> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://process.mad.co/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://process.mad.co/project-work/design/ideation-and-brainstorming.md).
# Ideation and Brainstorming
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Ideation and Brainstorming
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Ideation is the process of coming up with ideas. The best way we have found to consistently produce great ideas within short time frames is to go through the following process.
Essentially, this starts out by creating a framework for idea creation, then creating a lot of ideas, and then sorting them out into follow-through actions. This ideation process will normally take around 2 hours or so.
* Ask yourself “Why”. Having a clear vision of success is key.
* Why are we doing the project?
* Why are we looking for certain results?
* Why do we need new or good ideas? What isn’t working right now?
* Create categories first, to give yourself a framework to start adding ideas. Don’t worry, you can add more categories later as you go along.
* Add ideas to categories. Spend around 1 hour on this.
* A good practice here is to use a whiteboard and create columns for each category and then write down ideas in the columns.
* Sort through your ideas via a matrix.
* You can use any of the below for the axis, or create your own criteria depending on the project.
* Easy ← → Difficult
* Low Impact ← → Big Impact
* Fast ← → Slow
* For each quadrant you create, assign a name. For instance:
* If something is both easy and big Impact, you can name the quadrant “Why haven’t we already done this?”
* If something is easy and low impact, you can name it “Friday afternoon collab session work”
* Write each idea on a sticky note and then attach to the matrix and sort. Essentially..and quite literally…card sorting!
* Create a new Asana Board project and create columns for each Matrix Heading and add each idea as a task on Asana, and then add any clarifying comments to each task.
Example Output from Ideation Session on the Mad Website:
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