Why that ideation workshop won’t give you an idea..

7 min readMar 23, 2025

From showers to flowers, with a little bit of marinating and manure in between

OK Massive clickbait title, but all the bots are at it, I’m not that divisive and lets face it… it always depends on a million factors from context to people to the temperature of the room…

Course it will come up with ideas, or seed them, they just may not be very good ideas TBF, and thats OK because your not going to crack a wicked problem, or well, a not so wicked problem in an afternoon in Stoke with some post-its and sharpies….

Ideas need marinating, they need to sit n steep for a while, bump into other ideas and then when your least expecting it, BOOOM the magic happens.

Shower Power

Let’s talk about shower power for a minute…

Professors John Kounios and Zachary Irving both explore how creativity often thrives in moments when the mind is free to wander, but not completely idle. According to Kounios, environments like the shower are particularly effective for sparking insight because they offer a balance of mild stimulation, like the sensation of water or the rhythm of washing your hair, without overwhelming your brain. This gentle sensory input helps relax the prefrontal cortex, that lovely lil part of the brain responsible for focused thinking, creating just enough distraction to loosen mental rigidity and allow new connections to form.

Zachary refers to this state as “unguided or unconstrained attentional thinking” a kind of creative mind-wandering that isn’t tethered to a specific task but you are not sooooo bored that you run off and go scroll on insta for an hour to distract yourself.

Irving says that when we’re too bored, we tend to seek immediate stimulation, which mutes meandering thoughts that can lead to new ideas. It’s this sweet spot, engaged… but not too engaged, and relaxed enough to think laterally, in these moments ideas and creativity, or ‘slow hunches’ as Steven Jonson puts it, bubble up between the brain cracks and start forming new ideas.

Tip No 1…. Go get bored, but not too bored…

Tip 2 No groundwork… No chance (or a lowered chance …never say never)

Turning up to an ideation workshop without doing the groundwork is like trying to build a house on a swamp. If you haven’t done the research, mapped the landscape, explored the context, or talked to real users, you’re starting on unsolid ground, you may build a bungalow, but its pretty doomed to start falling to pieces and theres no solid foundation or insights thats been built on.

Good ideas are rarely born in isolation. they’re built on existing knowledge, shaped by insights, and sparked by tensions within a system or need. Tensions are not bad, we are surrounded by them in design and digital, its an interesting space if you hold with it and watch the vibrations.

So ideas are not born in isolation, its important to dig into what already exists, previous attempts, academic research, lived experiences, feedback, frustrations, data points, it goes on and on, theres usually so much info that exists and fresh research to reveal and add.

Without this context, your workshop might produce a pile of “wouldn’t it be ace if…” ideas that crumble under scrutiny and sink into the swamp of ill fated ideas.

I feel thats because ideas disconnected from real problems or user needs often sound clever but go nowhere. Research doesn’t kill creativity, it fuels it. Understanding what has come before allows you to build on the shoulders of others, instead of reinventing the wheel (badly). And it keeps you honest folks.

Kurt Lewin said, “No research without action, no action without research.” This isn’t just about academic integrity, it’s about effectiveness. If you’re not grounding your ideas in real, contextual understanding, your action is just noise. And if your research doesn’t lead to change, then what was the point?…

Tip 3. The workshop Is just one moment in time

Yep we are back to showers, I am not suggesting a team shower, do not worry. Ideation workshops are often pitched as the spark for innovation, I 100% used to fall into the one and done mindset, but the reality is, they’re just a moment. A useful, fun, lovely, exciting, nerve wracking sometimes weird moment, yes… but still just a moment.

Expecting a single workshop to produce THE ONE, breakthrough idea is like expecting a single gym session to make you fit. Great ideas rarely arrive fully formed during a two-hour slot on a Tuesday. Creativity isn’t linear or instant. It needs space. It needs rhythm. It needs structure and it needs slack.

To give teams the best chance of generating valuable, usable ideas, you need to think beyond the session. Mix methods and cadences, some synchronous, some asynchronous. Organise time between workshops to reflect, absorb, and iterate. Let people walk the dog, do the dishes, sleep on it. The idea might not come from the post-it notes and dot voting, it might come in the shower three days later.

Borrowing from the creative process, we know that insight follows a rhythm, let look at the three ‘I’s… Immersion, Incubation, Illumination…
Immersion… where we soak in the research, review the data, and start asking “what’s really going on here?”
Incubation… where we stop thinking directly about the problem and let our subconscious brain start making odd connections and noticing patterns.
Illumination… where the “AHAAA!” moment finally arrives… back to that completely unrelated edge of boredom moment.

But workshops are important, sitting waiting for an idea to land in your brain by some marvelous miracle is not the way as Steven Johnson says “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”

Workshops can be the place where immersion begins or where illumination starts to break through. They are important, you can gather diverse folks together and facilitate ideation session, it a good way to get the juices flowing, get ideas poured into the collective conscious pot and share different experiences, its a way of letting our brains run free in different ways, with different people, at different speeds with different stimuli… different! But back to the long game… don’t expect it all in one go. Expect seeds, not full-grown trees.

4. Good ideas need a brutal second act

Even if you do hit on something in the workshop that makes everyone sit up, smile and say “High fives folks… this could be it,” (only me that shouts HI FIVES… OK OK) don’t get too comfy just yet, pull that cosy knit from your eyes. That’s not the end, it’s the start of Act Two. And Act Two is brutaaaaaal.

Well its not that brutal TBH, it may feel it, but this should be part of the process, as Mike Monteiro says ‘If your work is so fragile that it can’t withstand criticism, it shouldn’t exist. The time to kick the tires on what you designed comes before those tires hit the road”

You have to test the idea, challenge it, tear it to pieces. Turn it upside down. Shake it and see what falls out. Do some consequence scanning, DotEveryones framing is great and Rachel Coldicutt notes that it helps orgs anticipate the social, environmental, and political impacts of the choices they make when they ship new products and features. Think what are the unintended outcomes if this idea actually works? Who benefits? Who loses out? What might we have missed?

Get other perspectives. Bring in people who weren’t in the room. Include the critical minds, the sceptics, the people who’ll ask “what could go wrong?” and “who says?” This is where you find the blind spots, the biases, the bits that need sanding down or scrapping altogether. Steven Johnson reminds us that good ideas often come from slow hunches, bumping into other slow hunches over time, so take the time!.

So, no, the workshop won’t give you THE IDEA. But it might give you part of it. A clue, a kernel, a provocation. It will give you that seed that needs marinating in manure till it flowers, sometimes the strongest ideas are the ones that crack through the concrete on worn down walk ways (I will leave that there getting carried away)

ANYWAYYYY what matters is what happens next…..
What matters is that you’re building from truth, not vibes (even tho I love vibes vibes vibes). And that you’ve given the idea a chance to grow, change, and prove itself, before you (Or the stakeholders) fall in love with it.

And if the idea proves good enough, well the next round of hard work starts because as Robin Sharma says ‘Ideation without execution is delusion’ …