Building further

What is the building further template?

Brainstorming is a good way to generate a lot of ideas quickly, but some of those ideas will be half-formed and unactionable. This is to be expected. The point of brainstorming is to welcome any and all ideas instead of focusing on quality—but if you stop there, you’ll never get to a solution for your problem that will actually work. The building further template helps you examine your ideas closely so you can refine them.

When you use the template, you’ll discuss what you like about the ideas you come up with and what problems you foresee with them. Using this information, you’ll expand the original ideas into actionable solutions.

How to use the building further template in Lucidspark

To start, brainstorm ideas with your group. Put these in sticky notes in the “Original Ideas” section on the left. When your group’s creative well is running dry, it’s time to move on from coming up with new ideas to working with what you’ve got.

First, discuss what you like about the items that you’ve contributed. Put these thoughts into sticky notes in the “Likes” section.

Next, think about what problems you’d need to solve before you could put these original ideas into action. What would stand in your way? Write these ideas on sticky notes in the “Things to Solve” section.

Lastly, combine all these thoughts into actionable solutions. Use lines and arrows to connect and combine ideas, and restate your ideas as solutions: Start a sentence with “Well, what we could do is,” and finish the thought. Write these solutions in the right-hand side of the template.

When you’ve finished transforming your original thoughts into actionable ideas, use Lucidspark’s Voting feature to decide which are most worth proceeding with. You can also react to others’ contributions with emojis and comments.