KJ Ideation

By creating an open and collaborative method for collective brainstorming, the tool helps challenge owners to bring in different perspectives and knowledge of the issue in order to push past the symptoms and get to the root of the problem. This is done not only through collaboration but is also accompanied by ethnographic research and observation during the inspiration and discovery phase. The process thereby facilitates collective decision-making and will formation, while addressing specific challenges (whether external to the organization or internal). 

The method helps challenge owners to engage diverse actors in the brainstorming and idea generation phases systematically and democratically. The output of the method is a broader awareness of the challenge space, a more fine-tuned and nuanced understanding of the specific challenge, and a series of solutions or ideas on how to address certain aspects of the problem. By engaging different actors in the process, not only is the collective knowledge of the problem enhanced, decision-making is done in a participatory manner facilitating implementation and ownership. 

The method can be useful for participatory brainstorming and decision-making. 

The activity is best done in a small group composed of main representatives of the different stakeholders and value creation areas. It can also be done by a small group or project leader who consults with different actor groups through interviews and ethnographic observation. The activity has the potential to create new relationships and connections (of mental models) between actors while working.  

1. Set up a team of participants and a room to work in. 
2. Introduce the challenge and the challenge question. 
3. Insight Generation: Ask each participant to share knowledge on the problem from: lived experience, observation and field notes, interviews, best practices, etc.  (PESTEL tool) 
4. While one participant is sharing, other team members should take notes on interesting elements. Only one insight should be written per post-it. The post-its should be placed on a common board. 
5. Clustering: Study the post-its looking for similarities and patterns to create clusters. This process should be led by “feelings” and intuition. Some ideas may not be part of any distinct cluster and be “lone wolves”. They should not be discarded as they might fit into larger family of clusters to for a team of teams. Once the clusters are complete, the team should give a title to each one to help make sense of the data and give order to the research. When appropriate, clusters should be grouped into families to create a higher order team of teams.  
6. Sense-making: The family of clusters should be visually arranged in a way that gives order to the data and that tells its story: indicating patterns, trends, cause and effect relationships, order of occurrence, interdepencies, connections or contradictions. The visualization should be explained, verbally and possibly in a written form, in an effective and simple manner that presents the emerging insights in a logical and precise way, reducing complexity to give form to potentially new interpretations of the problem space.  
7. Voting: Participants should vote on the concepts or ideas that are the most feasible and effective (Impact and Feasibility Matrix Tool) and move these forward to the next phase of development.

The final results should be presented to all engaged actors for feedback and refinement of results and analysis.  

The brainstorming method can be applied to the generation of concepts or ideas.