"I've been given the topic of ideation, but I have a confession to make up front…"

"Ideation is a word that I absolutely loathe. In fact, that's me with my axe and sabre ready to chop the shit out of it. Why do I hate is so much? Because it sounds like a word invented by management consultants to make something sound more expensive. Because it makes it sound as if the idea creation process is the reserve of a few 'special' people. But worse, because the term is the result of a corporate mentality polluting creativity and good ideas. And big corporates are often responsible for the worst parts of the internet."

"You know the kind of digital landfill I mean - the dark wastelands of the internet full of single visit websites, and branded apps that only serve to stroke some marketeers ego rather than deliver value to customers."

"Made by Many was set up to be something very different. I'm one of four guys who founded a company on our credit cards six years ago. Just to prove that we definitely were a start-up, I was going through an old blog the other day and found this quote from our first day, just after returning from the Apple store…"

"We were set up to be the antithesis of big corporate and digital landfill. We believe in lean principles, agile, solving problems faster through making, and in not being constrained by the rigid hierarchies and silos of big corporates that so often hold ideas back. Having said that, we've become very successful at helping big companies to behave like small companies."

"We've achieved this by taking a very different approach to creating ideas. Here's an example of one of our techniques that we often use at the very start of a project. We gather a diverse range of people in one room, around a table with a large stack of drawing pads on it.

I mentioned at the beginning that I don't believe that ideation is the reserve of 'special' people – in fact this technique only works if you have a wide range of skills in the room - designers, technologists, strategists and often the client.

Once you've drawn an idea, you hold it up and explain it to the room. How well you draw doesn't matter, just the quality of the thinking. The object of the session is to generate as many ideas as possible."

"Why? So we can get those ideas in the hands of real users as quickly as possible. The best ideas are prototyped and tested. A prototype can be as simple as a sketch, or a set of slides made in Keynote. The important point is to learn fast."

"This is a fairly typical progression of ideas on a Made by Many project. There's a big explosion of ideas at the beginning, and then these are rapidly refined down as we prototype and learn what works with real users.

However, it's important to say that volume doesn't equate to success. Often the right idea might be buried inside lots of others. And the 'right' idea is often made up of fragments of other ideas joined together.

This approach requires a drastically different approach to idea generation."

"This is a timeline that I'm sure you're very familiar with. It shows the typical progression of a project, and unfortunately it's a timeline that's incredibly wasteful. You wait until the end of the project to do any meaningful testing, and it's only then that you find out whether you have a good idea on your hands."

"At Made by Many we turn things round and test continually to tease out a successful proposition. We'll form a series of ideas, sketch them and then test these with real users. The insights are then used to refine those ideas before retesting. It's a continuous series of small loops. The important thing is not generating loads of ideas – it's using this approach to find the right idea."

"The right idea sits squarely between customers needing it and growing the business."

"This way of working has some quite scary implications. The vision is the first thing to change – that big idea at the start is just a hypothesis until it's been tested by real people. Which means that ego is replaced with evidence. It also means that progress is not based on deliverables any more. It's not about how many documents you've written or decks created, but on real progress with your customers."

"However, this approach has some brilliant implications too. You get product in people's hands within days. Waste is dramatically reduced and, because of continuous testing, desirability is guaranteed."

"I said at the beginning that ideation wasn't the reserve of 'special' people. Is it the result of having the right culture?"

"I think it's more than a superficial culture. It's not about having an office full of bean bags and a table football in one corner. Nor is it about having post-it notes on the walls, or beards or having an office dog…"

"Though I did take this photo in the office this morning, so maybe some of it's true! But it's so much more than this. It's about assembling a group of people who share an underlying drive to build the best products – a passion to only work on the 'right' ideas."

"After all, it's only by working on the right ideas that you can create the kind of reaction and response you want from your customers and help to grow your business.

To do this, ideation has to be something that everyone is involved in. And the great thing is that it's not the 'ideators' that determine the winning idea, it's the customers."

Huge thanks to Andy Whitlock for help in distilling the 'right' message for this talk and to the fantastic Paul Davis for drawing the slides.

More from the Talk Nerdy To Me event can be found here: photos and video.