I really enjoyed the ideating step this week. After coming up with some promising “How Might We” statements, I felt like my group was ready to jump headfirst into this project. Going into our first how might we statement, I actually imagined how I would have approached this problem alone. Something I struggle with, in all of my schoolwork, is the “fear of the first step” (“Reclaim Your Creative Confidence”). Usually, about a week before a big project is due, I call my mom and complain about my work for the week, and almost always say the sentence “I just don’t know where to start here.” On Tuesday I had similar feelings about this project. Watching my group put one yellow sticky note out after the other, I was honestly intimidated — what if my ideas weren’t good enough? The “Reclaim” piece gave good advice when running into this pitfall — give yourself a crazy deadline or start a small piece of the problem first. By focusing on a small piece of our how might we statement, the lifestyle piece, ideas seemed to come more easily to me. I started thinking about other Lifestyle brands CVS could partner with or model themselves after, and once our brainstorming got started, I kept rolling with it! Even though I was a little slow to start on this first day, I felt like our group did a really great job both days feeding off each other’s energy and coming up with creative and, in some cases, ridiculous ideas. However, I felt like my group tended to become victim to the design pitfall of fear of the messy unknown, where we were looking to our “competitors” for innovation (“Reclaim”). We kept going back to “but how will this compare to Amazon’s entry in the pharma market” Unfortunately, I think this really bogged us down on our second day of ideating for our circular economy “How Might We” statement, as we kept coming up with ideas that would put us on the same level as our competitors, rather than transcend the competition.
As our group met another time out of class, I think we had a hard time with the One Conversation at a Time (“Stage 3”) rule of brainstorming. Because we were all excited about different ideas we had come up with over the last week, along with new ones we had brainstormed over the weekend, I feel like it’s possible we didn’t get a good chance to flesh out all our ideas as we kept changing topics. However, that being said, as we’ve settled on an idea to move forward with, I think everybody got a chance to say their piece and voice their opinion.
As we move forward to our prototyping stage, I think it is going to be important to remember that failure is an important tool (“Learning to Think Outside the Box”) – it’s intimidating to explore an idea and have it not work out, but as I feel like our group had a great group of options to choose from, it wouldn’t be the end of the world to have to back track a step or two and start over if an idea were to fail.