explicit criteria. Mixing the two modes is the recipe for ending up with the safest, most boring ideas.
3. Volume of ideas matters
The first idea anyone generates is rarely their best — it's their most obvious. Good ideas appear after the obvious ones have been exhausted. That's why rapid ideation techniques (Crazy 8, Speed Storming) force the group to go beyond the first thought. The goal isn't to have ten ideas; it's to have fifty so you can choose the three best.
4. Convergence needs criteria, not popularity contests
Without explicit criteria, groups choose ideas presented by whoever has the most authority or the most eloquence. The best convergence methods — impact/feasibility scale, NGT, heat map — work because they make each person's judgment visible separately before the group discusses. That protects good ideas from timid groups and bad ideas from compliant ones.
5. Without an owner and a date, it's not a plan
At the end of any ideation workshop, someone needs to leave with their name on something concrete. "We're going to explore this" is a statement of intent; "Maria presents the prototype next Thursday" is a commitment. The workshop close must produce verifiable commitments, not diffuse enthusiasm.