16 Should Be: Incubation in Creative Collaboration

After a team of creative collaborators explore the wide swath of possibilities in the Could Be stage and have diverged and then converged to deeply understand the problem, it’s finally time to start examining viable potential solutions. This is the Should Be stage.

Should Be has a lot in common with the Sketch stage on Tuesday of a Design Sprint, or Define in Design Thinking though they mean this term differently than the work of defining the problem done in earlier stages. But don’t get too bogged down in the terminology of overlapping frameworks here. What is important to understand in the early- to middle-stage of creative collaboration is that the team begins to transition from exploring “what could be” to understanding “what probably is.”

Should Be and Incubation

The incubation stage in individual creative pursuits can often feel magical, cultivating boredom to let the subconscious make a mashup of all your ideas and find a new connection that comes like a lightning strike. In collaborative creativity, the Should Be stage is a lot like Incubation, but the process looks and feels very different because it is done with others. It is the stage when the team understands the problem fully and is looking for a solution, but it has to be handled in a somewhat haphazard way to get the most from the stage.

That is, just as we trust our very bizarre subconscious minds to do the incubation for us individually, in creative collaboration we have to trust our teammates to act as a proxy subconscious and help us think of lots of solutions in a conscious space. And yes, ideas in Should Be can also get pretty bizarre, and it’s good if they do! They’re just a little more focused than in the Could Be stage just prior, because the team understands the problem now.

Team Growth in Creative Collaboration

The Should Be stage is also often when the Storming stage of team development happens. In this stage on typical teams, members are setting out to claim their turf or define their role on the team. There may be some competitive feelings, a little jockeying for position, some figuring out what lane everyone is in. But these can be done in good faith, too. On good teams this stage helps identify and maximize the strengths of the individual team members.

In creative collaboration, a strong team will have creatives with different skillsets and thinking habits, and the Should Be stage is a great time to recognize those as the project starts to take a particular direction. Collaborators should think about what they can contribute in a unique way as the discussions diverge and converge, and the project starts to become a tangible thing the team will actually create.

Narrowing the Field

During the prior Could Be phase, the team’s job was much more broad and vague. Collaborators had to explore the entire landscape and come up with a problem definition. And now with that definition firmly underfoot, teams in the Should Be stage still engage in divergent thinking, but with a somewhat narrower scope. Should Be channels that group understanding of the problem definition into the act of generating potential solutions. Instead of figuring out what the problem is, teams are now working together to think of possible ways to solve that problem.

The wide divergence in the Should Be stage is important because it allows creative collaborators to begin to actively generating from the big-picture perspective. The team gets to creatively explore and envision how things should be, and it can be great fun when a team works well together. Collaborators can move to a more purely creative mindset in Should Be and suggest many potential solutions. This is the moment where the team starts to collectively develop a vision by asking things like, “What are a bunch of innovative ways to address the needs and opportunities built into our problem? Okay, we thought of some… so, let’s dig deeper: what are a few more? What are some unorthodox ways of approaching this that we haven’t considered?”

Team members are essentially looking for pathways forward, and proposing them to their collaborators. Sometimes these ideas come from individual contributions, and other times they’re a collective effort from one person sparking an idea in another, or two colleagues working through an idea together. The ideas at this stage can be still a bit fuzzy or high-level, slowly migrating towards a solution, but it’s important that a team not decide too quickly. This might involve sketching out rough concepts, outlining potential features, or simply verbally pitching initial ideas, but resisting the urge to seize on or settle on one before exploring others.

The emphasis in Should Be is making up a lot of defined solutions–viable, workable solutions, yes, but don’t rule out good ideas because they aren’t practical or feasible yet. Great ideas often seem impractical at first, anyway! So pursue all ideas, even if they’re outlandish, as long as they address the problem. Just get lots of potential solutions out into the open.

Possibilities, Concepts, Frameworks: Converging Without Deciding

The divergent thinking still moves wide in Should be, but is combined with an even more forceful turn to convergent thinking. As team members share their initial ideas, they will start to react to and build upon each other’s suggestions. The early momentum of understanding the problem and generating a copious amount of possibilities to address it carries over to convergence in Should Be. Themes begin to emerge about the best pathways for a framework or concept of a solution, and the team starts to recognize that pattern as a promising direction.

Still, the goal isn’t to select a single solution yet. There will certainly be some level of evaluation of ideas in a team setting, of course, but during Should Be it’s best if teams limit their members’ instincts to shut down trains of thought too quickly. The more wide-ranging, deeply-considered, and thought-provoking your team can make their ideas in Should be, the richer your sources will be in later stages when you choose one specific idea and begin to sharpen it to eventually make it a working prototype in later stages.