Generating and Prioritising Better Solutions
Once a team understands the problem and the people affected, the next step is turning those insights into potential solutions. Innovation games can help teams think beyond obvious ideas, investigate root causes, and prioritise solutions based on value and feasibility. Three useful techniques for this stage are Cover Story, The 5 Whys, and the Impact-Effort Matrix.
Cover Story: Imagine Future Success
Cover Story is a Future Thinking exercise that helps teams imagine what successful innovation could look like, then work backward to identify what is needed to achieve it.
Instead of starting with current limitations, participants temporarily assume their project has already succeeded.
How It Works
Teams create a fictional magazine or newspaper cover representing their innovation several years in the future.
The cover can include:
A headline describing the innovation's success
Quotes from customers, executives, or industry experts
Supporting stories about the impact
Images representing the future outcome
Once completed, the team asks:
“What would need to happen for this future to become reality?”
The answers can then be translated into milestones, actions, and priorities.
When to Use Cover Story
Cover Story is useful when teams need to:
Develop an ambitious innovation vision
Challenge existing assumptions
Define what success looks like
Align around a shared future
Identify milestones for achieving that future
Key Takeaway:
Cover Story helps teams define the future they want before working backward to determine how to achieve it.
The 5 Whys: Find the Root Cause
Teams can easily jump to solutions before fully understanding a problem. The 5 Whys is a problem-solving technique that helps uncover the root cause by repeatedly asking why a problem is occurring. Originally developed by Toyota, the method is now commonly used in Design Thinking and process improvement.
How It Works
Start with a clearly defined problem and ask:
“Why is this happening?”
Record the answer and use it to form the next question. Continue until the team reaches a deeper cause that can be meaningfully addressed.
The process might look like:
Problem: Customers are abandoning an online application.
Why? The application takes too long.
↓
Why? Customers enter the same information multiple times.
↓
Why? Different systems do not share customer data.
The exact number of questions does not need to be five. The goal is to follow the causal chain until the team reaches a useful root cause.
When to Use the 5 Whys
Use it when:
A problem is poorly understood
Existing solutions are not working
Teams may be addressing symptoms
The cause of a recurring issue needs investigation
Key Takeaway:
The 5 Whys helps teams understand what is causing a problem before deciding how to solve it.
Impact-Effort Matrix: Prioritise Ideas
After generating potential solutions, teams need to decide which ideas are worth pursuing.
The Impact-Effort Matrix provides a simple visual framework for comparing ideas based on their potential impact and the effort required to implement them.
How It Works
Create a two-by-two matrix:
Horizontal axis: Effort — low to high
Vertical axis: Impact — low to high
Then position each idea within the appropriate quadrant:
Quick Wins: High impact, low effort. Strong candidates for immediate action.
Major Projects: High impact, high effort. Potentially valuable strategic initiatives requiring more resources.
Fill-Ins: Low impact, low effort. Useful when resources are available but generally lower priority.
Thankless Tasks: Low impact, high effort. Ideas that may need to be reconsidered or removed.
The discussion around where ideas belong can be just as valuable as the final matrix. Different views on impact or effort can reveal assumptions that need further validation.
Turn Priorities into Action
The matrix should lead to decisions, not simply a completed diagram.
For high-priority ideas, define the next steps, resources, owners, or experiments needed to move forward.
Key Takeaway:
The Impact-Effort Matrix helps teams move from a long list of ideas to a focused set of innovation priorities.
Bringing the Three Innovation Games Together
These three techniques support different parts of solution development:
Cover Story → Imagine what success could look like The 5 Whys → Understand what problem needs solving Impact-Effort Matrix → Decide which solutions to pursue
Together, they create a practical progression:
Imagine → Investigate → Prioritise
This helps teams avoid two common innovation problems: solving the wrong problem and pursuing too many ideas at once.
Conclusion
Innovation is not simply about generating more ideas. Teams need to understand the underlying problem, define meaningful outcomes, and focus their resources on the solutions with the greatest potential value.
Cover Story encourages ambitious thinking, The 5 Whys uncovers root causes, and the Impact-Effort Matrix helps turn ideas into clear priorities.
Used together, these innovation games help teams move from creative thinking to focused action.
What's Next?
In the final blog, we'll explore how Future Headlines, Remember the Future, and Affinity Clustering can help teams anticipate outcomes, define success, organise insights, and turn innovation games into a repeatable organisational practice.
Last Words
I will be adding more articles on Design Thinking, Strategy and Innovation throughout the year. Articles of these 5 Step Action Plan and Modern Soft Skills will be added periodically to give my readers a broader insights to how to crush complex problems, overcome future challenges and spot AI opportunities.
Check out more articles via my blog: https://www.emerge-creatives.com/blog-1
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About the Author
Daniel Ling is a regional ex-Design Leader turned educator, and business owner of Emerge Creatives, an registered SSG training provider (RTP) to deliver modern soft skills to professionals through Design Thinking, Business Strategy, and AI Innovation.
With over 15 years of experience in the financial and e-commerce tech industries- including key leadership roles at Lazada, NTUC Income, OCBC, and DBS- Daniel has led cross-regional design teams, built design functions from the ground up, and spearheaded large-scale transformation initiatives. But beyond industry success,
Daniel has reinvented himself as a “designer in a business suit”- equally fluent in creative strategy and commercial impact.
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