Creative matrix

011 min

Why a team needs a creative matrix

Picture a product team at a grocery delivery app. Their manager asks how the app might cut late deliveries. In ten minutes the team writes a list: better alerts, more couriers, a live map. Every idea is sensible, and every idea points at the same place, the courier on the road. Nobody has asked about the store, the packing or the customer.

A team in that spot does not need more time. It needs a way to send attention to parts of the problem it would not visit on its own. The creative matrix does this by changing the question.

Why first ideas look alike

Designers call the habit in that list design fixation, which means holding on to a small set of ideas without noticing. In 1991, Jansson and Smith gave engineers a design problem together with an example solution that had known flaws. The engineers still copied features of the example into their own designs. A group that starts by calling out ideas gives every member the same first examples to hold on to.

022 min

How a creative matrix works

The creative matrix breaks that hold by swapping one big question for a grid of small ones. The delivery team first writes the problem as a "how might we" question: how might we cut late deliveries? That sentence goes in the top-left cell, where it stays in view for the whole session.

Next the team chooses the columns. In the version taught by the LUMA Institute, the columns hold people: personas, market segments or problem statements. The team picks couriers, store pickers and customers. The rows hold things that could help, such as technologies, environments or policies. The team picks alerts, bags and maps.

Each cell is now a question the team had not asked. What alert would help a store picker? What could a bag do for a courier?

Each person writes one idea per sticky note and places it in the cell where its row and column meet. Drawings count as notes. The aim is a note in every cell, so the team should not skip a cell because it looks hard.

LUMA gives a few limits that keep the session short. The grid has at most five rows and five columns, which is 25 cells. The timer runs for 15 to 20 minutes. The facilitator counts the notes each team wrote and rewards the team with the most.

Common variations

• Swap the axes. LUMA puts people in the columns. A 2025 worksheet from the Washington State programme Your Washington puts technologies, resources and methods in the columns, and user needs, pain points and scenarios in the rows. Both work, because each cell still pairs one item from each list.
• Add a wildcard. The last row or column holds ideas that fit none of the categories.
• Score the notes. WRKSHP.tools gives one point per sticky note and lets the highest total win.
• Rotate the grids. The Centre for Civic Innovation at Glasgow City Council runs several matrices at once and spends five extra minutes moving teams between them.

032 min

Where the creative matrix comes from

The guides do not name an inventor of the creative matrix. The version most guides copy comes from the LUMA Institute, a company that teaches human-centered design methods. LUMA says it began inside MAYA Design, a design consultancy and technology research lab, and was founded in 2010.

The idea of crossing lists to find combinations is older than LUMA's version.

Zwicky's box, the older relative

Fritz Zwicky was a Swiss-American astrophysicist and aerospace scientist who developed a method called morphological analysis for problems that have many dimensions and cannot easily be measured. His tool was the morphological box, also called the Zwicky box. The box sets several lists of values against each other, and each cell picks one value from every list.

Tom Ritchey, a researcher who wrote a guide to Zwicky's work, explains the box with three lists: five colours, five textures and three sizes. That gives 75 cells, because 5 × 5 × 3 = 75, and each cell holds one colour, one texture and one size. Zwicky then wanted the analyst to examine every cell and decide which combinations are possible and useful.

Zwicky summarised the method in five steps: state the problem concisely, find the parameters that matter, build the box, evaluate every solution in it against the goal, and apply the best ones.

The creative matrix keeps two lists and caps the grid at 25 cells. It also asks for ideas in each cell rather than one configuration, and it leaves the sorting to a later step. Zwicky's method accepts its size and then checks every cell. The matrix stays small so a team can fill it in one short session.

042 min

Why a creative matrix produces different ideas

A creative matrix asks for ideas about one pairing at a time, where a plain brainstorm asks about the whole problem. A pairing is a combination. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes combinatorial creativity as the kind that occurs when old ideas are joined in new ways. A courier and a bag are both familiar. A bag that serves a courier is a smaller question than cutting late deliveries, and its answers differ from the team's first list.

LUMA adds that limits help most when a problem is very broad or a team keeps returning to conventional ideas. The grid is such a limit, and it supports divergent thinking: producing many different options before judging any of them.

Why people write alone first

Several guides tell the group to start in silence. Diehl and Stroebe tested the reason in 1987. They compared real groups, whose members talk to each other, with nominal groups, whose members work alone and have their results pooled. Four experiments tested three explanations for why real groups produce fewer ideas: some members let others do the work, some fear being judged, and members must wait for a turn to speak.

The fourth experiment found that waiting for a turn, which the authors call production blocking, accounted for most of the loss. A matrix session removes that wait because everyone writes at the same time. Mural's template adds that writing in private helps a group avoid groupthink, the drift of a group toward one shared view.

Why quantity is worth rewarding

LUMA tells facilitators to reward quantity. The reason appears in a 2010 experiment by Girotra, Terwiesch and Ulrich. They point out that organisations want a few great ideas, not a good average. In their theory the best idea's quality depends on four things: the average quality of the ideas, how many there are, how much their quality varies, and how well the group can tell good ideas from weak ones.

More notes give more chances for an unusual one. They help only if the group can pick the strong notes out afterwards, which is why a full grid is not the end of the session.

051 min

The creative matrix in real projects

Back to the delivery team, which used a creative matrix to look beyond the courier. Its first list said nothing about the store. The pickers column forced the question, and it produced ideas such as colour tags for finished bags, which the courier-only list would have missed.

Real projects show how teams pick their axes. A guide on WRKSHP.tools, written by Erik van der Pluijm, describes a team that generated ideas for a new investment product at a bank. Its columns were customer segments, such as affluent young professionals and double-income families. Its rows came from quotes in the team's first customer interviews, such as daily habit, easy and bragging rights. The guide says the pairing helped the team think beyond building an app.

The Centre for Civic Innovation at Glasgow City Council uses the matrix for public problems. It puts "how might we" challenge statements along the top and the personas most affected by them down the side. It asks each person to start in silence, then to fill the gaps and vote on the ideas with the most potential.

Teams also use the creative matrix between two phases of work. The design agency Delve describes it as a way to structure the work that sits between research and ideation. In the double diamond, that is the point where a team moves from defining a problem to developing solutions.

062 min

What to do after the creative matrix is full

A full creative matrix gives a team a pile of raw notes, not a plan. Guides agree on three moves.

1. 1

   Group.

   Each author explains their notes in a sentence or two, and the team gathers similar notes into themes. Affinity diagramming is the usual method for this.

2. 2

   Vote.

   WRKSHP.tools suggests dot voting or secret voting, and Mural suggests anonymous voting, so the most talkative person does not decide.

3. 3

   Choose a few.

   WRKSHP.tools says to take about three to five ideas forward and base an experiment on them. A decision matrix can score the shortlist against criteria.

The Design Doing guide adds a step before the choice: bundle ideas. The team combines the best parts of several notes into one stronger concept, and notes that look alike are a sign the team is converging.

When the group builds on each other's notes

Some templates tell teams to build on each other's suggestions during the session. The 2010 Girotra experiment does not support that. Teams that built on earlier ideas produced no more ideas, and the ideas that built on others were no better. The strongest results came from a hybrid structure in which people work alone first and then work together.

A matrix session already has that shape if discussion waits until the notes are down. The delivery team should keep its first 15 minutes silent and talk only when the grid is full.

071 min

Where the creative matrix goes wrong

Most creative matrix failures come from the setup, before the first note is written.

• The categories come from the room's first instinct. If the columns and rows are the ones everyone would have chosen, the cells repeat the same ideas. Drawing them from research, as the bank team did, gives the grid something the room did not already think.
• The grid is too big. LUMA allows 25 cells. The Design a Better Business guide advises against going over 20. A bigger grid means more cells to fill in the same 15 to 20 minutes.
• A cell makes no sense. The Design a Better Business guide separates two cases. A cell may be empty because the pairing is nonsense, or because it is unfamiliar. Skip the first and fill the second.
• Five notes say one thing. Several wordings of the same idea in one cell count as a single idea. The guide asks for different ideas in each cell, not variations on one.

081 min

Creative matrix vs. similar methods

The creative matrix is easy to confuse with other grids. The table separates them by what the grid holds and what comes out.

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