During the ideation phase of the create step, I recognized that creativity as well as building off others’ previous ideas was the most valuable takeaway from this phase. I would like to reflect on this week’s work in terms of highs and lows during the process.
HIGHS
Again, I was extremely proud of our group for adhering to a strict individual brainstorm before working together and talking in depth about our ideas. We are all different creative individuals who had some extremely similar and different ideas of solutions for our two HMW statements. I was surprised that during the wild ideas portion of the brainstorm, we actually were able to take some of our crazy ideas and turn them into feasible ideas. For instance, one group member suggested that we have a hippie commune that goes around making and selling Olay productS, which we were able to transition into the great idea of having a quasi-OlaY pop-up/food truck store concept. Comparing our group’s experience to the “4 rules of Brainstorming” shared in class, I think we followed every single one, but I was especially proud of the quantity of ideas we generated. I think part of that was because we all had different visions, and we were able to hear each other’s ideas and build upon them easily. It was extremely validating that we all reacted slightly when each idea was posted with either a “nice” or “cool,” even though we did not say anything else until the organizing portion. I think this encouragement and environment we created where group members did not feel judged fostered the greatest generation of ideas possible. I am extremely grateful to have been assigned such a passionate, supportive group, especially being the youngest in the group and with no previous business class experience.
LOWS
In terms of the challenges myself and the group faced, I definitely struggled contributing truly wild, far-fetched ideas because I am such a practical, realistic person. I tried to embrace the experience for what it was, but I recognized that I was really only a contributor to the first part of brainstorming and editing ideas to become more feasible. We definitely struggled with the organizing part of the process because we could not come up with two dimensions that we felt would best address our HMW statement to find the strongest solutions. Also because we took a lot of time discussing how we would organize, we had little time to organize then vote. I left class on Tuesday feeling slightly frustrated, but the rest of the group felt that way too. Luckily, we planned to re-do the organization and dimensions the next time we met. We did this, and we felt a lot more satisfied with our voting. It was difficult to get excited to do the whole process over again on Thursday with a new HMW statement because we already felt super jazzed about our solution idea. However, I am grateful for Ange’s encouragement to choose another HMW statement and start again because we actually came up with even more new solution ideas. Once, we were able to accept that we liked our initial idea, but we wanted to challenge ourselves to come up with even more ideas we definitely were able to rise to the occasion. It was tricky not to be influenced during the voting process by ideas that I knew other group members liked, but I worked on trying to only vote for what I thought was best. This skill of sticking to my own beliefs is something I definitely can work on because I easily get persuaded by other people, especially in group settings where multiple people could agree about something and one person may disagree.