Sven is the creative director of the Estonian agency Imagine. They have a multidisciplinary team of creatives, from producers and designers to coders. Their work is very diverse: from digital campaigns to outdoor advertising, working for media companies and retailers.

We talked to Sven to know how they are using Triggers in their daily work.

How are you using Triggers at your agency? For what kind of projects?
We are using Triggers in “first idea" creative sessions, where the purpose is to come up with lots of crazy, stupid and cool ideas. Triggers is a perfect way to get them. I do my “first idea" creative sessions in three phases.
1. First, we meet and tell all our ideas that we have thought of on our own and write all of them down. The idea is to get every person in the session to a state of being a "blank sheet" with no ideas.
2. The second phase - generating ideas. Now we use Triggers to come up with as many ideas as possible. I mix all four decks and use approximately 20 cards for one session. Each card for about 2 minutes. By mixing decks, I can get a wider variety of ideas, compared to using only one deck. With one deck I can see that same idea are starting to come in different angles and the team will be out of brainpower sooner. But with mixed decks, the trigger questions are more random and surprising, so the ideas are more creative, and the team gets excited when they draw a new card.
3. When I'm out of cards, we usually have 50+ ideas. And in the third phase, we select the ones, that have “it” in them and start working with them.

What's the outcome? How does it help you/your team?
As I said, the outcome is lots of fresh ideas, and hopefully, we have some excellent ones we can start working with.
For the team, Triggers is helpful, because it helps them to approach the brief in entirely new angles. After almost every session I hear someone saying “how come I didn't come up with this idea before?”. And that's an excellent sign.

Any tricks or exercises you have tried?
I think the best “trick” that works for our agency is mixing the decks. I have all four decks (240 questions), and in one session I use about 20 cards that I prepare for the session. So in every session, I have a “new” deck that can surprise my team. I think that's one of the most important things - surprising. My “session decks” are somehow related to the brief but at the same time, they are surprising and unexpected for the team. Only then my team can come up with ideas and solutions that they haven't thought of yet.