Yesterday was the second day of UNHCR’s first-ever Innovation Workshop!
What did we do?
The day started out with each team, in their separate groups, learning a variety of different brainstorming skills. A couple of different pieces of advice were given to the groups:
1) Force yourself to think about the problem from a different angle than you normally do.
2) Use random words, photos, or songs to trigger thoughts that you wouldn’t otherwise have. For example, take a photo, and say the first three words that come to your mind. Use those words to give you associations with ideas that you can use to address your challenge.
3) Put on different “hats” to brainstorm in different ways. Use the “emotional” hat to only think of ideas that are fundamentally emotional or focus on emotions. Use the “data” hat to think about things in a very systematic way. Each of the hats will give you a different grouping of ideas.
4) Think of analogous situations to the challenge that you’re trying to address. Do you have a problem with crowds? Think of other situations where crowd control is necessary – concerts, riots, flash mobs, etc.
5) Privately brainstorm on Post-Its in your group and then put them all on the wall and discuss them. This will allow people to write ideas that they might consider too “silly” to say to the whole team.
6) Never say “but,” always say “yes and”.
Finally, the teams learned prioritization of ideas — based on dot scoring or different types of voting, they took the (sometimes hundreds) of ideas that they had and narrowed it down to a short list of potential solutions to their challenges.
Next step? Prototyping! Look out for news on that tomorrow! Check out the UNHCR Innovation Facebook page for photos throughout the week.
Talking to Challenge Master Ben about a Bangkok-focused challenge.
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