All too often, creative sessions fall flat right from the start because the participants are offered a stale and overly complex challenge to work through, which does little to stimulate bold ideas.

How much does this brief fire your imagination?

“We need ideas for a returnable format which will engage female audiences over 60 and introduce the concept of prioritising self-development as they consider retirement. The ideas should be informative and educational whilst remaining entertaining and accessible to viewers outside the target audience.”

It’s cluttered and overly formal and feels tricky to solve. Here are some tips on how to soften and liven up this brief.

Keep it simple

Express challenges as SIMPLY as possible. Think; “How would my mum express this?” “How would a ten year old express this?” Thinking simply takes jargon and management speak out of a challenge and thus gives you a far clearer idea of what’s expected of you when it comes to generating ideas. There’s nothing more certain to take the energy out of a room than a challenge full of clichés and vague generalisations.

The magic of ‘How Might We?”

Whatever your brief, beginning the challenge with ‘how might we?’ is a great open and inviting way to draw your participants into a session. It’s subtly less intimidating than ‘how can we?’ or ‘how will we?’ It offers the idea of multiple solutions and invites people to be a little more playful.

Create lots of different options before settling for ‘the one’

It’s worth generating several options for expressing your challenge rather than settling for the first that comes into your head. Look at your brief from different perspectives (it’s always worth looking at it from the audience’s perspective as they’re the people you’re trying to appeal to) and try expressing it in different ways.

With this in mind let’s look at our retirement challenge again.

How might we make retirement feel like the best years of our audience’s lives?

How might we offer an irresistible pick and mix of retirement opportunities for our audience?

How might we inspire our mums to break all their habits and try something new?

How might we create content that makes retired women fist pump?

Once you’ve got a great list of challenges, converge and select one to generate ideas around. If you have time and teams are enjoying themselves offer a second challenge to see if that takes people in a slightly different direction.

	Created by Alex Dalton about 8 years ago

How to begin an idea generation session in the most positive and stimulating way