Ideating

• If you have more than eight participants, divide the group into small teams of four to five people at separate tables. Make sure no table is left with three or fewer participants. Provide each person with markers, scratch paper, and sticky notes. If facilitating virtually, have groups in separate video breakout rooms or on separate calls.
• Give each person a blank Round Robin worksheet and share a prompt for ideation with the whole group. This prompt might be the initial problem definition from the Framing module, or an Insight or problem redefinition from the Sense Making module. Each person should write this prompt in the top box of their Round Robin worksheet as a guideline.
• Depending on everyone’s level of familiarity with the context of the problem you are trying to solve, consider giving a five to 10 minute overview before you ask people to start ideating. This baseline knowledge will ensure that everyone is able to contribute effective and relevant ideas.

• Set a timer for three minutes while each person individually and silently generates one initial idea around the prompt. Participants should make sure their idea can be easily understood by others by adding sketches and written captions.
• To build upon ideas or initiatives that have already been proposed, use this time to ask the team members who had the idea to summarize each idea or initiative in the first idea box of the worksheet.

• Each person will pass their sheet to their neighbor, or gather each team’s worksheets and redistribute them to another table. Every person should receive a new worksheet for each round.
• Allow one minute for each person to read the original idea.
• Set the timer for two minutes for each person to critique the original idea in front of them by capturing the ways in which it could fail in the second box. Ask them to think about different potential social, economic, political, technical, or cultural challenges that the idea may encounter, and capture all that come to mind with sketches and notes. Participants should write legibly and clearly.

• Each sheet is passed again to a new person. You can either follow the same approach you followed in the third step or try a new one, as long as nobody ends up with an idea they have proposed or critiqued.
• Allow two minutes for each person to read both the original idea and the critique.
• Set the timer for three minutes so each person can improve on the original idea by addressing as many of the challenges captured in the previous round as possible in the third box. You can also ask people to focus on one or two identified challenges that could pose the most risk for that idea.
• Participants should feel free again to sketch and add annotations during this step.

• Set the timer for 10 minutes. Each person may hold on to the sheet with the idea that they refined in the fourth step, and share briefly with the other people at their table the original idea, the key challenges, and how they addressed those challenges.
• If the goal is to select some ideas to move forward, you can ask each small group to vote for their favorite idea and have them share that with the larger group.

• This activity can be done individually, in pairs or trios, or in teams of up to six people. Diversity of thinking is key, so ideally you should have three to four individuals or small groups working simultaneously, each with a different worksheet.
• Place a copy of the Alternative Worlds worksheet on a surface or virtual space that is easily accessible to each individual or small team. Give each person a marker and sticky notes.
• Using the Alternative Worlds poster worksheet, articulate as a group the problem you are trying to solve. This should either be a Problem Statement you identified during Framing, or an Insight from Sense Making that you want to use as your basis for ideation. If people are unfamiliar with previous work, consider giving a five to 10-minute overview of the problem.
• For example, imagine that you have identified that your school name and mascot are causing many people in the community to feel discriminated against or offended. In the first step you might write “Our school needs an identity that everyone in the community can feel proud of and rejects outdated racial stereotypes and slurs.”

Once you have written down the problem statement, ask each person or small team to identify two or three key words or terms related to that statement and write them on the poster.

• Following our example, some keywords might be “rejecting racial stereotypes and slurs,” “creating school pride,” or “inclusivity toward everyone in the community.”

• In the next space on the worksheet, ask each participant or small team to spend three to five minutes capturing examples of any person, company, or organization who has solved a problem around the same keywords. Make this step as expansive as possible: encourage participants to think about real life people and organizations—preferably outside of the public school system—as well as fictional characters or stories that could serve as inspiration.
• For example, if a key phrase is “screen fatigue” in the context of remote learning, you can look at real life examples of immersive digital experiences in the gaming and fitness industries as well as movies or TV shows about technology.
• Encourage participants to come up with at least one example for each keyword to capture on the worksheet. The more examples they come up with, the more productive the exercise will be moving forward.
• Following our original example, you might list professional sport teams, famous musicians and bands, or major brands and consumer goods that have taken different approaches to renaming themselves or adopting a new mascot in order to be more inclusive.

• Use the remaining space on the bottom of the worksheet to generate ideas of how your group can solve the identified problem, taking inspiration from the examples you identified in the previous step.
• Which specific elements of the inspirational examples can you borrow in your solutions?
• How might you adapt these comparable examples to better suit the problem at hand?
• Feel free to record this discussion using a physical or digital whiteboard, individual sticky notes, or piece of paper. Encourage participants to come up with as many ideas as possible, and for each person to contribute at least one idea for each keyword.
• Ask participants to express each idea with three components: a name, a sketch and a brief description. Remind participants that ideas should speak for themselves, so single words or incomplete sentences will make it hard for others to understand their idea. 
• Following our example, you may take inspiration from another organization that has worked to create more inclusivity and diversity in their company by involving their stakeholders and depict a community competition to rename your school and mascot.