People are curious about how Design Labs™ function. Here is a description of how a typical Design Lab works but, be warned, no two Design Labs are the same as they are created to meet the needs of our clients and specific situations.
A Design Lab is a meeting of minds in which participants create breakthrough ideas to solve a problem presented by a host organization and set the foundations for innovation.
What is innovation?
Innovation is everywhere! But it is not a thing you can hold. It’s a concept, a perception, a label used to describe something that makes a significant change. Products, systems, and ideas only become innovations after they are labeled as such by people who find them new and useful. Yesterday’s innovations are today’s commonplace things (at some point the ball point pen was a huge innovation, now it’s just a pen). Bureaucracy was an important innovation that responded to the unfairness and corruption of the “spoils” system of government. Now we are focused on the next innovation for government.
In PSG Design Labs we facilitate creative thinking to find breakthrough ideas to solve problems in ways that may prove to be innovative. This article discusses some of the elements, techniques, and processes used in Design Labs to make the magic happen.
Getting ready
The most important part of a Design Lab is the participants. We choose creative thinkers who represent diverse backgrounds and a broad spectrum of relevant knowledge, some have subject matter expertise and some have other relevant expertise. Only non-stakeholders are chosen in order to keep agendas and conflicts of interest to a minimum, and so members of the host organization wont limit creative thinking by being the voice of rules, regulation, and reason. All participants are provided a briefing book prior to the Design Lab and their only mandate for participation is to have read the materials before they walk in the door.
In Design Labs we prepare the workspace to make it as conducive as possible to creative thinking and good communication. We arrange the chairs inside a U shape of tables to eliminate barriers to communication, we place quotes from brilliant thinkers around the room to inspire positive attitudes about creative thinking, and provide a lot of small toys to play with. The toys promote a fun environment, inspire a more open and childlike mindset, and are good objects for people who like to fidget while they think. Together these things set a good physical environment for building effective communications, respect, and trust, which in turn allows participants to safely reveal ideas that seem unusual or cause discomfort by challenging social norms and rules; the very type of ideas that lead to creative solutions.
Setting the tone for creative success
Next we lay mental and emotional foundations for creative thinking and effective group process. This opens the group up to their own creative thoughts and to each other’s creative ideas. First, we warm up their minds with a playful exercise in which everyone gets to use their imagination and experience the paradigms and habits that limit our natural ability to think ‘outside the box’. Then we discuss the following concepts to encourage individual and group creative thought:
1. Avoid creativity killers
2. Be open to all questions
3. Break your thought habits
4. Seek remote associations
5. Tolerate ambiguity
6. Embrace your child’s mind, use humor, and play
7. Take risks
8. Use your discomfort
9. Come over to the dark side
After exploring these individual and group frameworks for creativity, we give an overview of group process, which includes these elements:
1. Warm up your body and mind, and take breaks
2. Start and work anywhere in the process that’s appropriate
3. Communicate openly about the process
4. Manage expectations
5. Incubate ideas
6. Embrace failure
7. Trust the process
8. Park some ideas for later
All together the combination of favorable physical space, individual creative thought habits, and good group process is conducive to optimal creative thinking.
Before a problem presented to a Design Lab is addressed we introduce and practice techniques used to generate and collect information and ideas. To collect information we use two brainstorming techniques; classic brainstorming, in which the facilitator writes on a flipchart, and post-it brainstorming, in which participants write their ideas on post-its and the facilitator puts the post-its on flipcharts. To generate ideas and information we follow divergent and convergent guidelines while brainstorming.
The divergent guidelines provide for the best results when a group wishes to produce creative ideas together. They are as follows:
1. Defer judgment
2. Quantity equals quality
3. Piggy back on other ideas
4. Go for wild and crazy ideas
Once ideas are generated the group will select and refine the ones with promise. For a group to choose creative ideas they must be able to move past the ‘safe’ ideas they might normally choose and explore new and unusual ones. To help this process we coach the group on the convergent guidelines, which are as follows:
1. Affirmative or positive judgment
2. Be deliberate and look at every idea
3. Check criteria
4. Seek novelty
5. Improve ideas
These preparation and foundational elements lay the groundwork for effective creative thinking by the group. This is very important because the following techniques, used to generate information and creative ideas, are not nearly as effective if the group is not warmed up to them.
Ideas, ideas, ideas!
The technique used to begin the creative process is called ‘The Purge’. It helps to clear participant’s minds, providing a ‘blank sheet of paper’ mentality, while gathering foundational information and ideas. The main question is written for all to see, and the group is asked to write down (on post-it’s so they’re easier to move around later) all the ideas they already have about how to answer it. They are encouraged to discuss information they found in the briefing book or have questions about. This technique provides the group an opportunity to hear what others are thinking about, discuss possible areas to explore for solutions, begin developing ideas they already have, and build trust and communication. In addition, many of the seeds for breakthrough ideas begin to develop at this point.
The next technique helps identify boundaries that limit creative ideas and help to think past them. It is called “Challenging Assumptions”. The group brainstorms assumptions around the problem subject, then discusses and pushes against them to question why they exist, and see if they can be removed, stretched, reversed, or changed.
After clearing the mind and exploring boundaries the group brainstorms, with post-its, to answer more specific sub-questions related to the main problem. During this process ‘prompts’ are used to encourage different mental frameworks that change the way participants look at the question and solution ideas. Some simple examples of this are to ask the participants what their emotional responses are to the question and see what comes up, ask what might happen if they substitute, combine, adapt, or modify elements of the problem, or ask them to pretend they are a fictional character from a movie and write down ideas about how that character would solve the problem. There are many different prompts and each one brings about unique thoughts and ideas from the participants. The prompts help generate a considerable number of ideas to work with, some of which can be quite creative and exploratory, but for the most creative ideas it’s good to take the group one or two steps further into ambiguous territory.
A tool we like for pushing creative thinking is called ‘Virtually Identifying Relationships’ (VIR). This tool presents images for participants to look at and write down what strikes them visually, emotionally, contextually, etc…about the image. Then they make connections between these visual stimuli and the problem question/solutions. Participants then share and discuss in small groups what they came up with and develop their favorite few ideas to present to the larger group. This small group sharing often produces discussion and ideas that move past the usual understanding of the problem and provide more creative solution ideas. These ideas are added to the collection of ideas and information already gathered from the ‘Purge’ and other brainstorming questions.
Tying ideas together
At this point it is normal to feel uncomfortable and incomplete, like a lot of work has been done to produce a mass of ideas on post-its without any tangible solutions. This high level of ambiguity is expected and the group is reminded that this is part of the process. In order to begin making sense of all the ideas and create potential solutions the group is asked to ‘cluster and headline’.
With the ‘cluster and headline’ technique the group silently clusters all the ideas on post-its into groups with connected ideas. Then they discuss what connects the ideas and write ‘headlines’ that identify the theme in each cluster. This sorts the ideas and information, engages in-depth conversations about what ideas mean, and starts moving the group towards solidifying thoughts about important areas of exploration that may provide solutions for the question(s) presented by the host organization. This process produces initial solution ideas and brings up a lot of questions to be answered in order to move forward. Answering these questions is invaluable.
In order to answer questions developed on the first day and achieve valuable insight into the host organization’s challenges a dinner is held after the first day with members of the host organization. Design Lab participants are not allowed to talk about the ideas developed during the first day (this keeps the ideas safe from premature critical analysis) but they are encouraged to ask questions and talk about the process. The first day dinner has proven to be very valuable for answering questions, getting perspective, and helping steer the creative ideas coming from the Design Lab towards the needs of the organization.
Break on through to the other side
The second day begins with another ‘purge’ and discussion, specifically about information gathered from dinner the night before and to capture ideas participants may have come up with overnight. By starting the second day this way the host organizations question is brought more strongly into focus and the cluster themes that seem to have the most energy and possibilities become clearer. An important question asked at this point is, “What ideas are the best levers for change”? Specifically, we begin to guide the group towards examining the cluster themes to see which ones may generate solutions with the greatest positive impact on other areas. Which lever moves the biggest stone, or which stone causes the most ripples in the pond. This conversation is provoked by asking the group to put the cluster themes into a hierarchy in which the group examines the ideas for greatest impact and puts them in a loose order to work on.
At this point it is important to avoid premature closure on final ideas. The group is encouraged to explore and discuss the ideas they think are the most promising. As they move towards solidifying these ideas we ask that they push the limits of the idea further. To develop significant creative solutions the group explores all the ideas in a single cluster, expands on them, finds connections both within the cluster ideas and in relation to other clusters, pushes the boundaries even further than they already have, and does a ‘plus up’ (improve and expand) on any ideas that have great promise. This is done with each cluster in turn and involves a consistent oscillation between divergent thinking, the production of ideas and information, and convergent thinking, selecting and refining ideas. It’s all done through dynamic facilitated conversation, the management of information and ideas, and by consistently checking ideas against the main problem presented by the host organization to see that ideas are moving in the right direction.
By the end of the second day the essence of the final ideas are present and how they relate to each other and to the host organizations problem question are roughly sketched out. The third day, often a half day, is used to clarify details and solidify the final ideas to be presented to the host organization. In the end there are 5-10 solid solution ideas, 2-5 of which will be breakthrough ideas that, if effectively and strategically implemented, may become true innovations.
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