One thing we do for our retained clients is regular team-wide Idea Workshops. We get together for one hour to explore a specific goal from our client, and creative new ways that we can help them achieve it. The whole Huddle team get involved in this, even if they’re not directly involved in that client day to day. The sessions always take a similar format – we warm up with an improv exercise such as word association or “7 questions”. After this, we focus on a particular goal statement, for example: “How might we increase profitability for Client X this year?” The first part of the idea generation is for each of us to spend 5 minutes coming up with as many new ideas to meet this goal as possible. There are no bad ideas at this stage, and no judgement. Only the amount of ideas is what matters. After this, we each spend 5 minutes looking through another person’s ideas, and coming up with additional ideas to build on these. Then, we spend another 5 minutes, and keep going, until everyone has looked over everyone else’s ideas and had the opportunity to expand on them. The result is some ideas that get multiple people adding to them, something like this:
- Original idea: “Automation to reduce time taken for admins”
- First person expands on this: “Click a button to bulk update bookings rather than one by one”
- Second person expands further: “Email notification for admins when new bookings require review, so they don’t have to check every day”
- Third person completes the idea: “Customisable notification channels e.g. email, Slack, SMS”
After this initial idea generating session, we then do the “Super Six” exercise which involves spending 6 minutes each doing 6 quick sketches, inspired by the ideas we came up with. This can either be six alternative variations on one idea, six steps in a process, or six different ideas. After this, we each talk through our ideas and vote on our favourites. 
The final outcome of the workshop is a deck of slides that is delivered to our client, summarising the process and the ideas we came up with. We then discuss with the client and incorporate into our ongoing development work. These sessions help our team get involved in new opportunities, share ideas, and make sure we’re always coming up with fresh ideas for our clients. The workshops are included for free in select ongoing partnership packages.