--- title: "The AI suggests, your people score: inside our brainstorming room" description: "Ideate takes one hunch through six steps and ends with the cheapest test you could run this week. Claude adds ideas when asked. It is never allowed to rank them." section: Inside Sneeze It author: David Steel published: 2026-10-10T20:15:38.430Z url: https://one.sneeze.it/blog/ai-suggests-your-people-score tags: ["inside-sneeze-it", "ideate", "brainstorming", "decision-making"] --- # The AI suggests, your people score: inside our brainstorming room _Ideate takes one hunch through six steps and ends with the cheapest test you could run this week. Claude adds ideas when asked. It is never allowed to rank them._ Every multi-location owner has a list of hunches. Members keep canceling in month three. The noon hour is dead at two of the twelve locations. Maybe it is time for a second concept. Most of those hunches end one of two ways: a meeting with a whiteboard photo nobody opens again, or a decision made by whoever talked loudest. We built Ideate to end them a third way: with a test you can run this week. You bring one sentence. It walks your team through six steps. Your people score the ideas. Every finalist meets its strongest objection while it is still cheap to be wrong. It has been [live at ideate.sneeze.it](https://ideate.sneeze.it) since September 19, free while we test it, open to anyone with an email address. No password, no card. The rule that shaped the whole product is short. Claude can add ideas. Claude cannot score them. :::stats 6 | steps from one sentence to a decision 3 | questions per step your team answers before the AI speaks 6 | checks a problem is sharpened against 3 | finalists at most, each with its strongest objection and cheapest test source: Sneeze Ideate, October 10, 2026 ::: ## Six steps, people first Ideate is built on the IDEATE Method by Cohen, Pool and Neck: Identify, Discover, Enhance, Anticipate, Target, Evaluate. Each step is a column of cards on one board. At every step, the team answers three questions themselves first. Only then can someone press "Push me," and Claude adds what is not on the board yet. Generating five to eight ideas takes 15 to 40 seconds. Order matters here. If the AI goes first, the room anchors on its list and stops thinking. If people go first, the AI fills gaps instead of setting the agenda. :::flow "From a hunch to a test" One sentence | A frustration, a hunch, a decision you keep putting off Six steps | Identify, Discover, Enhance, Anticipate, Target, Evaluate People score | Migraine times Enthusiasm, plus Gut Three finalists | Picked from the top of the scoreboard Challenge | Strongest objection and cheapest test this week ::: The early steps include tools that make a problem worth solving before anyone solves it. "Sharpen" tests a problem against six checks and rewrites it: - A migraine, not a mosquito bite - People already pay for a bad fix - Not solved in five minutes - Plenty of people have it - You can name who has it - A business, not a feature of one "Find the customer" works through the segment, a persona, why you are the one to serve them, their adjacent needs, and where to go and watch them. "Think bigger" climbs any idea three rungs in scope and says what must be true at each rung. Take an idea that starts as a fix for one gym: rung one is this location, rung two is every location in the system, rung three is a new line of business. An "ambition dial" sets how far Claude reaches, from Practical to Moonshot. :::figure wide ![A gym after closing, with three people at a whiteboard of sticky notes; each holds a marker over a different note, and a single magenta note sits apart on a laptop on the bench.](/blog/media/20cc6761fbcc7f961cf65681.jpg) Claude can add a note to the wall. Only the people in the room can score one. ::: ## Why Claude never holds the marker The scoreboard is where most AI brainstorming tools go wrong. Ask a model to rank ideas and it will, confidently, and the ranking will carry an authority it has not earned. It does not know your members, your lease or your team's appetite. So in Ideate, people score every idea on three things. Migraine: how badly does this hurt the people who have it? Enthusiasm: how much does our team want to do it? Gut: what does experience say? The score is Migraine times Enthusiasm, plus Gut. Pain and energy multiply, because an idea that is weak on either is weak. Gut adds, because it should tip a close call, not overrule the other two. :::pullquote Claude can add ideas. Claude cannot score them. Unscored stays unscored, never zero. ::: Two smaller rules come from the same place. A score stays empty until all three parts are set, so a half-scored idea never looks like a real number. And an idea nobody has scored stays unscored. It does not quietly become a zero and sink to the bottom. Those rules keep the scoreboard honest about what the room actually decided. The scoring also changes who wins. In a normal meeting, the loudest person's idea gets the most airtime. When everyone scores on the same three questions, a quiet manager's idea with a real migraine behind it can rise past the owner's favorite. ## Every finalist meets its strongest objection The team picks up to three finalists. Then "Challenge" gives each one two things: its strongest objection, and the cheapest test you could run this week. That second part is the point of the whole tool. A finalist is not a plan. It is a bet, and the cheapest test is how you find out whether to place it. Offer the new program to the next ten members and count the yeses before building anything. Run the new class time at one location for two weeks before rolling it out. :::compare "A typical brainstorm" "An Ideate board" Ideas go up on the wall. The most senior or loudest voice picks one. Objections come up months later, after money is spent. The whiteboard photo is the only record. --- People answer first, then the AI fills gaps. Everyone scores on the same three questions. Each finalist gets its strongest objection now, and a test that costs a week, not a quarter. The board stays where you left it. ::: Claude has rules here too. It may not invent a number; any figure it raises comes out as a question for you to check. If an AI panel cannot answer, it shows the reason instead of an empty list. And without the AI at all, Ideate still works as a six-step board. ## What it learns, and what it keeps private Text you type goes to Anthropic's Claude API only when you ask Claude for something, and API data is not used to train models. Your boards are seen by you and the Sneeze It team, nobody else. Only a board's creator can delete it, and when they do, it is gone. On our own team's boards, Ideate is built to connect to the Sneeze Brain, the shared memory our tools learn from. When a staff member removes an AI card or scores one a 1 or 2, that counts as a correction, and the next prompt can read the lesson. Only what the AI wrote and what a person said about it is sent. A board's title, starting point and hand-written cards stay in Ideate, and a guest's board sends nothing to the Brain at all. You can read how that works in [correct it once, every tool learns](/blog/correct-it-once-every-tool-learns). The same people-decide habit shows up in our reporting, in [truth, not wins](/blog/truth-not-wins). :::takeaways "What this means if you run 20 locations" - Bring the hunch, not the answer. One sentence is enough to start a board. - Let your managers score. A shared three-part score keeps the loudest voice from deciding by default. - Make every finalist argue with its strongest objection before it costs you anything. - Leave with a test you can run this week, not a plan for next quarter. - Ideate is live and free while we test it. It is a guest account for feedback, not a client portal, and it holds no client data. ::: :::cta button="See Ideate" href="https://ideate.sneeze.it" Have a hunch you keep putting off? Start a board, free. Any email address, no password, no card. :::