01Best for
Concept generation, discovery workshops, picking what to prototype.
Output
A ranked shortlist of concepts, with the pain each relieves and who reacts.
Best for
HMW sprints, roadmap ideation, finding the non-obvious dark horse.
Grounding
Every idea is checked against personas who actually feel the pain — including an extreme user.
Anti-pattern
No sticky-note theatre — divergence is wide, but convergence is earned with prototype tests.
The loop
Frame the HMW
State the How-Might-We; the council grounds it in the lived pain behind it.
Diverge on concepts
Many distinct ideas, pushed for at least one genuinely non-obvious one.
Prototype & test
The promising concepts become prototypes personas actually use.
Rank & shortlist
A head-to-head forces preferences; you leave with a defensible shortlist.
02How it works
Runs through d.school Micro-Cycle.
A job is the outcome you buy; underneath, the run follows a proven framework and reaches for one move at a time. Ideation (How-Might-We) runs through d.school Micro-Cycle, using council, prototype test, head-to-head along the way — and it won’t converge until the panel below has weighed in.
The frameworks
The formats
Coverage
At least 4 personas, spanning segment · expertise-level · extreme-user. The panel includes at least one extreme user to push non-obvious concepts. (How-Might-We is often mis-sold as a flat “method”; here it is the ideation Job, run through a real framework.)