How Might We

We've been using How Might We... to do ideation internally and with our partner organizations and have found them as a great way to spark creativity and a generate a lot of ideas. I would recommend checking out more of IDEO's resources around the design process as well. The Human Centered Design Toolkit (http://www.ideo.com/work/human-centered-design-toolkit/) and its corresponding community (http://www.hcdconnect.org) are great, especially if you have a focus on the developing world like we do. Alternatively there is the Bootcamp Bootleg (http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Bootc...) which D-School publishes as a less prescriptive resource with a lot of similar content.

This 'secret' advice is pretty old and it's very useful for prompting a perspective shift. The version I have in my quotes file (from 1998, surely not the first time anyone ever noticed the trick) is:

"Beware 'We should', extend a hand to 'How do I'... --Alan Cox, from http://news.slashdot.org/story/98/10/13/1423253/featurecathe... (The rest of the paper is pretty good too!)