You've been handed the reins for your next big team meeting. The brief? "Make it creative, engaging, and oh, by the way, we need some cracking ideas to hit our targets." Sound familiar?
If you're breaking out in a cold sweat at the thought of facilitating an innovation session, you're not alone. Most of us end up as accidental facilitators at some point in our careers, expected to conjure up brilliance without a formal facilitation qualification in sight.
The good news is with a bit of know-how and some practical techniques up your sleeve, you can run a session that will not only generate great ideas but also energise your team and get everyone pulling in the same direction.
Before You Start: Asking the Right Questions
All too often, I get asked for ideas for activities to include in running a team session. But that’s an impossible question to answer without some groundwork. Before you dive headfirst into planning your session, you need to get clear on some key points. Here are the questions I inevitably ask before I give someone any tips or advice on running the session itself. (You can ask these of yourself, or your boss, if they've handed you this task):
1. What are the specific outcomes you want or need from this session?
Do you want a list of potential activities? For the team to feel connected and have the chance to get to know each other? Or both? Knowing your end goal will shape everything else.
2. Is there an overall strategy in place?
Understanding the bigger picture is crucial. If there's a strategy in place your ideas will have a natural place to link to, so, make sure you're clear on it. If there’s a lack of clarity on overall strategy then you’ll need to create some parameters to work within.
3. How well does the team know each other?
The dynamic can be very different if you're working with a well-established team versus a mix of new and long-serving members. This will influence the type of icebreakers or team-building elements you might want to include.
4. What's the team's level of experience?
Have people participated in these kinds of sessions before? Have you got lots of experience, lots of inexperience or a mix of both? Understanding the skills and experiences in the room can help you design activities that play to people's strengths or challenge them to think differently. It can also help you consider who might naturally hold back and who might take a lot of airtime.
The Think/Feel/Do Framework: Setting Your Session Up for Success
The Think / Feel / Do framework is one I find incredibly useful when planning any session, whether it’s a workshop, a talk or a group ideas session. The concept is simple but powerful:
Think: What do you want participants to think, know or understand by the end of the session? This might include new information, insights, or perspectives.
Feel: How do you want people to feel during and after the session? What emotions or attitudes do you want to evoke? Energised, challenged, inspired?
Do: What actions do you want participants to take as a result of the session? Do you want them to do things differently to how they have been operating? Or to act on agreed follow-up tasks?
Let's say you're running a session to generate ideas for a new product launch. The targets are ambitious and you know people might not feel they’re achievable. You want to run a session to ensure there are some concrete plans to achieve the targets, but you also want people to feel committed and motivated to maximise the launch.
Your Think/Feel/Do might look something like this:
Think: Everyone should have a shared understanding of our target market's needs and how our new product addresses them. They should have clarity about their own role in achieving our target metrics.
Feel: By the end of the session - excited about the potential of the new product, confident in their ability to contribute to its success and committed to playing their part.
Do: Within the session - be honest and open about how they feel, and to generate at least three new additional ideas for the product launch. After the session - to prioritise the actions for this product launch.
By considering all three aspects, you're much more likely to create a session that not only achieves its objectives but also leaves participants feeling engaged and motivated to take action.
When you're clear on your Think/Feel/Do, you can then choose activities and techniques that will help you achieve each element. You have a way of filtering to see whether a proposed or suggested activity fits in and adds value or not.
Designing An Idea Generation Session: Practical Tips and Techniques
Once you've got clarity on the basics, it's time to design your session. Here are some options that might help depending on what you want people to think / feel / do.
1. Start with individual thinking
One of my favourite techniques as an alternative to brainstorming ideas aloud is to kick off with some silent, individual idea generation. Give everyone a stack of post-it notes and ask them to come up with ideas around specific prompts. This approach ensures that everyone has a chance to contribute, not just the loudest voices in the room. The prompts help access thinking by directing the brain to solutions it might not have considered otherwise.
Some prompts you could use:
- Something we've done before but don't currently do
- An idea you've seen a competitor use successfully
- Something no one in our industry does but is common elsewhere
- An idea that feels higher risk than we'd normally go for
- Something directly linked to one of our brand values
- What would [insert well-known business figure] do in our situation?
- An idea you think no one will agree to (this often unearths some gems!)
2. Create space for different perspectives
After the individual ideation, you can group similar ideas together on flip charts or a digital whiteboard. Then, encourage people to look at the ideas from different angles. You might assign roles to people, asking them to view the ideas as:
The Advocate: championing the idea's potential benefits
The Critic: identifying potential drawbacks or risks
The Customer: evaluating from the end-user's perspective
The Investor: assessing financial viability
The Implementer: considering practicalities of execution
The Visionary: thinking about long-term strategic implications
The Devil's Advocate: challenging the idea to stimulate discussion
The Connector: finding ways to combine or build upon ideas
The Analyst: examining through a data-driven lens
This approach helps to thoroughly evaluate ideas and often pushes people to take on perspectives they might not naturally have seen. I like to challenge people to take on a role that isn't their preferred style.
3. Mix it up
Vary your activities every 20-30 minutes to keep energy levels high. Simply switching between individual work, small group discussions, and full group sharing can help. You can also include changes in physical environment - for example, having people move in one group around a number of flip charts or to different meeting rooms for different activities or thinking prompts
4. End with clear next steps
When you’re planning a session, make sure you leave time at the end to capture / review / confirm ownership of actions. Who's taking what forward? When will you review progress? Without this, even the best ideas can fizzle out once everyone's back to their day jobs. Either that or it becomes another thing on your list to keep chasing people up.
One thing that can be surprisingly effective is getting people to commit to their own ‘forfeit’ if they come to the next session without having implemented their agreed actions. I once used this on myself in my own business - it’s amazing how focused I was on making sure I published my blogs on the agreed schedule when I knew the consequence for not doing it was having to sing karaoke in public!
5. Enjoy it
The goal isn't to have a perfect session – it's to create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing ideas and building on each other's thoughts. Have fun with facilitation and you’ll find it brings out so much more from your team.
People are more creative when they are in a session that’s not planned to within an inch of its life and where they can enjoy time with colleagues and away from the business as usual.
With these simple techniques in your toolkit, you're well on your way to facilitating a session that is both enjoyable and delivers real value.
Taking Your Facilitation Skills Further
Running effective innovation sessions is a crucial skill for leaders, but it's one that often gets overlooked in traditional leadership development.
If you're looking to build your confidence and expand your toolkit in this area, check out our Facilitation for Leaders workshop in the Catalyst Career Club. It's packed with practical techniques, real-world examples, and guidance on how to use facilitation in a wide range of situations as a leader
The Career Club is a low cost membership for leaders and managers earning £50k+ who want to take ownership of progressing their career