Creative Innovation Exercises

🧠 “How We Brainstorm And Choose UX Ideas” (+ Miro template) (https://lnkd.in/eN32hH2x), a practical guide by Booking.com on how to run a rapid UX ideation session with silent brainstorming and “How Might We” (HMW) statements — by clustering data points into themes, reframing each theme and then prioritizing impactful ideas. Shared by Evan Karageorgos, Tori Holmes, Alexandre Benitah. 👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾 Booking.com UX Ideation Template (Miro) https://lnkd.in/eipdgPuC (password: bookingcom) 🚫 Ideas shouldn’t come from assumptions but UX research. ✅ Study past research and conduct a new study if needed. ✅ Cluster data in user needs, business goals, competitive insights. ✅ Best ideas emerge at the intersections of these 3 pillars. ✅ Cluster all data points into themes, prioritize with colors. ✅ Reframe each theme as a “How Might We” (HMW) statement. ✅ Start with the problems (or insights) you’ve uncovered. ✅ Focus on the desired outcomes, rather than symptoms. ✅ Collect and group ideas by relevance for every theme. ✅ Prioritize and visualize ideas with visuals and storytelling. Many brainstorming sessions are an avalanche of unstructured ideas, based on hunches and assumptions. Just like in design work we need constraints to be intentional in our decisions, we need at least some structure to mold realistic and viable ideas. I absolutely love the idea of frame the perspective through the lens of ideation clusters: user needs, business problems and insights. Reframing emerging themes as “How-Might-We”-statements is a neat way to help teams focus on a specific problem at hand and a desired outcome. A simple but very helpful approach — without too much rigidity but just enough structure to generate, prioritize and eventually visualize effective ideas with the entire team. Invite non-designers in the sessions as well, and I wouldn’t be surprised how much value a 2h session might deliver. Useful resources: The Rules of Productive Brainstorming, by Slava Shestopalov https://lnkd.in/eyYZjAz3 On “How Might We” Questions, by Maria Rosala, NN/g https://lnkd.in/ejDnmsRr Ideation for Everyday Design Challenges, by Aurora Harley, NN/g https://lnkd.in/emGtnMyy Brainstorming Exercises for Introverts, by Allison Press https://lnkd.in/eta6YsFJ How To Run Successful Product Design Workshops, by Gustavs Cirulis, Cindy Chang https://lnkd.in/eMtX-xwD Useful Miro Templates For UX Designers, by yours truly https://lnkd.in/eQVxM_Nq #ux #design

This teacher helped her students see their future selves. There is great power in that. Research shows we tend to see our future selves as strangers rather than as who we'll become. But something profound happens, when you connect with your Future Self. When MIT researchers created an AI simulation - 'Future You' - letting people talk to their future selves, they noticed significant psychological shifts: ✅ People began to make bolder decisions today. ✅ They stopped questioning their worth. ✅ They built careers based on purpose, not just praise. According to Dr. Hal Hershfield's research, when we connect with our future selves, we make choices that honor our long-term vision - not just immediate demands. When we don't? ➡️ We sacrifice opportunities for comfort. ➡️ We say yes to everything except our own growth. ➡️ We delay the choices that would align with our deeper purpose. Here are 5 ways to begin connecting with your Future Self: 1/ Create Your Future Leadership Vision ↳ Stop asking: "What should I do next?" ↳ Start asking: "Who am I becoming as a leader?" ↳ Envision not just titles, but the impact you wish to make 2/ Write Letters From Your Future Self ↳ What boundaries would she tell you to set now? ↳ What skills would she want you to prioritize? ↳ What relationships would she tell you to nurture? 3/ Make Decisions Through Your Future Lens ↳ Stop making choices from urgency. ↳ Start filtering through your future wisdom. ↳ Before any major decision, ask: "What would my wisest future self advise?" 4/ Practice Future Self Meditation ↳ Set aside 5 minutes daily to connect with your future self. ↳ Breathe into the leader you're becoming. ↳ Feel the continuity between who you are and who you'll be. 5/ Create a "Future Leader" Board ↳ Collect images, quotes, and stories that represent your future self. ↳ Review it before high-stakes meetings. ↳ Let it guide your present choices when self-doubt appears. When you begin anchoring your identity in your Future Self: You stop waiting to be chosen. You start making conscious choices. You stop dimming your vision. You start embodying it today. This is what conscious leadership makes possible: Clear decisions that honor both your present capacity and future vision. Which of these practices would be most powerful for where you are in your leadership journey right now? I'd love to hear in the comments. 📚 Explore this concept more in my book - The Conscious Choice ♻ Repost if this resonated. 🔔 Follow Bhavna Toor for more insights on leading with purpose

Innovation strives under constraints. Whether its cost, access to data, or access to compute, constraints have always fueled some of the most disruptive innovations. The AI stack is no exception—it’s ripe for disruption, starting at the chip level with NVIDIA challengers (like Groq, Etched and others) to alternative foundational models like Liquid AI.ai or... DeepSeek AI. This Chinese-built open-source AI model is 95% cheaper than U.S.-based competitors, presumably built for under $6 million, and performs almost on par with models from giants like OpenAI, Google, and Meta. It’s also more energy-efficient—lowering not just costs but also the environmental impact of #AI. This is a powerful signal: AI innovation is no longer the exclusive domain of big players. Smaller, nimble companies now have the tools and blueprints to build competitive models. Startups will disrupt industries with purpose-built models and novel vertical and applied AI. The pace of innovation will continue to accelerate. And its exactly why I am SO excited to be backing early-stage human centric AI startups. The lesson? You’ve got to keep innovating. In tech, standing still is not an option. And as we’ve seen time and again, constraints aren’t obstacles—they’re opportunities. The entire AI stack is up for grabs. The question is: who will seize it?

Stop guessing your growth path. Map it instead with the Lean Canvas model. Last year a client was losing cash after a bad investment. Their Board wanted a clear plan, but management's ideas were scattered. Pressure rose as their cash runway shrank. I used a blank Lean Canvas and met with management. Box by box, we turned fuzzy thoughts into clear statements. In a few hours, the team could see the whole business on one page. A week later, decisions sped up, waste was cut, and revenue began increasing. The Board praised the new focus because just one sheet had replaced weeks of endless slides. 1. Start with the Problem box because pain fuels purchase: ⇀ List the top three headaches your market hates. ⇀ Ask customers for blunt complaints. ⇀ Rank pains by urgency and frequency.  ⇀ If the pain is weak, the plan is weak. 2. Name the Customer Segments who wake up with that pain: ⇀ Avoid lumping everyone together - be precise. ⇀ Describe one real person, not a demographic blur. ⇀ Note where they already search for help. ⇀ Specific faces drive focused solutions. 3. Your Unique Value Proposition attracts attention: ⇀ Write it like a headline your customer would repeat. ⇀ Highlight the biggest outcome, not features. ⇀ Short, clear value wins the click. ⇀ Keep it under ten words. 4. Now sketch your Solution: ⇀ Draft three bare-bones features solving each top pain. ⇀ Mockup screens or sketches quickly. ⇀ Show them to five prospects tomorrow. ⇀ Speed beats perfection in early design. 5. Channels tell you how messages travel to wallets: ⇀ Pick the two cheapest tests before buying ads. ⇀ Leverage existing communities and email lists. ⇀ Measure response time and cost per lead. ⇀ Cheap learning outruns expensive guessing. 6. Revenue Streams prove the idea can feed itself: ⇀ State exactly who pays, how much, and how often. ⇀ Compare price to the pain’s current cost. ⇀ Pilot a single pricing tier first. ⇀ Real cash beats hypothetical guesses. 7. Analyse Cost Structure for sustainability: ⇀ List the three largest costs and make them variable. ⇀ Negotiate monthly, not annual, contracts. ⇀ Lean costs preserve runway for learning. ⇀ Automate before hiring. 8. Key Metrics keep founders honest on progress: ⇀ Choose one north-star metric and two support numbers. ⇀ Link each metric to habit or revenue. ⇀ Track weekly in one simple dashboard. ⇀ What gets graphed gets fixed faster. 9. Finally, name your Unfair Advantage: ⇀ This is the asset rivals can’t match. ⇀ Lean on unique data, patents, or proven community. ⇀ Document founder expertise that speed cannot buy. ⇀ Without moats, margins leak. 10. Don't forget to summarise your high-level concept and identify early adopters too. Review our lean canvas model weekly to stay on track with your strategy. What's your favourite strategic model? ------- ♻️ Repost to help others in your network. Follow Jonathan Maharaj FCPA for more insights on accounting, finance and leadership.

An impossible bottle. How do you put a ship inside glass when the opening is too narrow? You don’t fight the constraint. You design around it. That’s the video you just watched. And it’s also the story of fintech. We don’t get to work in open seas. We build within glass walls. Regulation, compliance, interoperability, trust. The genius isn’t in ignoring the constraint. It’s in making something beautiful inside it. Think Aadhaar, UPI, Account Aggregator. Public infrastructure that looked “impossible” at first glance. Yet became global benchmarks because builders embraced constraint as the design principle. But here’s the hard part: Constraints spark innovation only if the ecosystem rewards long-term bets. Too often we’ve optimized for fast scaling over resilience. For optics over infrastructure. Policy moves slowly. Markets move fast. And fintech sits in the middle — expected to innovate at the speed of startups, while complying at the pace of regulators. That tension is our impossible bottle. The question for product leaders and policymakers is not “how do we escape the glass?” It’s: how do we make the most of the space we have? How do we build models that balance safety, inclusion, and growth? Because every impossible bottle proves one thing: Great design emerges when limits become part of the craft. And that’s the real story of fintech. If constraint is the bottle, innovation is the ship inside it. The takeaway is clear: We need to stop treating regulation as a blocker. And start treating it as a design partner. What do you think-are we bold enough to innovate within the glass, or will the next breakthrough come only when someone breaks it?

I've found empathy mapping most valuable during early project phases and presentations. Nothing convinces leadership to greenlight a project like showing them you truly understand your target audience's pain points. But, they're not for every situation. For straightforward projects with well-understood users, a quick check-in might be sufficient. The key is using empathy maps as tools for insight, not checkbox exercises. I've seen firsthand how they break down communication barriers between departments. The beauty of empathy mapping lies in its simplicity. The classic version has four quadrants – Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels — though I've found adding "Sees" and "Hears" can provide even more context for certain projects. What matters isn't the exact format but the conversations it sparks. Here's what works in my experience: - Start with a clear purpose. Are you trying to align your team around user needs? Inform a specific design decision? The goal shapes everything that follows. - Ground your map in reality. The most valuable maps come from actual user data – interviews, surveys, support tickets – not assumptions. I've watched teams realize how much they'd been projecting their own preferences onto users when confronted with real feedback. - Make it collaborative. Bring together people from different departments to fill out the map. The magic happens when your developer suddenly realizes why that feature the marketing team kept pushing for actually matters to users. - Keep it alive. The best empathy maps evolve as you learn more. I keep ours visible and revisit them regularly, especially when we're making crucial decisions.

I generated 25+ campaign ideas for my client without using AI. Here’s my 6-step creative ideation process: ➡️ Step 1: Understand the End Goal Before anything else, you should understand the overarching marketing and business objectives. Ask yourself the following: Who do I want to reach? Why? What impact do I want to have? What would success look like? ➡️Step 2: Discovery & Research To think strategically down the line, use this step to gather info: 📊 Internal content audit → Examine what’s been done so far and look in depth at what has and hasn’t worked (and why) 🔍 Competitor analysis → Dive into your competitors campaigns, their effectiveness, and how people are reacting to them ➡️ Step 3: Empathise Get to the root of your target audience’s needs so that you can address their pain points. This means you can show how your product/ service solves a problem they’re facing. (Ex - A personal branding agency recognising that their ideal client struggles with lead gen. They use social proof to demonstrate how they’ve successfully created content that positions their current clients as industry leaders). ➡️ Step 4: Inspire Creativity Through Brainstorming Creative thinking is all about experimentation, imagination and curiosity. Let your mind run free here and allow yourself to spontaneously brainstorm. Quantity > quality is best at this stage. Some examples of brainstorming techniques: 💭 Create a mindmap, drawing branches from each idea 💭 Reframe and reword your target audience’s problem, looking at it from different angles 💭 Think outside the box i.e. ask ‘how would a child solve this problem?’ 💭 Test the waters of constraints and aim to brainstorm 10 rough ideas in 10 mins ➡️ Step 5: Relax & Unwind Giving yourself breathing space after so much thinking. It can stimulate subconscious ideas. ⛅️ Walking 💭 Meditating 🚿 Taking a shower 🎶 Listening to music It’s often in these moments that we connect unexpected dots and ‘lightbulb moments’ are triggered. ➡️Step 6: Unlock Your Creativity It’s solution time! Having completed steps 1-5, you’re now ready to generate innovative ideas to test. Evaluate and select the ideas you think will have the greatest impact. At this step, you want to whittle the best ideas down so it’s quality > quantity Quick idea generation checklist ✔️ 1. Understand what you want to achieve and why 2. Research internal content & your competition 3. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal target audience 4. Get inspired through brainstorming techniques 5. Schedule downtime and give your mind a rest 6. Generate, evaluate and select ideas P.s. don’t just take my word for it that all of this planning & prep is worth it. Take Einstein’s advice: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” What helps your creativity when it comes to ideation? 💡

Transforming How We Think About Collaboration: The 'Collaborative Innovation' Approach 🪄 🎯 𝗕𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝘂𝗱𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀 Instead of seeking lowest-common-denominator agreement, start with a powerful vision that attracts committed changemakers. 👥 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Rather than "open door" meetings, carefully select participants to ensure the whole system is in the room — from grassroots to grasstops. 🔄 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹-𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗖𝗼-𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Move away from "develop-then-present" to working together in real-time, leveraging collective intelligence. ⚡️ 𝗘𝗺𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 Stop pushing for false harmony and start using differences as catalysts for innovation. ✨ 𝗘𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗼𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 & 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 Build the strategy through action rather than endless planning sessions. What's powerful about this approach is how it transforms resistance and diversity into sources of innovation. It's not about getting everyone to agree — it's about weaving different perspectives into transformative interventions. Insights from Russ Gaskin, CoCreative and Ashoka's Leading Multi-stakeholder Collaborations course💡 🤔 How do you navigate the tension between inclusion and focused action in your collaborative work? #SystemicChange #Collaboration #Innovation #Leadership #CollectiveImpact

10 minutes into training 40 Fortune 500 execs… I realized I was losing the room. They were nodding politely. But the energy was flat like my TV In a blink, I checked out like they were thinking: ‘We’ve heard this before’ So I stopped mid-sentence. 3 2 1…took a breath, and asked: “How many of you leave tough conversations feeling like you said everything except what you actually wanted to say?” 32 hands went up. Silence That’s when I knew: This wasn’t a “teach” moment. It was a pivot moment. So I scrapped the slide deck And showed them something real: The 4R Framework A tool to turn conversation anxiety into clear, confident communication: 1. RECOGNIZE: Notice the signals Tight chest→racing thoughts→dry mouth Your body’s talking. What is it trying to tell you? 2. REFRAME: Shift the story From: This is happening to me To: This is happening for me How is this conversation helping me grow? 3. RESPOND: Choose your words with intention That’s not fair→ Can we look at this another way? You’re wrong→ Can I share a different perspective? What response would I be proud of tomorrow? 4. REFLECT: Extract the learning Not: That went terribly But: What did that teach me? How can I show up better next time? The shift was immediate. By the end of the session: ✅ 3 people had mapped out tough conversations they’d been avoiding ✅ 2 managers committed to changing how they deliver feedback ✅ 1 leader finally decided to have “the talk” with an underperforming team member That’s the power of clarity under pressure. 📍(Sometimes the first step into corporate feels bigger than graduation itself. I’ve been working on something that will make that step lighter for you. Stay tuned!) P.S. Which “R” gave you the biggest breakthrough? #CorporateTraining #Leadership #CommunicationSkills #EmotionalIntelligence #ManagementTips #LinkedInLearning #ExecutiveCoaching

Stuck in a rut? Does coming up with a good idea feel like picking something to watch on Netflix? (every choice is mediocre, you end up arguing/scrolling for 2 hours) I have a few ‘good ideas’ to help. Here are 4 brainstorming techniques for UX problems. 💡 🧠 The HMW Reframing Method Start with a challenge—users aren't completing sign-up. Now, reframe it as a How Might We question—how might we make sign-up irresistibly easy? This simple switch kickstarts solution-oriented thinking.  Pro tip: Generate multiple HMWs for each problem to explore different angles. 🧠 The Intersection matrix Create a grid with user needs on one axis and random objects or concepts on the other. For example, "Quick checkout" meets "Rollercoaster." How could the thrill and speed of a rollercoaster inform your checkout process? It's weird, agreed. But you never know, you might end up with unexpected brilliance. 🧠 Reverse brainstorming Flip the script. Instead of asking "How do we improve user engagement?", ask "How could we completely destroy and annihilate user engagement?" List all the terrible ideas, then reverse them. It's a fun way to identify pain points and generate solutions you might have overlooked. 🧠 The 5 Whys You know this classic. Basically, become a toddler. Start with a problem statement and ask "Why?" five times. Each answer becomes the basis for the next "Why?" This helps you dig deeper and uncover root causes. For example: - Users aren't using the new feature. Why? - They don't know it exists. Why? - We haven't promoted it effectively. Why? - Our notification system is broken. Why? - It wasn't properly tested before launch. Why? - We rushed the development process. Boom. Now you know where to focus your problem-solving efforts. It also helps to begin ideation with the ‘hair on fire’ problem. Here’s how. https://bit.ly/4dHyjWl Let’s do opposites. What’s a brainstorming exercise you hate, and why do you think it doesn’t work? Looking to find some interesting answers in the comments! 🥸