Each week this semester, the planning demo class will meet as a group and discuss a topic relevant to the class (and hopefully relevant to designers in general). I (Jeremy Alexis, the Demo Advisor) will prepare a few simple slides and a structure for the conversation; the students will provide questions, stories, and challenges. We will use this web log to summarize the discussion – our goal is that it can continue the conversations we have in demo to include alumni, potential students, friends of the school, and the larger design community.
The topic last week was “running good workshops”. The students will be conducting several workshops in the near future, and this seemed like a good time to talk about what works and what does not work when trying to get a group of people to be creative.
Workshops are an increasingly common activity in the design process. They allow the design team to bring together a large group (hopefully from multiple disciplines), and then leverage the “wisdom of crowds” to create new ideas for products, services, and business models. There are many arguments both for and against holding workshops – we did not dive too deeply into this debate. Rather, we just assumed that workshops are a necessary component, and if you run them correctly, they can be very useful.
Designers have not always been seen as workshop facilitators. I am pretty sure that Frank Lloyd Wright did not have his clients and contractors to his office in Oak Park to brainstorm new ideas for houses. Paul Rand was famous for disappearing for several months, and then coming back (well, apparently the clients would have to come to him since he often did not travel) with three potential design solutions.
But as we all know things change. We were once solely responsible for developing creative, path-breaking ideas. Although we are not off the hook for this (clients still want the occasional good idea…), our role has expanded to include facilitating idea generation from different stakeholders and managers. This can actually be more challenging than creating the ideas – it can be really hard to get a group of people (often people that do not see themselves as creative), to withhold judgment, pick up the sharpie, and contribute to the brainstorming session.
Step 1: choose the right type of meeting
There is quite a bit written on how to run a brainstorming session or how to elicit creativity from the unwilling. We did not try to tackle these issues. Instead, this discussion tried to outline a practical guide for making these sessions successful. So, a good starting place is “what type of meeting should we run”. This is an important question, since “brainstorming” is often used at inappropriate times in the design process. The first challenge for planning a meeting is making sure you are planning the right type of meeting. If you need top managers to make a decision, you do not want to spend time creating ideas. This sounds stupidly obvious, but I have seen many occasions when a design team defaults to brainstorming as the key activity in a meeting, even if the outcome of the meeting has nothing to do with brainstorming.
To understand the types of meetings that a design team can run, we will use a 2 X 2 matrix (by the way, if you have an aversion to these, I suggest you never visit this page again, since you will likely see them frequently and in all their glory). On the X axis is understand / make. There are some meetings where the primary goal is learning or information exchange, in other words you are trying to create a common understanding within the group. Other times, the goal is to “do” something, either make a decision or create a set of options and ideas (for those counting, this is the “make” side). On the Y axis, we see that some meetings can be about “arrival”, meaning that at the end of the meeting, we want the whole group to have arrived at the same conclusion, idea, POV, and so on. On the other hand, you can also run meetings where the goals is departure, meaning you do not want everyone to agree at the end, rather, you want to create a diverse set of opinions, ideas, and hypotheses.
The conversation in this class centered on meetings in the “departure / make” quadrant – meetings that intend to motivate and inspire the group to create a diverse set of concepts (or brainstorm!).
Step 2: get your critical success factors in place
Once you have concluded that you need a brainstorm meeting at this point in the process, you next need to make you set the right conditions for the meeting to be successful. The following are “critical success factors” for any brainstorm meeting:
Right mix of people: I can’t stress the importance of this factor enough. You need to work with your corporate contacts to ensure that your invite list includes a mix of people that want to be there (people that have good ideas and will contribute) and have to be there (people that can act as barriers to implementation).
Clear goal (ideally articulated by someone important in the organization)
Good food (and army marches on its stomach, so do brainstorm participants)
Highly structured, newsworthy content
Step 3: design the brainstorm sessions
You can use any type of brainstorm method you want, but no matter your choice, there are several fundamental rules you should follow.
First, make sure that you have design the session for an appropriate idea generation pace. This means balancing the speed of idea generation (not too fast, not too slow), with the quality of output. So, you can be creating good ideas, but if they are coming too slowly, the participants will lose interest. If you create poor ideas quickly (not something to be proud of…), the team will be frustrated with the results. The following diagram shows this balance:
Second, you need to design the session to include time to generate, debate, evaluate, and communicate the concepts. Teams want to do all three; it is up to the facilitator to make sure that teams are in the appropriate mode. However, if you do not plan for all four of these modes, the team will likely go into them anyway, and your timing with be thrown off. I recommend a 45% / 30% / 15% / 10% distribution (so, 45% of any session should be filled by generation). The following diagram shows a framework for meeting design:
Step 3: prepare the manipulatives
How far you go on this step is usually determined by your approach to brainstorming. There are approaches that bring in items like beanbags, magazines, nerf products, red wine, and so on. Other approaches rely only on black sheets of paper and sharpies. I have seen all of these approaches both succeed and fail. It is best to tune you manipulitves to your audience. The following diagram shows a continuum for different types of sheets for capturing ideas:
Step 4: prepare the facilitator
If your critical success factors are in place, and you have good food and content, the job of the facilitator can be easy. However, even with all these elements in place, there is still the need for someone to energize and inspire the group, and then keep them on track. A facilitator should keep a group on target, prevent any one person from dominating, make sure people are documenting their ideas, and work to keep the group on time.
The analogy is well known: brainstorming is like popping pop corn – it starts slowly and then speeds up, but eventually slows down. To manage this, a facilitator needs to be good at asking questions. A good AI machine, asking the following four questions, may make a good facilitator:
“Say more...” The facilitator must try to coax ideas from the group. This is best achieved by saying the open ended phrase “say more...” This challenges the individual or group to further explain and think about their ideas. When asked to refine and elucidate, people need to rely on their creative side to fill in the blank space.
“Build on that” great ideas build on each other. The facilitator should try having the group “build a wall with ideas”, not just lying a bunch of individual bricks on the ground. The goal is to leverage the group dynamic to extend and challenge each individual’s thinking.
“How can we overcome that” frequently you will encounter a difficult group member that utters phrases like “we could never do that” or “that is impossible”. The facilitator can turn this around – usually these people react well when put in a position of authority – give them the opportunity to solve the problem they have stated. This usually helps turn a negative attitude into something more positive.
“One conversation at a time” it is important to not have group members talking over each other. The facilitator must retain order in the group.
Step 5: prepare the team
Often a design team consists of 4 to 10 people. These people will often be at the workshop. Generally, one person will run the workshop. This does not mean the rest of the team should be sitting in the back making fun of the participants. Each member of the team should have a jog. You may include:
Time keeper
Note taker (white board notes, visible to all)
Note taker (typing, capturing as much as possible)
Prep (people working behind the scenes to help get the next activity ready)
Plants (people near important clients making sure they are enjoying themselves and understand everything)
Step 6: finish what you have started
Often, workshops end with the participants feeling excited about the ideas that were created and happy to get to cocktail hour. Every day after the workshop, this enthusiasm fades. To keep the momentum of the project up, the team needs to produce, within one week of the workshop, a “review packet” sent to all of the participants. This should include:
> Summary of content slides
> List of participants
> Idea catalog
> Notes
> Clear next steps
Final thoughts
Designers need to be able to run workshops. For the near term, our corporate friends will expect us to do this well. The tools and techniques presented, when implemented properly, should make workshops more fulfilling for the participants and valuable for the designers. I look forward to any feedback or additional input.
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