Rather than thinking of your challenge
as trying to address an issue in the current environment, imagine that you are
starting anew and can design an ideal system that does not have any of the
current problems. Then step back from this and extract concepts and design
principles that you can begin to test in the current environment that would
approximate the ideal as closely as possible.
Exercise
The aim is to explore a
relatively constraint-free environment in order to generate several novel,
practical ideas.
Tips
The key to this tool lies in taking
existing constraints, physical plant, job roles, staffing levels, etc., off the
table. Emphasize repeatedly that this is a new build and we can do whatever we
need to do to get it right. There are very few givens. Promise that you will
return to deal with current reality in the second half of the tool.
All methods of creative idea
generation involve some combination of mental attention, escape and movement.
Idealized design provides escape from current reality to a clean slate, asks for
mental movement to design an ideal state, calls for attention to the new ideas
and concepts that emerge in that process, then asks for mental movement to
adapt those concepts back to the current state.