How, Now, Wow

If you’re looking for a fun and collaborative way to evaluate different ideas, then this game matrix will be your perfect fit! This evaluation exercise is an excellent follow-up to any ideation processes if the goal is to map ideas by originality and degree of difficulty.  

The How, Now, Wow process uses two parameters, originality on the x-axis and implementation on the y-axis. Let’s say your group has already brainstormed a set of recommendations for your project. Using How, Now, Wow, you can begin to evaluate the many different recommendations that were identified using this sift and sort exercise.  

• The ‘How’ category consists of all the creative and original ideas that the team has identified which are hard to implement at the moment due to constraints.
• The ‘Now’ category is for status quo ideas which are going to be easy to implement.
• Lastly, the ‘Wow’ category is for all original ideas that can be implemented within current resource parameters.

Once everyone is done contributing, a large group discussion should follow reflecting on any differences in the sorting, as well as some of the themes within each of the quadrants. To prioritize next steps, you can ask the group to vote on their top 3 ideas or recommendations to follow-up on.  

With this template you can conduct your own How, Now, Wow to brainstorm ideas with your team!