The third stage in our problem solving method is to generate ideas. With all the work that your problem solving group has done, it will be quite easy to brainstorm a wealth of ideas for improvement. So work as a group, brainstorm and collect ideas from the work that you've done. The analysis of the data, the analysis of the problem. Don't judge the ideas at the stage. That's the next stage.

Just get them all down, give everyone equal importance of their ideas. And the tools that we use to analyze the problem in the previous stage can also be reviewed as sources of ideas. For example, what ideas come out of the stakeholder analysis or the Ishikawa diagram? What does the data tell us that we need to improve? And we can use the tool on the next slide to discuss what prevents the issue or problem from being resolved right now? What are the barriers to fixing it?

And what ways round the barriers might there be? As Linus Pauling says If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas, most of them will be wrong. And what you have to learn is which ones to throw away. The issue that you will often have at this stage is that the group has too many ideas and wants to cut them down. It's best to stick with many ideas at present, as Linus Pauling said there, because the next stage offers the opportunity to think about how they relate to each other, and therefore how we might combine them or reduce them. As I mentioned, they're the tools that we've used in the previous section will be good sources of ideas, but a new tool that we can also use is to consider the barriers to solving the problem and this will help us generate more ideas for solutions.

So ask yourself the following questions as a team, what are the barriers to defining and measuring the problem? What are the barriers to gathering useful data? What are the barriers to solving the problem? What are the barriers to implementation edition questions might be, why have we not solved all this already? What has prevented us from solving this before or from removing these barriers before? Secondly, we can use the stakeholder analysis tool that we met before, also to help us generate ideas.

So again, looking at each of the stakeholders involved in the issue, what solutions would help satisfy them? What solutions would help satisfy your customers? What solutions would help satisfy the employees or the owners, or any legislators involved or regulators, that sort of thing what solutions can help from the point of view of the stakeholders? At this stage, we also want to start to refine our ideas. We've generated many ideas and we need to start to group them and collate them. For example, group ideas together and categories by type or theme.

You could use the headings from your Ishikawa diagram as one approach, refine the more radical ideas into something more practical. Use the ideas great on the next slide to identify the ideas that are most likely to be workable. To do that the group should come up with a best guess of where each idea is on the axis between easy to implement and hard to implement. And also where it is on the axis between small potential benefit and large potential benefit. We can then chart them on the grid that we'll see on the next slide. All ideas that are easy to implement should be progressed straight away, they're no brainers in a sense, ideas that are hard to implement, but which have low benefit can be discarded.

Let's have a look at the ideas grid thing. The ideas grid is a very simple tool. And as I said, it has an axis between easy to implement and hard to implement, and another axis between small potential benefit and large potential benefit. And as a group, we sort of estimate where each idea will fit in this grid. And of course, ideas that are easy to implement can be progressed immediately they are they just do it ideas, ideas which have a large potential benefit, but which are also hard to implement, do need some more detailed analysis, some kind of feasibility study or cost benefit review. ideas that are hard to implement, but which have low benefit can be discarded there that don't do it ideas, and they are not worth the effort.

We finished the section on generating ideas with a rather nice quote here from Albert Einstein. From a letter he wrote in 1949, a new idea comes suddenly I didn't rather an intuitive way, but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.