---
name: ideation
description: Use when asked to generate ideas or run a brainstorming session — divergent thinking, mind mapping, SCAMPER, and other idea-generation techniques — as the generative phase that precedes evaluation/selection, distinct from decision-making tools like decision-tree used afterward.
---

# Ideation

Ideation is a creative process for generating ideas, concepts, or
solutions to a problem, through free-flowing brainstorming and
exploration without immediate judgment or evaluation — the goal is
fostering diverse thinking so genuinely novel ideas have room to emerge.

## Divergent thinking, on purpose

Ideation deliberately emphasizes **quantity over quality** at this stage:
generating a large number of ideas without immediately assessing
feasibility or practicality, because premature judgment suppresses the
wide range of perspectives and unconventional options a later evaluation
phase actually needs to choose from.

## Techniques

- **Brainstorming** — open, group idea generation.
- **Mind mapping** — visual, branching idea exploration (see
  [[mind-map]] for this technique in depth).
- **Role play** — generating ideas from another stakeholder's or
  persona's perspective.
- **Random word/image association** — using an unrelated prompt to break
  a stuck line of thinking (see [[oblique-strategies]] for a
  related deliberate-randomness technique).
- **Provocation** — deliberately proposing an extreme or impossible
  option to shake loose more realistic adjacent ideas.
- **SCAMPER** — a structured prompt checklist: Substitute, Combine,
  Adapt, Modify (or Magnify), Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse (or
  Rearrange) — applied to an existing idea/product to generate variations
  systematically rather than from a blank page.

## What comes after ideation

Ideation is followed by evaluation and refinement — ideas get analyzed,
selected, and developed into actionable concepts. During ideation itself,
judgment should be deliberately suspended; that discipline is what
distinguishes ideation from the evaluation phase that follows it, and
conflating the two collapses the divergent-thinking benefit ideation is
meant to provide.

## Common pitfalls

- **Evaluating ideas as they're generated** — kills the divergent-thinking
  benefit; even a well-intentioned "but would that actually work?" during
  ideation suppresses the next idea that might have been better.
- **Treating ideation as a one-technique activity** — different
  techniques (mind mapping, SCAMPER, random association) surface
  different kinds of ideas; relying on only brainstorming misses what the
  others would have found.
- **Skipping the transition to evaluation** — a pile of generated ideas
  that's never triaged and selected from produces no actual outcome; see
  [[decision-tree]] for one structured way to evaluate options
  afterward.

## Learn more

- [[mind-map]] for the visual branching technique in depth.
- [[oblique-strategies]] for a complementary lateral-thinking prompt technique.
- [[decision-tree]] for structured evaluation once ideation has produced options to choose among.