17 Will Be: Illumination in Creative Collaboration

The language of creative collaboration stages gives great power to each stage. Could Be and Should Be allow vast openness and general direction to the creative movement of a team toward an idea, our next stage’s name, Will Be, makes a bold claim that propels a team much more rapidly toward a solution. Will Be is the stage where a team’s initial ideas greatly coalesce and take more tangible form. This phase, similar to “Decide” (as in the Wednesday of a Design Sprint), or “Ideate” in most design thinking models, is where the team begins to make final choices and focus its creative output.

Divergence With A “Can-Do” Attitude

If we think of the Should Be stage as one in which the team decides the general direction they will follow towards their solution, the Will Be stage is where the team starts actively building the road. In this analogy, they’ll look at the contours of the topography, clear away an opening, and put down a nice surface for travel, all in the aim of getting to that solution in the next stage.

In more practical terms, Will Be is about taking the Should Be ideas that are still disparate but are beginning to collect together towards a particular type of solutions, starting to select and refine the most promising ones. The team has to shift at this point, too–Could Be was wide open and accepting of all ideas, and Should Be was a general suggestion session to find commonalities. Will Be is a more serious negotiation with a bit of compromise required. The team begins to envision which of the Should Be possibilities will be the focus of their efforts. Gone is that pie-in-the-sky thinking, as teams have to evaluate their generated ideas against the project goals, feasibility, and stakeholder response.

Back to the analogy of building a road, the team in Will Be does still engage in divergent thinking, but it is a much narrower funnel in this stage. All the different skills and equipment it takes to build a road (reading maps, clearing land, digging and laying a foundation, pouring the asphalt, and so forth) are highly specialized, and that’s how a team should approach divergent thinking in Will Be. Each team member has specific skills or creative types they uniquely bring to the team–after all, the team was created with careful consideration of its members. Will Be requires team members to lean into their unique individuality and suggest solutions not only that are possible, but are what they can actually do. Because in the next stage, the team has to make a prototype of anything they suggest in Will Be.

Viability and Feasibility: Converging Towards the Tangible

Thus, Will Be is a point of significant shifting towards convergent thinking. After some divergence on evaluating and selecting the best ideas from the prior stage, the team has to take into account their own strengths, abilities, bandwith, and timeframe.

Feasibility is a lot of the driving force behind convergent thinking in Will Be, but the team has to think of feasibility in multiple ways. Ideas narrow as the team starts to zero in on a smaller set of concepts that seem most viable, which makes the team think about feasibility in terms of what would really work as a solution. But, they are also thinking about what is feasible for them as a team to pull off. What could they make or build, given their collection of creative minds and the time, energy, and budget they have left?

The Road to a Prototype is Paved with Good Intentionality

As the team converges on a few key ideas, the process isn’t necessarily complete. Team members’ unique creative skills need to be taken into account so that the makeup of the team is reflected in the final choice of what Will Be. There might be some collective ideation as the team explores different ways to combine or refine the selected solution. For instance, if the team has whittled their possibilities down to two different ideas that each have compelling elements, the team might brainstorm ways to merge those elements into a stronger, hybrid solution that incorporates and highlights the strengths of its members.

Will Be sets the stage for the more tangible phase of prototyping and testing. By making deliberate choices about which ideas to pursue, the team can concentrate its resources and energy on developing those specific concepts, balancing the decision with the team’s unique combination of creative thinking and creative skillsets. The Will Be stage is where the abstract possibilities begin to transform into concrete plans, paving the way (see what we did there?) for bringing those ideas to fruition.

Perhaps the best way to think of Will Be is to address the best ideas from the previous stages and determine the best solution from them that this particular team, with these unique members, and their special collection of creative skills, will do. Embrace that uniqueness in Will Be and together decide to make something that only this team could make.