One of the trademarks of new fangled team collaboration workshops associated with "design thinking" is the wall full of yellow post-it notes. It's very easy to be seduced into thinking that if your team just starts writing things on little yellow stickies then creativity and innovation will bust out all over. But is there more to it than just writing things on little squares and sticking them on the wall?

There is.

"Downloading" - ideas, observations, images, etc. come to life in our heads but until we record them somehow, they exist in a multi-dimensional jumble. Together they might excite us or confuse us or overwhelm us or worry us and often enough they do all these at once. While they dance around in my head they get distorted by my emotions, they can hide behind one another or mutually stall one another because they are contradictory, some ideas are big and bossy and tend to bully other ideas into silence, and some ideas are so introverted that they just sit on the sidelines.

And we want to let