What to achieve in this phase

Stakeholders contribute to creating and exploring ideas and concepts.

Collaborate and come up with potential solution ideas for the agreed service problem or opportunity.

Work in this phase

1. Collaboration

Generating and exploring ideas should be a collaborative process involving customers, stakeholders and multidisciplinary team members.

Collaboration during this phase allows stakeholders and multidisciplinary team members to:

• contribute their knowledge and expertise to generating and exploring ideas
• contribute their knowledge and advice to help decide which ideas to progress and help ensure their perspectives are represented in this process
• understand why some ideas were progressed and why others weren’t.

2. Understand the scope for identifying ideas

Use the service problem/opportunity that was identified and defined in the understand phase as the framework and scope for identifying potential solution ideas. Frame the service problem/opportunity into meaningful questions and use these questions to generate ideas.

Understand phase

3. Generate solution ideas

Facilitate a collaborative approach to generating solution ideas. Include customers, stakeholders and multidisciplinary team members. Generate a broad range of ideas focused on the service problem/opportunity.

Aim for quantity and diversity of ideas.

4. Explore ideas

Explore and build on the ideas that have been generated. Aim to:

• group similar ideas together, to identify and explore patterns, consider ideas that seem unique, different, exciting or provide a different approach
• look at ideas from different perspectives (for example, customer, agency and cross-agency, technology, strategic direction) with stakeholders and multidisciplinary team members.

Aim to move quickly from exploring ideas into actively testing out ideas (develop phase). The purpose of testing out ideas is to learn, so there will be cross-over from the develop phase back into the create phase as the testing process results in old ideas being discarded and new ideas being created.

Develop phase

Create phase

Useful tools for this phase

Design thinking bootcamp bootleg — d.school at Stanford University

Understand the scope for identifying ideas

‘How might we’ questions — d.school at Stanford University

Generate solution ideas

The KJ-Technique: a group process for establishing priorities — Jared M Spool

Brainstorming

Explore ideas

The KJ-Technique: a group process for establishing priorities — Jared M Spool