Ideation workshops pursue the following goals:

• Encourage out-of-box thinking: Without the fear of being evaluated or judged, participants feel more liberated to generate the most adventurous, unexpected ideas for hard-to-crack challenges.
• Generate as many ideas as possible: The focus is on quantity instead of quality. Later on, the team can analyze and filter the most valuable ideas.
• Receive diverse opinions: Ideation workshops encourage inviting not only designers. Marketing people, developers, or project managers may offer innovative ideas and fascinating insights into your target users.

To reach these goals, facilitators often rely on diverse ideation techniques that help put people at ease, stimulate creative thinking, and generate the most outrageous, eccentric ideas.

For example, brainwriting is an alternative approach where participants don't say their thoughts aloud but are asked to write them down and pass them to a neighbor, who, in turn, can add new ideas or read them all out.

Another technique that can be used is Worst Possible Idea, where participants are asked to come up with the worst possible, stupidest, and even contradicting ideas as solutions. Interestingly, this method helps relieve anxiety and tension and can lead to the most reasonable solution.^[1]