Note: This article is part of an experiment with AI, specifically with the DinoBrain tool. The initial version produced by the tool is published in its entirety, and I will be editing it personally, making clear what content is added by tagging (BP).

Importance of creativity in agile teams

Creativity plays a fundamental role in agile teams, as it allows to generate innovative ideas and effective solutions to the challenges that arise in the development of projects. Fostering creativity in these teams provides numerous benefits that contribute to the success and growth of the organization.

Benefits of Fostering Creativity in Agile Teams

When creativity is fostered in agile teams, it opens up a wide range of benefits that directly impact project performance and results:

Generation of innovative ideas: creativity stimulates the generation of fresh, original and out-of-the-box ideas. This allows finding unique and disruptive solutions to complex situations.
Increased collaboration and effective communication: Fostering creativity involves all team members, promoting collaboration and fluid communication. This strengthens team cohesion and promotes synergy among team members.
Efficient problem solving: Creativity helps to face problems from different perspectives, generating optimal solutions. It allows thinking ‘outside the box’ and finding innovative alternatives to the obstacles that may arise.
Greater commitment and involvement: When creativity is encouraged, team members feel valued and their sense of belonging increases. This translates into greater commitment and involvement in the project, which in turn boosts the quality of the work performed.
Development of key skills: Creativity stimulates the development of skills such as critical thinking, adaptability and flexibility, essential competencies in an agile environment.

The role of games in the development of creativity

Games play a fundamental role in the development of creativity in agile teams. These playful activities provide a safe and fun environment where team members can explore new ideas, develop their imagination and challenge their conventional thinking. Games encourage collaboration, the exchange of perspectives and the search for innovative solutions, all in an interactive learning context.

Tools and methodologies to foster creativity in agile teams

Creativity is a fundamental element in agile teams, as it allows them to generate innovative solutions and adapt to changes effectively. In this sense, there are several tools and methodologies that can be used to foster creativity in these teams and thus enhance their performance.

Design thinking: fostering innovation in the creative process

A widely recognized methodology to foster creativity in agile teams is design thinking. This methodology is based on a user-centered approach, which seeks to understand the user’s needs and generate innovative solutions to meet them. Through different stages such as empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping and testing, design thinking encourages the generation of disruptive ideas and different perspectives that drive creativity in the team.

Agile methodology: flexibility and adaptability in the creative approach

Agile methodology is another key tool for fostering creativity in agile teams. This methodology is characterized by its iterative and incremental approach, where collaboration, effective communication and team decision making are encouraged. By adopting agile practices such as Scrum or Kanban, teams can be more flexible and adapt quickly to changes, which facilitates the generation of creative ideas and the constant search for improvements in the development process.

In addition, agile methodology promotes transparency and continuous feedback, which allows to constantly evaluate and improve the ideas and solutions proposed by the team. This boosts creativity by providing opportunities for learning, experimentation and adaptation in the creative process.

Conclusions

In short, having the right tools and methodologies in place is essential to foster creativity in agile teams. Both design thinking and agile methodologies are effective approaches to enhance innovation and flexibility in the creative process. Through these tools, teams can generate disruptive ideas, adapt quickly to change and generate effective solutions to meet user needs. By fostering creativity in agile teams, it promotes collaboration, effective communication and the generation of successful results in project development.

Remember that Asana offers resources and features that can support fostering creativity in agile teams, providing collaborative tools for effective communication and task tracking and management that support agile project development.

Games to foster creativity in agile teams

Games are powerful tools to stimulate creativity in agile teams. Through playful and fun activities, they promote an environment conducive to exploring new ideas, encouraging collaboration and solving problems effectively. In this section, we will highlight three specific games that will help boost creativity within your agile team.

Possibilities game: exploring new ideas and perspectives

The game of possibilities is an activity that invites team members to think outside conventional boundaries. It consists of generating different fictitious or alternative scenarios related to the project or task at hand. Through the exploration of these possibilities, creativity and imagination are boosted, allowing the discovery of new solutions and perspectives not previously considered.

Winner/loser: promoting collaboration and problem solving

The winner/loser game is a dynamic that promotes collaboration and problem solving in the agile team. It consists of posing a challenging situation that requires the participation of all members to achieve a common goal. As they advance in the game, obstacles and challenges are presented that they must overcome together, encouraging creativity to find solutions and strengthening teamwork.

Mixing objectives: stimulating creativity and teamwork

Mixing objectives is a dynamic that seeks to stimulate creativity and teamwork by combining different goals and challenges. Each team member is assigned individual goals and then invited to collaborate and find ways to merge their goals to achieve joint results. This boosts creativity by addressing the need to adapt and mix ideas, generating original solutions and promoting collaboration among team members.

Actions to foster creativity in agile teams

Actions applied to foster creativity in agile teams are fundamental to enhance innovation and creative thinking. Below are some of the most effective actions:

Make time for creativity in the development process.

Sometimes, the fast pace of agile teams can limit the space for creativity. It is important to set aside dedicated times exclusively for generating ideas and exploring new solutions. Establishing specific times for creativity in project planning ensures that it is given due importance and provides an environment conducive to the generation of innovative ideas.

Avoid micromanagement and encourage autonomy and freedom of ideas.

Micromanagement can stifle the creativity and innovativeness of agile teams. It is critical to trust team members by giving them autonomy and freedom to propose ideas and solutions. By allowing them to make decisions and experiment, creativity is encouraged and innovative solutions are fostered. Trust in the team is the basis for developing an environment where creativity flourishes.

Asking why: fostering reflection and critical thinking

To foster creativity in agile teams, it is essential to promote critical thinking. Asking challenging questions, such as ‘why are we doing this this way’ or ‘are there other options we haven’t considered’, stimulates reflection and challenges team members to question existing assumptions. Through this practice, teams can find innovative and creative solutions.

Engage in the decision-making process: drive creative thinking throughout the team.

Promoting the active participation of all team members in the decision-making process is key to fostering creativity in agile teams. By involving all members, you gain diverse perspectives that enrich the creative process and generate more innovative solutions. Actively listening to the ideas and opinions of all team members and fostering a climate of respect and collaboration enhances creative thinking as a whole.

The post Empowering creativity in agile teams through games appeared first on Creative Sensei.

I had the opportunity to ask Simon Sinek that very question: How do I start a movement? Well, I used different words, but if you have a message you want to share with the world, this wording may resonate better.

Simon was being interviewed by professor Eric Koester at the Speaker Series within the Book Creators program at the Creator Institute. He was sharing insights about his writing process, how he is a ‘pressure writer’ who sometimes gets into a plane to get into a flow and write for three hours.

How sometimes he finds a problem, tries to solve it and then share it, in the form of a book, like the problem with trust he reflects on Leaders Eat Last. And how, some other times, he can be talking about some ideas, finding answers to several questions in a book, like in the Infinite Game. I was very fond of the not really competitive environment he described as worthy rivalry (where the opponent helps you be better), as it elicit some particular image I had to depict on my notes:

I was writing a book about creativity and play at the workplace. Well, I had handed in the first draft a few months earlier and was on my way to revision. But during the interview I was granted the opportunity to ask him a question. I felt very honored and a little anxious then. I had been following Simon’s work for years, from the Golden Circle in Start With Why, to his lessons from Leaders Eat Last.

What happened when he spoke made me change course on the book. Now I want to share with you the story I share in the introductory chapter of my book Join The Playful Revolution as he disclosed the secret to starting a movement:

What do you believe in?

Simon Sinek is a leadership expert and the best-selling author of Start With Why and Leaders Eat Last. His 2009 TEDx Talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” with over fifty-five million views, introduces the concept of the Golden Circle. This refers to the way great leaders communicate in a very different way from everyone else, be that Apple or Martin Luther King.

The three elements of the Golden Circle are: why, how, and what. At the core of the approach is starting with why: the company’s purpose, cause, belief, and the reason for it to exist.

In a recent conversation with Simon, I asked him how to start a global playful movement.

“I’m trying to bring more playfulness to the workplace to spark more creativity and innovation, while bringing happiness as well. So, how do you start to create a global movement?” I asked.

Simon paused for a moment to assess the question and then responded.

“I’m a great believer to start with the place that you are good at. I was good at speaking my idea before I was writing about my idea.”

He suggested you pick your preferred format and go with it to hone your thinking: blog, video, podcast, consulting, speaking, etc. Then, he provided an example of how he developed the concept of the Golden Circle, described in detail his book Start with Why.

“I treated it like a science experiment. I didn’t claim to be right. I didn’t claim that I had all the answers. When people would say, ‘will it work in this industry?’ My answer was, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never worked in that industry. Let’s try.’”

He continued, “I was very honest about that. I’m looking for the opportunities for the theory to fail, so I can improve the theory. What ended up happening was that the people who believed in my work gave me entry and tinkered with me. They let me tinker on their companies or their organizations.”

As Simon explained, his format of choice was speaking and he was talking about his ideas in order to refine them, but over time he noticed a shift.

He said, “I stopped talking about what I did and started talking about what I believed. Then, I was more and more being introduced to people who believe what I believe.”During the conversation, I was nodding at his every word. I could not be more in tune with him, but what he said next changed the focus of this book entirely.

“Stop telling people what you want to do and start telling people what you believe in. When you’re talking right now, you don’t really care about innovation. It’s a side effect, it’s a benefit that’s relevant to some people.”

Mmm, that came in as a knock, because I had just written a book about innovation, or so I thought. As soon as he started saying it, I smiled as if my mask had dropped. He could read right through me.

And he carried on.

“You’re in sales mode trying to throw spaghetti against the wall, hoping some of it will stick.”

He got me! I think I blushed a little and there was no place to hide.

He kept reasoning, “but talking about the thing that you believe… You believe in play. You believe that play is really important and we’ve forgotten the joy of play. It turns out that if you can embrace play, it brings all kinds of things: more happiness, it reduces stress, and drives innovation.”

Yes! He articulated it in a much nicer way. I had verbalized something different, but he put the focus on where my heart was, not my words.

“If I’m talking about play and then somebody smiles and goes, ‘you’re right.’ They’re more likely to invite you to figure something out with them. You have to practice talking about the thing you believe, and then saying yes to the people who believe what you believe, and saying no to people who don’t,” he added.

This is why I included this story, to share what I believe in the hope it may resonate with you.

Simon gave me one more example:

“In the early days, when I lived paycheck to paycheck, I didn’t have any money. I needed every client, it was really hard time. I remember word was starting to spread about a thing called “The Why,” and I remember somebody got my phone number. They heard about my work through somebody else I’d worked with, and they got to the phone: ‘I heard about you from [whoever]. Convince me why I should hire you?’ And I said, ‘Don’t.’ Because anybody who said ‘Convince me,’ I knew it was the wrong mindset. I needed somebody who said: ‘I heard what you do, I don’t think it’s perfect, but I think you’re onto something. I’d love to talk to you.’ I said yes to that, even if it paid less money. And so I was very diligent about choosing people to believe what I believe because they were the ones more likely to help spread the idea.”

I Believe

I believe in Play.
I believe that Play is really important and we’ve forgotten the joy of Play.
I believe Play is essential to spark the creative genius of every human.
I believe Play is a great collaboration environment.
I believe we need creativity to solve global problems.
I also believe we need Play to remain healthy and happy.
I believe Play can bring joy back to the workplace.

What do you believe in?

Note: some of the links are affiliate links. That means you pay the same but I get a little money to help support this project (thanks!).

The post How to start a movement and change the world like Simon Sinek appeared first on Creative Sensei.

Disciplines like Futures Design, Prospective and Scenario Planning help to clarify the vision of multiple futures and increase your degree of readiness. They explore the key aspects that impact on your business, the trends and the indicators that they are going in a particular direction. With that initial analysis, they paint different scenarios presenting their particular set of challenges. Thinking of strategies to address those challenges will give you a roadmap to action in case that scenario becomes a reality.

A little research will show a complex body of work, processes and techniques that can feel overwhelming. This article intends to give you the very basics to run your very own Futures Design workshop. Once you are familiar with the process (it is easier than you think), you may want to dive deep into the world of Scenario Planning, Foresight, Prospective and other exotic names for similar processes.  Scenario Planning is the particular flavor of Futures Design you will learn here. But you can gain some insights and understanding from practising first.

What is the Future?

There are infinite possible futures, many plausible, some probable and a few preferable. The only certain thing is that one of those futures will be a reality. 

In the futures cone by Voros you see that, in the present moment, there is one reality taking place, while infinite futures are possible. It is only when time passes that one of them become the reality. You can draw a linear picture of the past, because you know what happened. Projections fail because they estimate the future based on the past trajectory.

In the universe of infinite possible futures, you find a set of bizarre possibilities, more plausible ones, some with more probabilities than others. There are more preferable futures, and if you go idealistic, then there are utopian futures. If you go on the very negative, undesirable futures, you find the dystopian futures. 

Why do you need to design the future?

At the beginning of 2020, I was handing out the report on a prospective (or speculative) future exercise about our industry I had facilitated. I designed the workshops based on the Scenario Planning descriptions by Stadlers (2015) and Wade (2014), and added my playful touch with Dixit cards for scenario design, and LEGO models for challenge identification.

This type of exercise is a mix of observation of trends, design, and future-casting. It requires identifying the major drivers of the changes in the industry you are looking at. Next it is necessary to analyse the directions they can move to (positive and negative). Then, drawing a matrix of impact and uncertainty, with all the drivers. Those with the most impact and uncertainty levels are selected to create possible scenarios combining them all. 

Each scenario will pose a different set of challenges. If you get ready (or design a strategy) for those challenges in as many scenarios as possible, you will be more ready for them. That is, if you include some not so plausible scenarios in the equation.

I had invited participants to think of impactful yet uncertain events. The original exercise aimed at 2030 as the timeline. Since it was an experimental process, we focused on shorter term scenarios, and the most likely (plausible) ones, to gain some practical insights. Then, a global pandemic hit, and made the whole exercise futile… or maybe not -we did consider an economic crisis, though.

Our global society is changing at an increasing speed in complexity and uncertainty, what is commonly called the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) environment. 

The crisis accelerated changes like digital transformation across the globe. And individuals and businesses adapted to the ‘new reality’. 

To me, these events have emphasised the need for a more adventurous design of scenarios (at least one of them) when doing prospective future design, but also, it means that VUCA got even more volatile, and this is the new reality. Jamais Cascio coined the term BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible) as a new framework to replace VUCA:

BANI — Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible — is a framework to articulate the increasingly commonplace situations in which simple volatility or complexity are insufficient lenses through which to understand what’s taking place. Situations in which conditions aren’t simply unstable, they’re chaotic. In which outcomes aren’t simply hard to foresee, they’re completely unpredictable. 

In order to deal with exponential change, you can’t base all your decisions in what you know. There has been a breaking point and you may need to bring together all your resilience, soft skills and creativity to adapt to the new world. 

Seven steps to design the future with scenario planning?

Here is my distillation of Wade’s Scenario Planning with influence of Stadlers’s material. The basic steps are:

1. CONTEXT – Introduce the session motivation, context and goal
2. DRIVERS – Identify business-relevant Drivers 
3. DIRECTIONS – Identify the two future directions of these drivers (+ and -)
4. UNCERTAINTIES – Identify drivers with high impact and uncertainty (Critical Uncertainties)
5. SCENARIOS – Compose 4 possible scenarios with the two most critical drivers.
6. CHALLENGES – Identify key challenges for each scenario
7. STRATEGIES – Identify possible strategies for each challenge

Ideally, you would compose a team with 8-10 participants with different expertise, from technical to business. A first workshop can be run in four blocks of 90’.

Sessions:

• 1 session of workshop approach and identification of drivers
• 2 sessions to identify early indicators and select critical drivers
• 1 session for the development of 2 scenarios and the challenges of different stakeholders

You should follow-up the workshop with regular checkings: monitor the early indicators of each driver, because it indicates that the scenario is getting closer to reality (e.g. from possible to probable).

Step 1 – How to introduce the context and goal

The first step is to decide on a specific goal. You may have some motivation: Maybe you have been in business for a while, and new players are threatening to take away some of your customer base. Is that a trend that will fade or will become stronger? You need to address both possibilities. That would be one key point to communicate.

But, to make the most of the time of the participants, it would be useful to carry out some prospective work beforehand. This would provide people with some extra background information, what are the trends and most relevant drivers of the industry. However, if you have assembled a team with a variety of knowledge, they may be able to share it with the rest to have a rough context.

In this stage, it is also useful to introduce people to the process -definition of futures, methodology, content and structure of the sessions-.

Step 2 – How to identify business-relevant Drivers

Each industry is affected by different drivers. For example, a travel agency may be impacted directly by the economy, whereas the world of Internet of Things may not be as relevant (as for today). 

The first task of the team is to come up with different drivers for your industry. That is, any driver.

TASK 1: LIST

• Setup: give people a pack of sticky notes and a permanent black marker
• Duration: 2’
• Instruction: “Write down in sticky notes any drivers that may impact your industry, one driver per sticky note” 
• Description: people should be writing down the drivers and putting them up on the wall.

TASK 2: ORGANISATION

• Duration: 1’
• Instruction: “Group the sticky notes that describe the same driver -even if with a different name”
• Description: after people have organised the drivers, the facilitator can take one of each and make the final list in another area, separated as if in columns. If there are too many, you can run a voting round to limit them to a manageable number (6-8).

Step 3 – How to identify the future directions of the drivers

TASK 3: DIRECTIONS

• Setup: draw a vertical line with tape under each driver. Make a mark in the middle.
• Duration: 10’
• Instruction: “We are doing this together”, for each driver: “What is the end result if driver XX grows and if it loses steam?”
• Description: if the driver grows in power, that may result on ZZ dominating the space, whereas, if it loses steam, a potential threat (or a promising advance) just disappears. The facilitator will write both results on sticky notes and will put the positive on top of the driver’s vertical line, and the negative at the bottom.

TASK 4: EARLY INDICATORS

• Duration: 2’ per driver (10-15’)
• Instruction: “What would be the events that get us closer to each direction? For example, if a Bigtech is coming to your industry to dominate it, the first event or indicator could be that they buy a company of your industry.”
• Description: This would be conventional brainstorming, with the facilitator taking note. It is better to work with one direction at a time. The outcome is a set of drivers to track periodically, and a series of events to look for as early indicators that the result of that driver is approaching. It is convenient to record this for future reference (I normally take pictures).

Step 4 – How to identify drivers with high impact and uncertainty or Critical Uncertainties

TASK 5: UNCERTAINTY MATRIX

• Setup: Draw on a panel an L shape, with Impact on the left (- at the bottom and + on top), and Uncertainty at the bottom (- on the left, + on the right).
• Duration: 5’-10’
• Instruction: “Place the drivers in the matrix, according to the degree of impact in your business and uncertainty about their realisation”.
• Description: they will do this as a group, with two or three placing the drivers on the matrix, but then devoting some time to clarify any disagreement in the criteria. After they are done, the focus should be the top-right part of the matrix: the drivers with most impact and higher level of uncertainty. 

The rationale behind this is: if it does not impact you, don´t worry, if it is impactful but certain… then plan accordingly – you know it is coming, but you don’t need this exercise for it. Now, if it impacts you but is uncertain… you really want to explore it.

If there are more than three or four, you may want to run a voting round to pick the top 2 (three at most) to move through the exercise.

Step 5 – How to compose possible scenarios with the most critical drivers.

You bring two drivers, with both their positive-negative directions (towards more or less) which generate 4 scenarios. 

Three driver’s directions would generate 8 scenarios. For an initial exercise with limited time, you may choose to focus on the 2 most relevant or with the greatest impact as you voted before. You can explore the rest in follow up sessions. 

Now, the way I suggest you compose the scenarios is using Dixit cards for inspiration. I have used the game Dixit for a variety of things, and scenario planning is one of them. 

TASK 6: VISUAL SCENARIO

• Setup: split the group in teams and provide each team with a set of Dixit cards (at least 20), an Scenario template (an A3 sheet as in the image below), sticky notes and permanent black markers. Prepare the sheets with the chosen drivers directions in the Drivers box: that is the scenario we are planning for.
• Duration: 10’-15’
• Instructions: “You have a choice of images to pick from. Think of the driver-direction and pick a couple of images that resonate with it.”
• Description: People will select a visual representation that matches the driver. Depending on time, and the number of drivers, they can work together, one by one, or divide the work.

TASK 7: SCENARIO DESCRIPTION

• Duration: 10’-15’
• Instructions: “Explain the scenario using the images as a metaphor”
• Description: People will have to improvise a verbal explanation, using the images as a prompt. That way they will shape the scenario in a storytelling form. After explaining it to the group, they should summarise it on a sticky note. 

Step 6 – How to identify key challenges for each scenario in futures design

Having listened to the scenario description, everyone will have a more specfic idea of the scenario. Enough to put themselves into it, with a particular role: clients, employees, or any other stakeholder.

In this step, participants will try to think as the stakeholders and spot the main challenges they would face in the particular scenario.

TASK 8 – A DAY IN THE LIFE

• Setup: each team of participants will receive a bunch of LEGOs (no more than 50 pieces per person is needed, maybe less), a template for challenges as in the image below, sticky notes and a permanent black marker.
• Duration: 15’
• Instruction: “Build a model of a day in the life of stakeholder XX in the scenario YY”
• Description: It is best to build a model individually, thus, participants can work in parallel, and divide the work. If there are not enough role-scenarios for each, team members can work on the same, then share them and build a common one to share with the group.

TASK 9 – CHALLENGES

• Duration: 10’
• Instruction: “You need to write as many challenges as possible for a particular stakeholder in a particular scenario, and then you will move to the next one”
• Description: A team or participant -depending on numbers- will focus on a stakeholder-scenario at a time. They will have about 1-2’ to brainstorm the challenges they think they will face. Then they will move onto the next stakeholder-scenario, and so on. If you run three rounds, each stakeholder-scenario will have a variety of challenges.

TASK 10 – PRIORITISE

• Setup: place the challenges in the wall and give voting dots to participants (one per stakeholder-scenario)
• Duration: 3’
• Instruction: “You need to vote for the most relevant challenges”
• Description: Participants will have to vote for the most relevant challenges, which will provide a priority list.

Step 7 – How to identify possible strategies for each challenge of each scenario?

This is the final stage of the scenario planning exercise. By now, people are familiar with the context, drivers, scenarios and the specific challenges or particular stakeholders. It is solution time.

You can use a table like below to organise the solutions.

TASK 11 – STRATEGIES

• Setup: sticky notes and permanent black markers
• Duration: 10’
• Instructions: “How might we prepare for challenge XX?”
• Description: Participants will solve one particular challenge at a time. Depending on time, they can work in teams or individually. You run a first brainwriting sprint for 1-2’, then everybody move to the next challenge. Rinse and repeat a few times. You may want to organise and prioritise the strategies, or leave them all for later. In any case, you will end up with a set of strategies to respond to the challenges.
• Will my business be future proof after scenario planning?

Nobody can predict the future, but the exercise can give you some indicators to monitor, and some challenges to be prepared for. Ideally, you keep observing, and updating the exercise periodically.

If you keep track of the early indicators, you can start applying the strategies you already thought of to solve the challenges posed by that scenario. It will always be better than see it coming and doing nothing.

Should you design the future alone or in a team?

Ideally, you would gather a multidisciplinary team, both in terms of knowledge domain -tech, business, etc.- and thinking styles -imaginative, analytical, optimistic, pessimistic, and so on. In the scenario design phase you need people who can explain the context, as well as people who can think outside the box, imagining worlds that are not yet here.

In the phase where you choose the key drivers, the collective knowledge would be most powerful. The same way that, to choose the key challenges, people with a strategic vision may contribute more.

Then again, other people may be invited to generate ideas to solve the selected challenges…

If you are forced to work alone, you may need to use techniques like De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats to analyse each scenario with a different focus.

How long does it take?

The scenario planning and challenge identification can be done in one day (6 effective hours). You can break it down in two days, three hours each, or, as I have, in 4 sessions of 90’. However, it is best to go with either format in a very short span. I believe it is most effective to do it in one or two days.

This part should be followed up with an ideation workshop 3-6 hours, to find solutions to the most critical challenges in the different scenarios. If doing parallel team storming sessions, you can cut down the time, as long as you have enough participants. 

Ideally, a team of 4-6 people can generate several ideas within 15’ of team storming dedicated to a unique challenge. If you have 4 scenarios and 3 top challenges in each, that could take 4-6 hours (including breaks… 12 ideation sprints may be really taxing). Divide by 2 if you have double the people…

Where do I learn more about Futures Design or Scenario Planning?

Here your have my top 5 resources in complexity order, feel free to explore them in any other sequence:

1. Strategy 101 – Scenario Planning (Christian Stadler) – This is one of the first videos I watched to learn how to do scenario planning. In less than 10’ it gave me an overview of the general process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAkCUTgUi7I
2. Woody Wade: “Scenario Planning” – Thinking Differently about Future Innovation – This video was the main source for the workshop design you have read about here. ​​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKhUKHzE8hk
3. Woody Wade “See Your New Normal” (free ebook) – Wade explain forecasting with a 1-2 year horizon due to covid instead of 8-10 years. https://www.woodywade.com/ebooks/see-your-new-normal
4. Actionable Futures Toolkit – A toolkit created by designers (you get to download the session canvases), explained in their web. I found it after I had run my workshop, and did a test on remote with it. My recommendation is that you gain some confidence with a simple workshop and then ‘graduate’ to something like this. Of course, if you are an experienced facilitator, you may be already familiar with some of the techniques, and it will be easier for you. https://futures.nordkapp.fi/
5. Future life (Spanish) – This is a professional toolkit to design and facilitate workshops. It includes a variety of techniques and resources for you to choose from and create ad-hoc workshops, and spice them up if you repeat with the same group. It builds on Element 4, a Design Thinking toolkit, that can be used in combination with this for the ideation part (solving the problems you may envision). Only in Spanish at the moment. https://element4.es/futuro/

@Creativesensei 2022

The post How to future proof your business with simple scenario planning  appeared first on Creative Sensei.

Here you can find the top five activities to guide your first steps activating your team creativity: improvisation, story dice, provocation, brain-writing and SCAMPER. These cover playful approaches to warmup the creative muscles, generate and expand disruptive ideas.

I have included them in my book Join The Playful Revolution – How To Bring Creativity and Play to the Workplace, where you can find some more detailed descriptions of some techniques such as brain-writing. You will also find a couple of bonus techniques not included in the book, for your eyes only. I hope you find these useful.

By the way, if you are looking at ways to facilitate group creativity in a remote setting, her you may find some useful information: Remote Team Creativity.

(Note: Some of the references in this article may contain affiliate links, which means if you buy the product you are supporting this project with a small commission at no cost for you).

Activity 1: Improvisation “Yes, and”

I borrowed this technique from improv comedy (Hough, 2011). A very important principle is that in improv comedy, they expect you to make your teammates look good. This, in exchange, builds trust. And it requires empathy too.

The technique I use basically consists of one participant starting to build a story with any statement. It can be something mundane, the first thing they did that morning, for example.

• Participant 1: “This morning, when I woke up, I did not want to get up because I felt terribly tired”

Then, the next participant continues by saying “Yes, and xxx”, and so on.

• Participant 2: “Yes and, I slammed the alarm clock across the room when it rang”
• Participant 3: “Yes and, because it was summer, I had left the window open”
• Participant 4: “Yes and, the alarm clock fell through the window all the way to the ground”

The last participant will say “Yes, and YYY”, but will try to close the story.

• Participant 5: “Yes and, I live on a second floor, and I heard somebody whining and cursing, so I switched the light off”

The whole point here is to build on your predecessor by adding to the story. This approach will neutralize the “Yes, but” attitude you may find when offering a new idea. The rule requires that you accept your partner’s proposition as is, and add value to it. No “But”, just “And”.

If you have created an initial story with a team, using the “Yes, and” framework, then you can challenge them with variations, depending on time availability:

• Retell the story in half the time, which will force you to leave things out.
• “I woke up very tired”
• “and, I slammed the clock”
• “and, the window was open”
• “and, the clock fell through”
• “and, nobody died”
• Retell the story to foreigners, or five-year-old children (which may require you to double up on expressivity). Do you want to try it?

Apart from the benefits of fostering collaboration, by active listening and communicating, this technique develops storytelling and creativity on the spot. To me it is one of the most complete of all.

If you do this periodically, you may find that you interiorize the principles and it will transfer to how you receive everyone else’s idea in a day-to-day context. This is the very essence of a safe environment to innovate. It is also cheap, easy and fun.

Activity 2: Story dice for everything

You can use improv as an icebreaker on its own, and in combination with story dice, using the dice images as a story prompt.

I first came across story dice when looking at games and agile retrospectives. Many people were using Rory Story Cubes, a set of nine dice with different icons in them, representing basic concepts (foot, face, light bulb, etc). There are alternatives of different brands, and you can make your own with permanent markers over blank dice, or DIY paper dice too. Dave Birss has created a free beautifully designed online set for remote sessions, that lets you choose between five or nine dice.

Teams are using story dice in retrospectives, when talking about the past project or sprint, but also for planning the next stage or the future of the team. You can draw some inspiration from Sumit Sethi’s approach that he shared in a Linkedin post:

• People take turns rolling four normal dice. If they get a six, they get to roll the story dice.
• The storyteller throws all nine dice from the set and has to use at least five to tell their story. They will share their life during the project or sprint, and it can be positive or about something that needs improvement, or both.
• They play until everyone has told a story.

Although it worked for Sumit’s team, many people may be caught by surprise the first time. Using them playfully first, as an icebreaker, makes everyone familiar with the mechanics of the dice and storytelling. Later they can then focus on the project stories when using them in a retrospective.

Some dice based icebreakers could be:

• Throw the dice and pick one to share some anecdote from your childhood. This allows teams to get familiar with visual metaphors and stories, as well as getting to know each other.
• In groups of three, throw three dice and each person will tell a story based on the image. Person One, will tell the beginning, Person Two, will continue it, and Person Three will finish it. The challenge is linking the image to the overall story. This is also performed using the “Yes, and” approach. It builds listening and creativity, and makes for fun stories without fear.
• The whole team tells a story with one dice each. You need to divide the group in three sections, so section one tells the beginning, section two, the middle, and section three, the end. In this case, you are creating a collective story, with a very diverse pool of storytellers. This exercise is basically the improv exercise mentioned earlier, but using the randomness of the dice to make it even more challenging (and fun).

This is a combined exercise that develops creativity, story-telling, empathy, collaboration and visual language skills. If you were to use only one practical activity from this book, this should be it.

Activity 3: Provocation

Provocation is a technique very well documented by Edward de Bono, with several variations. My favorite one is to take a regular and true statement, and transform it into something radical, exaggerated, inverted or impossible: i.e., regular statement “companies have employees” → provocation “a company without employees” (I know, there are several types, it is just an example).

Anouk Suñer-Rabaud, in the course material of Creative Thinking at Universidad Oberta de Cataluña, suggests other examples: “Skates are hammered on the floor”, “students teach the teacher.” You then get these statements to generate ideas that will make the statement true. What can we create/do for that statement to be true? i.e. following the example “a company without employees” –> “a company that hires freelancers”.

Instead of having to generate hundred of ideas in order to get the obvious ones out of the way, these provocations open more original paths, short-cutting the process a little.

You can use this technique for your individual thinking, but it can be introduced right before any ideation session to get people in disruptive mode. It is a good primer to take people out of their standard way of thinking.

Activity 4: Brainwriting

Let’s assume that you know the essence of brainstorming (that is: a group of people calling out ideas, while someone is taking notes, and yes, you are expected to suspend judgement…). The technique is credited to Alex Osborn. This format tends to favor the most vocal types during the idea generation phase. Also, when it is time to vote, if done on sight, there might be some pressure to vote for the idea of the boss or the dominant voices.

To save the hassle, and have everyone be engaged and contributing, you can run a quick brain-writing session instead:

• Your participants should be equipped with sticky notes and thick, black permanent markers.
• They need to be instructed to write one idea per sticky note and in capital letters.
• You set the timer up (three to five minutes), get everyone ready, and go.
• They collect their sticky notes after time is up, and put them up on the wall.
• Now you give them time to organize, take away duplicates, categorize.
• And finally, you give them a few dots to vote for their favorite ideas. For 3-6 participants, 3 dots per person would be enough, maybe 4-5 if they are 8-10 participants.

And all can be done in silence.

This technique evens up the participation. You get lots of ideas in a very short period of time, and there is no time wasted arguing about meaningless points. You also obtain a rough evaluation /selection of ideas. There are more sophisticated techniques to evaluate ideas, like an impact/viability matrix (or more like return/costs in the business world) but, depending on context, you get a quick and dirty first set of promising ideas.

Now, this technique works at any level of the hierarchy. I know it is a speedy process and some ideas or concepts might benefit from a little further discussion. Your participants may need that time, so you may consider planning your session with a little ‘free time’ for that spontaneous discussion to take place. Alternatively, just as you voted on preferred ideas, you may let people vote on ideas they would like to discuss further, and give them time to do just that.

Activity 5: SCAMPER

When you do a quick brain-writing or brainstorming session, you first go after the low hanging fruit. Since there is some time pressure, you suggest the first things that come to mind. Invariably, those tend to be the ideas that are most obvious. The more you dig, the more variety you find. That is why originality is a numbers game: the more ideas, the most likelihood of original thinking.

SCAMPER is an acronym created by Bob Eberle that summarizes certain actions used in the technique: substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, reverse.

This technique starts with a product or idea and explores it systematically, by going over every action, with several questions, and coming up with several answers. For example, if we start with a frying pan:

• Substitute. What can I substitute? The handle, the frying side, the screw that keeps them together… What do I substitute if for? The handle, with a clamp (something to hold it with), the frying side, with a metallic lid.
• Combine. What can I combine it with? Maybe an attached stove or oil dispenser.
• Adapt. How can I adapt it? Vertical handle for very small kitchens.
• Modify. What can I modify or magnify? Changing the shape to make star-shaped fried eggs…or make it extensible.
• Put to another use. Use it to add some weight on top of a sandwich that is on another pan.
• Eliminate. What can you remove? The handle. By making sure the exterior always remains cold, you can pick it up by hand.
• Reverse. What can you invert or reorder? First thought: using the handle to heat things up… that is, making a handle that can contain liquid and is fire resistant, so you can heat the handle up.

With this systematic approach, we are generating ideas on demand (deliberate creativity), regardless of our own perceived sense of creative skill. It is a creative confidence builder, and a good training exercise. But if we start from an initial provocation round, people may loosen up a bit and become more adventurous in their propositions. Of course, being a tool, it is not compulsory to use all the verbs (all the steps described by the acronym), but a little full practice may be helpful at the beginning.

This technique is both suited to individuals and teams, and mixes very well with provocation.

BONUS 1 : Teamstorming

Juan Prego, author of the book “Teamstorming”, gives his own touch to systematic group-storming. In the book he provides a unique blueprint with up to six rounds, generating ideas individually, using sticky notes and the rule “one idea in one sticky note”. In every round, each participant moves to another section of the wall and starts from the sticky notes that the earlier participant left there. It follows some of the actions of SCAMPER, but the book gives you the blueprint of the whole session, which also includes a few idea evaluation steps.

I have facilitated a session like this with a small group of 4 business development people, who generated more than 100 ideas in 15 minutes. You need at least 3 people to make it work, but it is a format that can be easily scaled up. I have run a session with more than 30 people and it went smoothly.

In his book, Juan moves from ideation to an evaluation stage. The first step involves voting for the favorite ideas, if there are too many. Then, the selected ones are placed on a matrix according to their level of originality and applicability. Aiming to be disruptive, he adds a step where the most original ideas that are least applicable get a little think through to make them applicable. You ask “How can we make this possible?”. Finally, depending on the goal, you select an area of the matrix to take action on, more evolutive or disruptive.

BONUS 2: Six thinking hats

The technique Six Thinking Hats was developed by Edward de Bono in a book by the same name and it has been applied to corporate meetings all over the world. Although it can also be used for generating ideas, I find it specially useful to enhance the winning propositions. I would use it after the core of the ideation has taken place and you have selected a small set of winning ideas. Then you apply this technique to each and everyone of the finalists to enrich the information and challenge potential caveats.

The technique involves the team sequentially discussing the idea focusing in different aspects, according to a given hat color they are wearing (figuratively, or literally):

• White: is the hat of the facts, data and information. You may want to add factual information you have about the idea, or voice concerns about the data you don´t yet have. It refers to what you know.
• Red: is the hat of feelings and emotions. You empathize with the possible recipient of the idea, or how it will make you feel executing it. It refers to what you/or the user feel.
• Green: is the hat of the new ideas. With this hat, you may propose or enumerate the most disruptive ideas of the ideation phase. If you are using the technique as ‘standalone’, then this is brainstorming time.
• Black: this is the negative hat. You find everything that is wrong with the idea. However, instead of dwelling in it, you have to tweak the idea to overcome the cons. This is a critical hat to make a better case for the idea, so I perceive it as a positive contribution in the process.
• Yellow: this is the positive hat. You find all the benefits of the idea, assuming everything will go well. With this hat, you find the core value proposition for the idea.
• Blue: is a big picture and organizational hat. On one hand, it means to manage the session, make sure you go through all points, everyone contributes, but also, that it makes sense, that the final ‘proposal’ includes all parts.

You can use it individually, as a systematic evaluation tool or in teams. When in teams, you can either assign everyone a different hat, and have a turn to express their views, or you can get the whole team visit each hat and contributing to that perspective. The latter will have a lot of educational value, since we know who are the always optimistic and the eternal critic.

Books & resources

Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko

Gamestorming, by Sunny Gray

Lateral Thinking Edward de Bono

The Improvisation Edge: Secrets to Building Trust and Radical Collaboration at Work by Karen Houghes (2011)

Teamstorming by Juan Prego – 2018 –

Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono

Online Story Dice by Dave Birss

Rory Story Cubes –

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Creativity is a talent with which all people are born and that some of us have something rusty. To activate it, in addition to using creative techniques, we can play games, modify our environment and drink beer in a very specific way.

Apart from the creative materials, I have been able to experiment with activities and board games that serve to develop empathy, collaborations, storytelling, visual language and creativity (divergent thinking in particular). These skills are the necessary pillars to work optimally in innovation processes such as design thinking , and it is necessary to activate them systematically.The key in all these initiatives is to look for the loopholes through which we can operate, instead of looking at what other people are doing and lamenting that we can’t. If we can’t have a creative room, let’s have a creative box with the same philosophy and bring it to the meeting rooms. And now that we can’t have face-to-face meetings, let’s take them to virtual spaces such as collaborative whiteboards (Mural or Miro type).

With these playful activities we not only increase the possibilities of innovating, but those who participate know each other better, feel better and are activated, so they are also more productive and productive; and if you find yourself obliged to work remotely, then you need to find the corresponding alternatives, even if they are not identical. The approach is “How could I…?” applied to the creative process.

How beer can make you more creative

Creative techniques are not enough. Creative processes are not enough. I have been able to see it live and direct countless times. If you put any ten people in a room and brainstorm ideas, I could predict how original they would be, based on their profiles. If they all look alike, have the same seniority, training and tasks…, it is likely that their proposals are limited to a similar scope, and this does not change in the duration of a one-hour session, or a design thinking process .

The brain generates new ideas by combining elements. If the pieces you have are similar, you will be able to find fewer combinations than if they are numerous and varied. In other words, the more experiences, data, knowledge and insights you have, the more combinations are possible and therefore the more original your ideas can be.

For example, so as not to have to go very far, and within your usual routine –so that it doesn’t take you time–, the next time you go out for a beer, have a drink or have a family reunion, try something different. Whether the first beer is of another brand than usual, or the wine, the water, the starters, the main course or the dessert, it doesn’t matter. “Feed” your curiosity. It can work with new readings, music and walk routes.

If you get in the habit of trying new things every day or every week, you will be giving your neurons new information to process and a new pattern to match. As a personal recommendation, make sure that these new things are legal and do not endanger your personal integrity or that of others!

Resilience needs creativity

For years I have been clear that the world needs a lot of creativity to solve global problems. Now, in addition, we are in a difficult moment for many people and it is time to reinvent themselves at full speed, as individuals and as companies.

In the latest Linkedin Learning 2021 report, resilience takes first place for the most important skill to develop this year. In the text they quote Gemma Leigh Roberts, who explains it this way: “Improving resilience is about creating your advantage at work. […] It’s not just about learning how to cope exceptionally well with challenges, but also learning how to thrive and reach your full potential.”

In other words, resilience is our ability to withstand the storm and reinvent ourselves. Creativity is the basic skill to be able to do it and, play, the safest context to develop it.

Reference

Article first published here:

PINO, Begoña. «Creatividad: es momento de la ludorrevolución (#playfulrevolution)». COMeIN [en línea], junio 2021, no. 112. ISSN: 1696-3296. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7238/c.n112.2145

The post Why do we need a playful revolution in the workplace? appeared first on Creative Sensei.

Nope, it is not a typo. I have just coined the term Designeer to name Tenny Pinheiro, designer and engineer, a very rare combination, who is author of The Service Startup  book and founder of the Design Sprint School, among many other enterprises.

He is a creator and maker since childhood, and has created the Design Sprint School, as a way to democratize Design Sprints, a specific form of Design Thinking oriented to get results very quick. In the School, students learn both his Service oriented model, and the google Ventures model proposed in the book Sprint (J. Knapp), since the approach is to pick and mix whatever suits your project best. He is now very involved in developing the app Kind, using AI to foster deeper personal insights and connections.

Interview summary

As I am interested in getting to know the minds of creative people, and also the experience of helping others to became more creative, I threw a bunch of questions to Tenny in a very cheeky way, and he has been kind enough to respond. It may be a long read, but it is worth it.

Tenny started his first business at age 13, taking the competition out of business (and himself), and he is on a mission to democratize Design, taking it to regular people who can understand and use its principles in their businesses. He believes creativity starts way beyond creative talent or process, with the freedom you give yourself to take risks.

” It’s a hard thing to do, because everybody’s judging. So the world is out there trying to make sure that you are uncomfortable in giving yourself any type of freedom. When I say freedom, I’m talking about this detachment from what other people will think, or even what other people should expect from it.”

So Tenny talks about giving yourself permission to connect with your talent, akcnowledging that everyone has a talent for something, then developing the talent through a creative process. So his definition of creativity starts with freedom, then talent, then process.

Then we talked about “practice”, and in the Design world that involves a lot of compromises with constraints, that many times make the final design better.

Tenny started as engineer but learned to be a designer on the job, so he is quite good at both, however, he thinks “designers need to understand a little bit better but  I don’t think they need to become engineers: we need designers. And I think we need engineers and you have to be good at your craft.” But, for people like him, with this dual skillset, he can see a bright future in AR and VR.

His definition of design is a quote from someone else: “Design is this ability that we have to just transform situations”. In this regard, he had the opportunity to work in Africa years ago, and he had to change the framework they used. The initial challenges were of a complex web, but they realised people were living with scartcity and they needed to change focus, do field research and try to add value to users in their context. Having an experience similar to that can be very enriching.

He is committed to making design accessible to everyone, by going to the core of the tools and explaining them in a simple, clear way, with zero jargon. It is natural if you are a professional, pushing the field forward, that sometimes things get a little more complicated, and you need a deeper understanding, but Pinheiro believes that some other professionals are trying to make it look more complicated in order to justify their work, in situations when it is not so.

In his quest to democratize design he created a very affordable online program, at Design Sprint School, and also made his Minimum Viable Service model open source. He created the MVS as a plugin for the Lean Startup framework, which he found very scientific but lacking on user focus.

As for the Design Sprint School, the aim is to train people both in Service Design Sprints and Google Venture Sprints. But they train them also in UX tools, and specially the roots of Design. The goal is that students don´t just execute a Sprint Agenda but understand it, can discuss it and change it, mixing techniques from both frameworks and more when the project requires it. When you need to get to know the people you want to serve better, or define the challenges better, then MVS model is more appropriate, since it is research intensive. When you know your problem and your customers, but need to tests ideas, then GVS is more appropriates, since it is prototype intensive.

The course is composed of videos, some audios and readings that complement the videos, and slow down the pace to allow for reflection. There are lots of practices you have to submit in order to certificate and actually learn the methods. But Tenny emphasizes that being a sprint facilitator is not about being an extrovert bubbly type. It is a skill open to everyone, and the practical exercises will give you the grounds to facilitate.

To finish off, Tenny’s advice for anyone entering the job market now would be “keep an eye on tech, because we are heading to a future where companies are valuing design so much that designers are part of the team and they are working side by side with engineers.”

Full interview

Disclaimer: this is a lighty edited transcript, what means that the structure may be a little raw and there may be some typos.

CHILDHOOD – I would like to know how you got here, and will start at the beginning: What type of child were you?

This goes back to my entrepreneurial roots because I was a child that was very active. I had a very active mind in the sense that I was always challenging myself trying to find new ways to do things.

There is this fun story:

When I was 13, my soccer ball ended up at a lady’s house. We were not even supposed to be playing at that field and she ended up puncturing my ball. It was kind of like all hell broke loose because we were playing soccer, and we didn’t have any way to do this anymore. So me and my friends were trying to come up with a plan to just get some revenge. She had this small ice cream parlor in the neighborhood and my idea was:

.- “What if we sell ice cream, but half of the price, and we just run her out of business?”.

And everybody liked it. It was better than throw fireworks at her house or the other options that we had on the table. So we went for it. So, long story short, two months later she went out of business and we were selling a lot of ice creams because we are doing prime quality at half price. And she couldn’t keep up with that. But the truth of the matter is neither could I. Because the way we were doing it was that I was borrowing money from my grandma. I was putting a lot of money into ingredients and selling it for that price tag. The money was not able to go back so we were not making any money. We were actually losing money every month. It was a lot of fun because we  were not quite interested in the money. But then after a while, it became clear that we would have to shut down. And also, she asked my grandma that we shut down the business. I was reluctant  at the beginning to do that. But then my grandma told me that she wouldn’t lend me money anymore to buy ingredients and that business was over.

That goes to explain a little bit of my nature as as a person that is always searching for something that will give me a new occupation. Like it will occupy my mind with something else and challenge me to do something that I never tried before, this type of thing.

So that was my first business and I was amazed with the fact that I could get money from people for something that I was building and that feeling carried forward to my next initiative.

CREATIVE CONFIDENCE  – What does creativity mean for you?

That’s interesting because to me it’s not about talent or about process. It’s more about how you allow yourself to feel free enough to take a risk but invoicing what you’re really thinking about a situation. So it starts not with talent or even process. To me it starts before that, it starts with freedom, the freedom that you give yourself before talent or process.

—- Like when you are studying music and you believe deep in your heart  that you suck at creating something. You never give yourself the freedom to try and to fail, then it doesn’t matter if you have talent. So it doesn’t matter if you if you have a process. You’re too afraid to even try to run the process and you don’t believe you have a talent. So it doesn’t matter if you really have if you don’t believe you have or you don’t have.

So that’s the thing about creativity. To me, it’s very strongly related to freedom, the freedom that you are able to give yourself. It’s a hard thing to do, because everybody’s judging. So the world is out there trying to make sure that you are uncomfortable in giving yourself any type of freedom. And that sucks, because it makes people actually believe that they are not talented, believe that they can’t learn a process or believe that they should move on to other things. But that’s the role of the world. This is how it’s very oppressive out there.

Like artists. They are not known for having lived a fulfilling life, for the most part, right? If we see history, how many suffering can you find when you read artists’ biographies and stuff. That is because those people rarely had their work recognized or awarded in a way that was fulfilling enough for them during their lifetime.

CONNECTING WITH THE TALENT (THE CREATIVITY)

So when I say freedom, I’m talking about this dettachment from what other people will think, or even what other people should expect from it. And how can you keep moving forward? Even if you’re just operating inside your own bubble? Because it’s very easy thing to burst that bubble. Even if you know that you’re the only one believing in yourself. Those are the people that can first recognize the talent that they have. Everyone has a talent for something. Most people are not able to connect with their talent because they don’t give themselves the freedom to make that connection.

People  that can give themselves some space, some kind of detachtment from what other people, society, Mom and Dad, peers, are thinking.. they are the ones that are able to suddenly find inside themselves that they actually have a talent and then develop that talent with process.

So I would add that word over there: freedom, talent, process. So that’s what creativity is to me.

PRACTICE – Can you talk to me about “Practice” in whatever way you interpret the words regarding creativity or design or skill acquisition.

So, just to follow up with this thing about freedom and creativity, the practice or the design practice.  It takes creativity, of course, but I think designers have the worst in this situation. And I’ll tell you why. Artists sometimes they just say you can say “fuck it” and just dettached from reality,  “this is my art if you don’t like it, whatever, you know, I don’t need you to like it, somebody’s going to like it”.  So I will just exercise my creativity and blind myself to things that are supposed to haunt me or to fight against my work or this type of stuff. Because I will just live inside my own bubble. And I will always find people that are able to give me praise or able to like my work, there will always be people that will like my line of work. So it’s not easy to become that, to be able to dettach from the system and live in the bubble, mainly because it’s hard to find revenue streams or ways to sustain yourself and their design.

COMPROMISE AND CONSTRAINTS – DESIGNERS

So designers are those artists that they are willing to compromise a little bit. So they are willing to expand a little bit that bubble. And so in a way that the boundaries of the bubble dig, it gets pretty close to the system. And that, space or sometimes  even intersects with the system in a way that you are not only creating inside your own bubble if they don’t think the things that you believe are right or wrong, but you are creating based on a specification based on some constraints. And that’s a hard thing to do sometimes, because you  have to realize that you’re not in total control of the creative process.

It’s a different type of creative process that you have to deal with. When you are designing, it’s so much more collective creative process with much less ownership, much less signature. Not many people think about that. But like design can also be read as “the sign” where you’re not signing anything you’re actually designing. So it’s very different from the path of the artist. So that’s, that’s how I think design practice can be for some people very interesting. Because they are the ones that are really willing to compromise because they don’t want to follow the path of the artist and live inside the bubble and protect the bubble of at all costs. And they are willing to work with constraints. They even like the constraints there. So those people the right people choose go down this path.

If you don’t like to compromise, if you don’t believe in your hearts that constraints can make your design better, then you shouldn’t go there. Because I think I believe that every designer has already had this experience of a constraint, changing the first propositions that this designer created into a better form or into a better solution. So you saw your first idea, you received a lot of constraints to work around it, because you prototyped it and it didn’t work. And then you saw your last idea like the one that was actually implemented. And when you compare them both usually you think “Thanks God for those constraints, because I like this one much better”.

I don’t think you’ll find a designer that hadn’t experienced this transition. Enough to be confident that those constraints, they may suck right now, and they may create some friction, but they will ultimately make the design better. So that’s how I differentiate between artists -god bless them, because we definitely need them- from designers, which are people that are using creativity in a different way, or a different type of creativity.

MISSION – What are your aspirations or mission like?

During the last decade, one of my main aspirations or mission was to democratize services and create a way for people like my niece (14 years old), to make sure that she could use UX tools and services in whatever business she’s thinking of creating.

I created my first business when I was 13. And I was clever enough to use any of the design tools that are used today. I don’t see any reason why kids can’t use a design tool. Kids can code, they can use it as a design tool. They are coding, they are creating apps, they are creating games, they are creating services. So why not make it available to those people cannot really grasp it.

And instead of having to grow and opt in for a design college program, study for four years, graduate,  then opt in for a master degree in desing for two years, graduate, and then find a job at IDEO.  Its fine if that’s what they need, they want to be very specialized, they want they want to rethink the field, they want to contribute with research, there’s going to evolve the field. That’s what they should do.

But there are some people that just need the tools. Not everybody is inventing a toolbox, but actually, everyone can use a hammer right or everyone can use like a screwdriver. And that was my vision for services. I get it that my  niece is not contributing to finding the next way we use to depict a user journey. But she doesn’t want to. She just wants to create her startup and she’s passionate about creating change in her neighborhood.

How can I help her to do that with the tools that I know?. And turns out, she uses a bunch of those tools very successfully, with very creative ways of  depicting the information that she was gathering in conversations, which is very good at having as well. So ended up in another prequel. So that was my vision that I pursued for the last 10 years.

DESIGN SPRINT SCHOOL – How do you create a successful online school?

I came to Silicon Valley five years ago, and I decided to go back to my roots as a as an entrepreneur. I felt that with the publication of the Design Sprint School I had my “contribution share” checked?  I wrote six books about it, my books are everywhere, and then, also published an online school which is a five star rated online school at a very accessible price. I have zero complaints and people just love the content. They love the way I explain things, the way I make it easy to understand as if I’m not presupposing that you have to go to college to understand what I’m talking about. And I make it easy I give examples that are not full of technicalities. I In other words, I took all the design-ish bullshit out of the equation and then I created something that can help explain design to everybody.

I have a cousin who is a hairstylist but is trying to change career path. He’s going through through the Design Sprint School, and his work is amazing. He’s posting his work and it’s really good. But there is a barrier or bullshit that runs around design.

Those people involved in pushing the field forward and create new tools, etc, like my book,  “The service startup”  that I created the MVs model (which is a facilitated design sprint model), -two years before Google actually-, are eager to defend the bubble. That community, (I’m including myself in this group),  are  eager to say that things are harder than you think. So “you need to hire us” because those people they live  by providing consultants services. I don’t think it’s deliberate. So anything that I write about it after dedicating four days to double click on consumer journeys are going to be obviously more difficult or harder or deeper than what a person needs to learn to design a journey. We are getting into the to evolvement field, the research within design field, and of course, it’s going to sound more complicated.

I think it’s a feedback loop like they think about the net next article, “how can I write about user research in a way that nobody has written about it before?”, instead of thinking of writing in a way that my niece can understand. Do you see the difference? Of course, the article is going to come out as harder to read. And with the first option, writing something that nobody has ever written before, writing about an angle, that I’m the only one seeing right now, that’s super exciting, and people should do that. But those are different purposes.

I was that guy before writing “The service startup” and being concerned that more people should get it. So I wrote this book, “The service startup” and connected back to my entrepreneurial roots because I was doing a lot of advising for founders and I was liking it. I was thinking that there was a better representation of who I am than anything else I did in the consultant realm. So wrapped up my consultant career and started trying to make  the knowledge that I had available in a way that everybody could understand.

That was my mission: to make sure that knowledge is available. It’s cool and people like it and and they can understand what’s going on with the designschool.com program. Over 1000 people have been certified. The program is everywhere, I have students from everywhere. Every day have 200 people going through the platform and the community is super cool. So it’s tangible to me that I’ve just put a lid on this stage of my life.

Now I want to go back to learning. That’s the next step to me, because that is  the path of the teacher, the mentor. And the best way to go back to learning was to go back to my roots as an entrepreneur. Go back to my roots as an engineer.

DESIGNEER – What was first the engineer  or the designer?

I started my career as an engineer, coding user interfaces for Flash before the NASDAQ burst. So it was a long time ago, I was working very close to game designers. And I would do some crazy algorithms to make sure that those games would come to life, using JavaScript, NEC, ActionScript, ASP.  Then I got too close to designers and I started to like what they’re doing, I was learning from them.

I was working with top tier agencies, so our games ended up winning cyber games like New York festivals, MTV awards. when I was doing a website of artists. It was super fun because there was a lot of creative people and also the awards…  what else would a 20 year old like me want?

But it all came like crashing with the NASDAQ crash. So all those projects they were funded went to zero.  Then I went into enterprise development, taking my coding skills elsewhere, to build ecommerces or this type of services that the internet was adopting. The money was still flowing because those other things were defended. I worked  for a couple of years with C# and with Microsoft Enterprise software and technologies for development.

And then I started to connect back with my roots with design mainly because I went to live in Napa, working for a company that I was doing proofs of concept, which are prototypes. I was doing prototypes so I was being a designer as well. I was building user interface for their product so the customer could see it: “Oh, that’s cool, it looks cool”.

AFRICA

But then I went to Africa I was supposed to go there to help. I was working for a company working with the government. The span of the projects were from telecom to oil to many different things. I was doing this internal Portal but I realized that there was a lot of usability issues with that thing because people from inside the company thought they would just mimic a portal from a company like Telefonica or Virgin Mobile or something like that.

But the users, the people actually using the phones in Luanda in Angola, were not used to those services they were not even expecting. They had this different needs, different expectations. That’s when I just put a brake on everything and had a conversation with the leadership that we needed to go back to research because we were building a lot of shit that no one would ever be able to use. We were spending a lot of money doing that. It may be that it was looking good at the contracts, but it was not going to be good in the end when they pull up the usage stats, and they see that it’s worth nothing, nobody’s using it.

So having this conversation just catapulted me to the position of being the principal services designer over there, because then I had to go back into the field. It’s funny because I was the principal, but I was also the only one. So I had to go into the fields, talk to the people in the villages, interview them, see how they leave, see how they experience things and do all the work that designers should do before even sketching something. So that was when I connected back with my roots as a designer.

How a designer could have that experience these days?

That’s super interesting because it seems today, if you just take a glance we have too much, we have an abundance of things here in the US, so how can I design for scarcity in a way that I may I’m able to drop my framework and acquire a new one? Because I’m dealing with scarcity and that’s a different challenge to design. But when you look deeper, you see now the situation with the Black Lives Matter movement here in the US. Racism has been going on for a long time, but it ‘s not getting exposed and all those feelings are driven by scarcity in some part of their vector. If you look at this situation you will find a point where scarcity is the main force driving that situation. And that’s the percentage that you should deep dive into. Because those projects they  will not get you the better revenue. Some of them will not get you any revenue at all, because you should do it as a volunteer, but they will teach you a lot about how people are living in scarcity. So just my advice would be just find those pain points where scarcity is the main driver of it, and then just volunteer for something.

What is Design for you?

Design to me is this ability that we have to just transform situations, I’m quoting someone here, but I forgot who am I quoting right now-

You can transform any situation from your generic situation into a preferred one. And that’s, to me is design, that’s the best definition I ever saw. It’s the ability to look at an ordinary situation, it may be totally bad, it may be just okay. But you are able to look at it through the eyes of the people using it. And then you’re able to generate ideas that can propagate solutions that are not in the eye of the regular beholder of the same situation,  just because you are looking at that problem through the lens of the people that are actually suffering with it. You are able to come up with clever ideas that otherwise would make you look like a genius because who would ever thought about it? Right? But then you have a process to do that. It’s not because you’re a genius is just because you’re you’re taking a different perspective in order to come up with that idea.

Most people are looking at the situation as a business issue. You’re looking at the situation as a human issue first and then as a business issue. So that’s to me is design and that’s the results that come out of it are ROI worth it. Otherwise companies like Apple and everybody else wouldn’t be doing it.  I don’t believe in the myth of the design genius. I just believe that people are really good at emphasizing with others. And when they do that, the brain is amazing. They can come up with solutions that the ordinary person just looking at the situation from their own perspective will never even think about.

Do you see in the future designers becoming engineers or engineers becoming designers?

No, I don’t believe that in the future designers will have to become engineers and engineer will have to become designers. I don’t believe in this word “become”. But I believe for sure that designers will have to make friends  with engineering. They will have to have a little bit more of an understanding of how the cookie crumbles.

You know, because when you look at Dribble, and all those websites and people are tripping their ass off over there creating those crazy animations that I would say that they don’t have a purpose even within design. Some of them are brilliant, but they are just for the purpose of a portfolio.  But to come into existence, that would be amazing boring for the user to see their credit card flipping hundred times every time it shows up in the screen or things like that.

Those animations that are  not really adding value, they are cut off from the process because they are not easy to maintain and they are not  fun to build and they are also not the core pieces of the company. So why would an engineer spend so much time to add to the project 15 days or something, just just set up an animation?

Those things sometimes are not things that designers actually  understand because most of them are not working close to engineers.  I think every designer would benefit from understanding a little bit of the technology. And I think companies like Apple are creating that interface. Because swift UI, for instance, the next stage of the of the iOS development framework, it’s fairly designer friendly. And it’s only going to get better. So there will always be things that engineers will have to build. As an engineer, I’m able to code things that are too on the other spectrum for a designer to get into that.

I think designers need to understand a little bit better but  I don’t think they need to become engineers: we need designers. And I think we need engineers and you have to be good at your craft.

If you are a good designer that is also good engineer like I am then great. But they’re not many people like me. It’s hard for people to believe that. Sometimes people go they see what I did with design, and they were like “Oh, you must be a shitty engineer”. And then they go through my GitHub stuff and are like “you must be a shitty designer”. It’s not easy to find people that can do both. The only reason I can do both is because of the story about my career: I actually started as an engineer, I’m a dropout from computer science and math.   My goal in the beginning was to become an engineer. So  for the people like me, I think there will be a bright future over there with the AR and VR.  And that’s my next stage as well. I’m actually building something with AI right now. But we still need designers and if you love what you do, you know, bless you. You just have to dip your feet a little bit into what engineers have to build whenever you pass that ball to them. That’s going to make you a better designer.

The Design Sprint School and Service Design Sprints

I created Service Design Sprints two years before Google launched their book. It doesn’t matter much because people know Google, and it’s such an amazing strong brand that it catapulted the thing to everybody. When I’ve created the thing two years ago, I was talking about it, going to universities everywhere. My book was launched in Japan, and I was doing my promoting work but there’s nothing like when Google lounched it. So it was pretty cool that they did. And it was pretty cool that I was able to take part and get some tailwind from this movement and create this School.

It’s not a competing approach. It may be that the guy that created it from Google got out of Google, and created an online school as well and that is a competing service to the Design Sprint School. But this has nothing to do with the method itself. So the method is very compatible, and , like most people, I am using Google’s framework for a lot of things. Mix it with mine, I take one of the tools that I’ve created, one of those tools that guru created, depending on the project, depending on the sprint, I’m using more of mine, more of theirs, and that’s what we teach at the Design Sprint School as well. We’re giving you options, just so you can mix and match. And maybe you will find the Jone’s method instead of Google’s method or Tenny’s method or Maria’s method is going to be the method that you want. To be honest with you, the right thing to do every time you tackle a project is to play around with the agenda and change it.

Before going out, we want to understand what is the challenge, then you want to go to your toolbox and just select the right tools for the job. And the right tools may come from my methods, from Google’s method or from anything else from UX, which is actually the biggest library you can have for methods ever. You can do whatever fits the challenge, and that’s the right mindset to have.

We teach both methods in the School. Actually, we go beyond those two methods. We teach some UX tools as well. We teach design thinking mindsets, and we equip students to not only think but discuss the design thinking mindset and culture and superstar routes. We also teach roots because it’s important. It’s important to understand what things are a fad. It is important to understand what is the Bauhaus movement. How it has to do with everything that we are discussing right now, because it has.

We try to give students  much more perspective on what they are doing than just throw them on the fire like “just go there and just run this agenda and you’re gonna be fine”. Because we know for a fact that you probably will get on the other hand, like you’ll survive that thing. But when you are thinker, when you can actually add to the pile, when you can come up with your own tools on top of it. We know for a matter of fact that you are going to be better than the person just executing the agenda. And that’s what we aim for time spent in School.

You have made the Minimum Viable Service model open to everyone.

Yep. Because because my goal was not to create something that you cant mash up with different things. My goal since the beginning was not to create a methodology, and then do the consultants service on top of it, which is what everybody does.

My goal was to create a tool that my niece can can use, and that can be mixed with other things. I have a book breaking free from the Lean Startup religion where I’m doing a harsh critic on the lean startup, but not in the sense of “Don’t use this shit, it’s going to be detrimental to your project”. That’s not the critic. The critic is that the lean startup is basically a scientific process. Use it, please use it. But you can plug in this design, which is the MVS which is the method that I’ve created. I’ve created the MVS to be a plugin to the Lean Startup approach. Not to be used like a religion or something that’s the only thing you need to use. I created it to be like embedded into this startup development cycle and to add value using service design in the cycle.

So  that’s why I opened it to Creative Commons, and the major criticism to it is that by creating the MVS I have created a user research heavy sprint method. Whereas the Google method is prototyping heavy. So the difference is that with the Google method, you fly through the early stage and you get to the prototyping stage, and then you have a lot of cool stuff that you can do over there. With my method, you are stuck for a while in the initial stage, because you are digging very deep into the human aspect of the problem. And then you fly through the next stages, and then you prototype and can enjoy each one. And so the intensity graph I would have a huge bump in the beginning. And then it becomes easier as you go. They (Google) would be easier in the beginning and be very intense as you finish.

So you have to think about what is the challenge that you’re facing.  Is your challenge something that you know a lot about, you’ve been suffering with, you can emphasize a lot, have tons of ideas that you want to test already or that you feel that they are writing to the ballpark but you don’t have validation and you have to validate those those things? That’s definitely a challenge for the Google Ventures approach.

Or  is your challenge a mystery to you? Is it something that you don’t quite understand yet or you think you have a solution for it, but you want to find other creative ways of finding new solutions. And also, your team has little research information or little empathetic material about the users that they want to serve with this challenge. So if you use the Google Ventures in this specific situation without changing the model, without complementing the model to make sure that you are like inserting those abilities to capture that empathetic link with the user, you’re going to get  in the end fast with prototypes that are basically useless to everyone.

So what is the challenge that you have. Do you need to double down getting to know those people that you want to serve, or do you need to double down testing things with them? Or you need a little bit of both? So that’s how you should think mix and match and this type of stuff. That’s what we teach at Design Sprint  School.

What is the most affordable, yet comprehensive online learning package?

The most affordable right now is 49 if I’m not mistaken, and it’s a month to month subscription, so you pay until you finish the program then you don’t have to pay anymore. If you want the certification and mentors feedback, then you pay $79 a month then you have access to take the test. So you and that’s the difference as well of the Design Sprint School.

I don’t believe in teaching design just by watching funny videos and this type of stuff. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. I think it actually helps propagate a mindset that it’s not that serious that it always has to be fun. That’s the main concern that I have with this mindset of balloons and people very energetic. It helps propagate the idea that designers  have to have this extraversion factor to them. They have to be this person, fun and engaging, and everybody wants you to be around them. They are seeing you as a creative, they paint the hair green, and they use those acetate-like glasses. And that’s a stereotype that I want everybody that comes to my school steer away from, because this is really detrimental to the design practice. This is the one of the enemies of that idea that I mentioned, that I want my niece or anybody else that is not the design-ish type, to be able to access the power that this method has, the power that this mindset brings to the table in whatever they’re building. So this is important because we steer away from that and we focus on having people practicing it. In order to graduate on the Design Sprint School, you have to actually post practices, you’re going to receive mentors comments, and then you’re going to receive the graduation certificate.

If you want to become a spring master at sprinting, either, then you can take the test, which is based on the exercise and everything that you did. And then you can get the black certificate, which is the Sprint Master certificate.

That’s how I believe it’s the most most effective way to teach design. And without actually scaring people that are not like that type. And also it helps people get their creativity flowing, give them that space, that freedom, because when I see people that are so different than I am, I feel that I don’t belong to that group and I’m less willing to  move forward. But when I practice things, that’s the opposite.

We have videos, of course, but then there are scribbles. They are videos where I’m telling the stories about the methods or I’m explaining the methods and they are followed up by reading, because it’s important that you also read and you take your time instead of just hearing from me with my voice, that you hear your voice in your own head and take your time to do the readings, because videos they have specific times. I have to make it short and then you end up leaving a lot of things out that have value. So there’s a lot of reading in this course as well. Then it’s features are simple to update.

There are some exercises. The exercise is super cool because I modeled it. -I’m a Game Master. I love D&D and I we play every Friday and I am the DM. – So I modeled the exercises like an RPG game like D&D. So you have the characters that you design for. Each character has a story and you see the images, you see everything. That’s the thing that you have to choose to have as a designer, like that empathetic link you can build, even if you’re sitting on a table inside your own office, because you are actually reading those stories and they are fun. They are also real, because those scenarios they are based in reality, but they are fun and they are also engaging. So you that enables you to design as if you’re dealing with real scenario situation.

Advice for someone who’s entering the job market.

I think it’s mainly “keep an eye on tech“. You know, don’t separate yourself from tech. Don’t buy into the stereotypes, the classic balloons and mustaches and acetate glasses stereotype. Those are not the designers of the future. We are heading to a future where companies are valuing design so much that designers are part of the team and they are working side by side with engineers. And, you know how empathy works. I think you should find your way. If you are an extrovert, great, be an X or be yourself, be you. It’s just if you’re not, don’t feel compelled to run this path, because I think that’s definitely not how you can contribute better as a designer today and moving forward.

What is the future for design sprint school

The School is growing every month, it grows month to month even during this crisis. So the future with Design Sprint School is to keep it alive. I update some contents, I talk to the students sometimes. There are mentors that are answering questions in the community. I try to keep it very low maintenance because I am free to do Kinds for instance, which is this project that I’m launching in the App Store the upcoming week.

Kinds is an app that I designed and developed from scratch where you can map your personality with the help of your friends. You can share kinds of personality traits that you can share with people and then you get upvoted with yours and then you can predict how similar you are to your friends. You will be able to predict the team chemistry within a group of friends or group of peers.  Also, how is the team chemistry score, and how they score is going to go up or go down if you remove this person. And there is going to be an AR capability where you’ll be able to see the main “kind” of people floating above their heads if you use your cell phone or glasses, which I think it’s coming next year from Apple and other providers. Those are the exciting things that I’m releasing right now.

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I started sketchnoting in 2016 right after I learned the basics of visual facilitation from Xavier Quesada –Bikablo style- during a Scrum Product Owner certification course by Agilar.com. Long before that, I had been using mindmapping for years (courtesy of my English teacher, in prep for Edinburgh University access requirements), and taught myself to draw with Betty Edwards “Drawing on the right side of the brain“. Well, just enough to know I could draw better if I wanted it.

My first steps were to start copying as much as I could, from free resources like Xplane “Visual thinking ebook” (free download) and Mike Rodhes book “Sketchnoting Handbook“. My materials, A5 notebooks, A4 print paper, and the regular Pilot black pen… no fuzz. I got a tiny bit fancier later with grey and coloured brush tip pens, but only later. After copying most of Xplane’s drawings and some of Mike’s, I went on corporate icon library and translated these into hand drawings, just to expand my visual vocabulary to that of my workplace.

It was about that time I discovered the Doug Neill’s Verbal to Visual Youtube Channel, and website, which served as an inspiration for some sketchnoting recording of my own (they call this style “videoscribing”):

• How to Sketchnoting Without drawing

• My interpretation of Tina Seelig’s Innovation Engine House

• And a Visual Summary Hack your Learning Chase Jarvis RAW with Tim Ferriss with my added take on the topic

I strongly recommend you to visit the Verbal to Visual Youtube Channel, since it is full of free resources to dig deeper into the sketchnoting world.

All this time, I have used sketchnoting to learn, to share concepts and ideas, to brainstorm, and also to take notes at conferences, even at corporate events. Now that I want to take it further, I have joined the beta course Digital Sketchnoting at Verbal to Visual, where I hope to develop specific digital skills, as well as get in touch and learn from other sketchnoters out there.

How to go digital sketchnoting

I am drawn to digital sketchnoting because I love my iPad 2018+ pencil, I carry it everywhere, and the workflow from thinking to sharing is quick and efficient.

• In the course I’m taking, we start stating the purpose of Digital Sketchnoting within the great scheme of things… or our grand plans. And I do have grand plans.

I am a visual thinker, so I use sketchnoting among other visual and manual techniques to learn and think. I want to use them to share, inspire and teach people creativity skills in a differentiated way, so it is part of my brand, I guess… still in very early stages, but with great ambitions to change the world :)

Then, we have shared the tools we use:

What app for beginners?

I would start with Paper by Wetransfer (formerly by Fiftythree), no matter what use you are going to give it, because it is free, it works nicely even with your finger or one cheap stylus and has limited space, limited tools. You can keep it to two-3 types of pens, and limited colours. I use it all the time for live sketchnoting where I don´t want to fiddle with tech, just listen and take notes.

Drawing

• I use Paper  (all the time, for everything visual), because of its simplicity
• I use Procreate (some times, for live sketchnoting) because of screenrecording
• Other apps fall in between Paper and Procreate. I may give Concepts a second chance, because of infinite canvas 

Notetaking

• I use GoodNotes because of the filing system (and simplicity of tools)
• I bought Notability because of the recording option 

Whiteboard

• I use Miro for collaboration (they have an app with limited drawing options, but works well enough for brainstorming visually)
• I may try Explain Everything because of the screencasting option

Device

• iPad 2018  (on offer last year 270€)
• first generation pencil (second hand 60€)
• Paperlike screen protector (34€) – the most budget friendly combo for the best quality

My recommendation:

You can get by to get started with almost any tablet that can run Paper app (by Wetransfer), and the cheapest stylus. When I was starting out, I tried lots of different apps: sketches, taysui, concepts, and more, and I settled with Paper because it was hassle free… with almost zero learning curve: you get in, pick a tool, start drawing.

Now I am in the middle of the development of CreativeSensei brand look and feel, and it is about time my sketchnotes start being more consistent. The exercise requesting a style guide has been timely on this. Here is my first attempt done in Goodnotes:

Another part of the exercise is to decide on canvas size. Doug’s recommendation is

When in doubt, use screen size. (Doug Neill, Verbal to Visual)

I follow that for live sketchnoting, but I am drawn to infinite canvas for mindmapping and brainstorming, as it lets you expand without borders…Still, work in progress.

The post Learning in public – Digital Sketchnoting appeared first on Creative Sensei.

I met Stephen years ago, at the Edinburgh University Shukokai Karate Club, and his personality and mine clicked almost instantly. We have kept in touch over the years and now we both live in Madrid, and are crative buddies.

He is a creative person, and a master of Silat, a not very well known martial art, and who better than him to open this section of Creators in the blog by Creative Sensei.

I have broken down the interview in three sections, and will complete it with some summaries soon.

Part 1

• Childhood
• Creativity
• Practice
• Work (vs. discipline)

Part 2

• photography
• martial arts
• painting
• pottery

Part 3

• acting
• chocolate (dopamine, and creativity)
• future, being present, flow, challenge

Be present

Find Stephen

• the photographer: https://www.stephenrasmussen.com/
• the martial artist: @artofsilat (instagram)
• the actor: @salvadoragency

The post Be present – an interview with Stephen Rasmussen appeared first on Creative Sensei.

Distributed collaboration has existed for ever, but right now, due to global Covid-19 pandemic, many people have been thrown at the challenge to collaborate remotely in a visual manner. Here are some quick tips from CreativeSensei.com on how to go about running a productive brainstorming session with a distributed team. I will share them in a relevance order (my own criteria), to offer a range of solutions to different challenges and possibilities.

• Remote distributed brainstorming – for team visual ideation (alternative to sticky notes), with ad hoc teams, non-designers
• Remote design team of 6 – a permanent team of designers or creative types, who need to collaborate over time (offline) and in real time
• Distributed asyncronous collaboration of 20 people around the globe – when you have a distributed team in different time frame, and have to collaborate but there is no need for it to be simultaneously (can be “asyncronous”)
• Hybrid Brainstorming sessions with remote participants – when you have a physical meeting and only one or two members are in a remote location, but you want to work analogically (hands on) in real time

Remote distributed brainstorming

For the past month I have been exploring the possibilities of online collaborative visual tools for different purposes (design, ideation, agile projects, communication). There are several tools out there and the two main ones I have found out are Mural and Miro, both great, according to reviews.

Here is a report on the Total Economic Impact of using Mural.

I had an earlier experience as a participant with Miro, and saw its potential. Since I wanted to evaluate it, I created a free account to test it (maximum 3 board, 8 users). I believe Mural probably offers similar features, so do check them both out to see which one suits you.

I have run 2 sessions with 3-4 participants, 2 demo sessions and 1 session with two teams of 6 people working in parallel in two separate boards, while in a whole teams videoconference. It is not extensive but enough to gather some insights:

• Start small, gain experience, then grow team size, session duration or complexity of the tasks.

Here is a quick tutorial of Remote Brainstorming I put together to setup a basic brainstorming session in Miro

• Prepare carefully.
  • Allocate time for participants to become familiar with the platform (think 20-30′ for first timers)
  • Setup creative warmups (10-20′ for people not used to creative assignments, maybe more if the group is big and/or people don´t know each other)
  • Create collaboration areas for different tasks during the sessions and include summary of instructions
  • Time tasks as usual… but then be prepared to give extra time, both for more explanations and for each brainstorming rounds (or whatever the task)
• set clear rules and expectations:
  • everybody needs to be extra patient, there will be more time needed for everything
  • for more than 4 participants, establish a way to be mostly quiet, while giving people opportunity to share questions. After you explain a task, ask if anyone has a question (do this all the time)
• recommended: have a helper to respond to technical issues over the chat (or the phone), so the facilitator focuses on running the session.
• very nice to have: independent audio channels for small team collaboration. There should be a general workshop channel (ie. teams videoconference), and a separate channel for each team, via a specific tool, over the phone… whatever.

Remote design team of 6

In 2014 I met my new team members from another location through skype, and it was a while until we actually met in person. Since we have been designing user experiences for web and mobile since, we needed to communicate visually quite a lot. Over the years we have been using several tools, at different times, for different reasons:

• Communication: video conference (google hangout, gotomeeting, skype, teams), email and phone (team calls), whatsapp
• Project coordination: trello, analog kanban, jira
• File sharing: network space, google drive, sharepoint, onedrive
• Prototypes: Axure, marvel app, pop
• Visual communication of ideas:
  • Paper and photo: rough sketch on paper, take a photo, send photo in real time while in call (if showing sketch to camera was not good enough)
  • Online whiteboard: tested some free web based whiteboard, but not very formal (google “online free whiteboard” to find out current applications)
  • Microsoft Teams Whiteboard: recently discovered Teams whiteboard (it is an option while in a call meeting, tricky to find), which for a quick explanation may be enough for many users. It has 5 colours and the precision of the drawing pencil is a little rough, but sufficient to sketch a diagram for clarification.
  • Miro for design, ideation and drawing: Currently exploring Miro’s visual collaboration possibilities, with drawing capabilities and UX templates (user persona, empathy map, product roadmap, wireframes…). As for drawing, it provides a variety of colours, thickness and, while using the ipad app, with a stylus, it can be quite precise. It also offers smart drawing, a beta function that creates perfect form out of hand drawing.

Distributed asyncronous collaboration of 20 people around the globe

In 2012 I signed up for “A Crash Course on Creativity“, an experimental MOOC created by Stanford University professor Tina Seelig, and run over a collaborative learning platform called Venture Lab (now Novoed).

The challenge was to generate at least 100 solutions for sleep problems, in 4 weeks, and the original team was composed by 20 people distributed across the globe in all sort of time frames. We run some meetings in real time, over Facebook, but most of the work I did was offline. We were testing tools and delivery methods Some of the tools we used back then:

• Coordination/documenting: google docs, google calendar, google spreadsheets, timezone tool, facebook group
• Voting ideas: google forms, facebook poll
• Visual tools: google image search, wordle (for word clouds), mindmaps (Mindmeister, slatebox), google presentation

Hybrid Brainstorming sessions with remote participants

In 2016 I run a few brainstorming sessions in our office with a couple of participants located in another office. We ensured they have access to the same analogic materials (pens, sticky notes and plasticine, mostly) and we run the usual brainwriting rounds (brainstorming where you write one idea in one sticky note, rather than voicing ideas).

We used videoconferencing to run the session, but the main canvas was in our office, where we hosted 6 other participants. We took note in a sticky note of the ideas of the distributed members (they told us over the phone) and place them in the panels, and we took pictures of the panels to send them the section they had to work on. It was a little work intensive and it took some extra time, but it was a way to include remote participation of a few people.

Around two years ago, we run a bigger creativity workshop with 20+ people in one office and 8 in another, where there was another facilitator. We tried to run the workshop together for the most part, but due to communication difficulties, it was mainly two parallel sessions, although the results would add up.

April 2020 @ CreativeSensei.com

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The term builds on the concept of Minimum Effective Dose made popular by Tim Ferriss when addressing whatever treatment or procedure: it refers to the least amount of effort, amount, including length of time, necessary to achieve a desired goal. It can be applied to a health treatment, a fitness goal and the like.

Before Tim Ferriss, I had been familiar with Pareto’s Principle, which more or less states that 20% of your efforts will yield 80% of the results. I applied it to everything from weight training to specific technical training when I was doing competitive sports. Even to work related projects… trying to provide value early on the process and maybe move onto another project when that 80% result was reached.

Regarding creativity, when I had my son, for the first few years I had little free time between full time job, commuting and family. Although I love photography and video, I didn´t have time for video, nor for too much photography. I managed to run a personal project #lunchbreak which was a series of individual portrait sessions of nine of my work colleagues, over lunch time, in a spot near the office. It spanned over 18 months since it was hard to get organised, with availability and the like. In total, less than 20 hours of work (more or less). The point is that I found the cracks in my busy schedule to find time for a creative endeavour.

Some time later, I was still yearning for something else… and I got it thanks to a mobile phone and instagram. I started an ongoing minimal project #onmywaytowork where the cracks on my schedule was my commuting to and from work. I would shoot a picture to something that grab my attention during my trip, edit very quickly and upload it to instagram, sometimes in less than a minute. I had found my photographic minimum creative output.

Similarly I have found different minimum creative outputs in other domains:

• Drawing: icons, drawing patterns in a small sticky note
• Video: a 15’’ tiktok clip
• Writing: free haiku, a tweet
• Music: a musical phrase on a keyboard or a diy fretless one string guitar (didley bow)

The whole point is that they take a minute or less, very little gear and minimal skill. At this level, we are not aiming at quality, but getting started, gaining creative confidence, expanding our comfort zone, feeding our brain by learning skills from zero, acquiring the habit to be creative… Of course, if you already have some skill, maybe the benefit is in creating a body of work to show for all your creative thinking.

Some times I think that creativity is the tangible of our imagination, what I called creative thinking. Never mind the terms, just go and make something for the fun of it. And keep doing it.

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