How to teach service design using wands, wizards, owls, and Hogwarts
Part 2: Future blueprinting 101
This is the second article in a two-part instalment all about teaching service design using Harry Potter.
Where we left off
At Methods, we run workshops on a Friday morning where one member of the team will run a practical session to teach the rest of us about a particular technique they’re using.
I ran a session recently about a service design technique called future blueprinting, which built upon the blueprinting session I ran last year.
This is what happened (and for those of you looking to run a future blueprinting workshop — this is how you could do it).
Preamble and set up
Where there is a problem, people often itch and rush to get to a solution. I say: all in good time. You want to get there the right way, and with the right people in the room.
For those non-SD practitioners, ‘future blueprinting’ is a workshopping method that follows ‘as-is blueprinting’ as the second part of a two-part problem-solving show often used at the end of a Discovery or in early Alpha.
You should always start a workshop by setting expectations, so that’s exactly what I did.
You also want people’s brains, not their laptops. With ideation it’s very important that people are concentrating fully, and not distracted by emails etc etc, so gently set the ground rules.
As ever for a workshop, keep people fuelled. Buy decent snacks (not just chocolate) and remind them to eat them.
I’ve run a future blueprinting workshop using a few variations, but generally to solve a problem like the Hogwarts First Year Onboarding (i.e. an existing end-to-end service exists already but is in need of transformation) I’ve found that the following running order works well.
The dark magic of ‘How might we’
The real secret to this workshop is a simple technique invented by a very smart person and commandeered into many different workshop techniques over the years, including the likes of Google’s ‘Sprint’.
How Might We is beautiful in its simplicity, and it’s at the heart of future blueprinting.
So my first job really was to introduce the technique to the room, with simple slides and a few examples.
Recap
Following the preamble and introduction to HMW, the first part of the workshop is all about providing a platform to start writing HMWs…Hopefully you already have at least one as-is blueprint, full of pain points, questions, and opportunities that you can use a vehicle for ideation.
Ours looked like this:
You want to spend a bit of time here, and this can sometimes be hard as people often want to jump to the solutions. But playback the story. Dwell on key problem areas. Read aloud the journey in a narrative that can spark ideas and encourage people to write lots of HMWs. Because, as they teach you in service design school — an empty wall is not a good wall.
Depending on how long the interim is between blueprinting and future blueprinting, you might have also undertaken some additional research (possibly your UR honed in on some questions or gaps that came up in the blueprinting session that you’ve probed a little more in the meantime).
As it happened, I’d had ample time between the workshops to do some more ‘research’ — so I played this back too.
Inspire
Depending on timings, and how many blueprints you have to recap (I’ve been in a session where we did eight to generate a huge wall of HMWs) you may want to break for lunch now. We only had two blueprints (and they were of the same end-to-end just created by two different teams) so we ploughed on into the next part: inspire!
Before you get to the stage where people have to start drawing stuff, it’s a good idea to just encourage them with a few examples of stuff that is working well out there in the world. Loosely linked to the problem you are trying to solve, aim for up to eight examples of stuff people are doing that they could learn from (and of course steal from).
For Hogwarts, I referenced the likes of Headspace, Replika, Revolut, as well as a few leftfield examples like…
Pick n’ sketch
Whether you ‘inspire’ before or after lunch, during lunch you’ll need to recruit a few Post-it fairies (or house elves) to help you as the facilitator to do a very important job…Grouping and theming the HMWs…
So this is what I did over lunch along with some kind house elves, whilst the rest of the team stuffed their faces with pizza…
Aim for either as many groups/themes as there are people (if a small group of up to 10) but if you have 10+ people then it’s a good idea to sort them into teams.
As this was Harry Potter, I of course came up with a fun way to group the teams that involved cutting out Hogwarts house emblems, screwing them up, and sticking them in a sorting hat for people to pick.
Either way, you need to make sure that someone at least is picking a HMW or two from each theme — so you can offer these on a first come first served basis (a “who wants this theme” round of hands up)…or just lay down the law and let people choose and hope they do as they are told. Fortunately, even the Slytherins did as they were bid. Each house picked around 10 HMWs across the dozen categories so there was enough consistency but also a bit of variation.
Crazy 8s
Another piece of dark magic that someone clever came up with and everyone has since borrowed, is crazy 8s…an activity where it is key to encourage everyone to get creative.
Once everyone has panicked a bit and of course come up with some brilliant ideas (like Ryan’s final idea below which was also my personal favourite) get them to put aside these wonderful folded A4s for later.
Next, it’s time for a bigger and more group-led activity.
After divergence, comes convergence, and this is where we mapped the future of Hogwarts First Year Onboarding experience.
Map the future
To facilitate said future mapping I made simplified versions of the blueprint ‘blueprint’ and printed them out on A3. This activity is about bringing together what has been done so far and mapping it out ‘end-to-end’. Each team had essentially a minimum of 24 ideas that they were able to draw upon to map how they saw the future of Hogwarts, and how they could restore the school to its former glory.
Draw the things
The final piece of the puzzle is to bring it all to life. Each house had their selected HMWs covering a range of themes from: mental health, travel, shopping, food, muggle-borns, and banking…
They also had their crazy 8s. And they now had their maps. The only thing missing from what I call a ‘future blueprint’ pack were sketches of how the key parts of it could actually work. These are called ‘signature moments’, and the first part of Draw the things is to pick them.
At this point, before pen goes to paper, it’s a good idea to just clarify what sketching actually means…particularly for those who haven’t done it before…I find the following slides do a good job of relaxing the room and easing the rookies into sketching.
Then show them that it’s perfectly ok to do any of the following….
With the preamble over, you should now set a timer for around half an hour (longer if you have enough time), and walk the room through the ‘3 step sketch’ method as you go and the ‘things’ start to take form.
Present and vote
With the future blueprint pack complete, it’s time to get it all up on the wall.
There were some brilliant ideas, including Prep a Sort, Mag Up, The Jelcome Party, and the Snitch Mac 1 (the Draw the thing photos below explain these wonderful creations far better than I ever could…).
But the winners were of course Slytherin, who came up with HAWI — Hogwarts Automatic Wizard Identification…A skin based magic to solve all of your problems at Hogwarts…
Wrap up
In just 3 and a bit hours we had taken a system full of problems (albeit many of them made up by some of the more imaginative Potter heads in the room) taken it apart, interrogated it, and put it back together all over again. We had four solid routes for how the Hogwarts First Year Onboarding could work better, and hopefully solve the issues currently tainting the former greatest magic school in the world. Could ideas like Hawi, Mag Up, and The Full Broom Party restore Hogwarts to its former glory?
The only way to find out, of course, is to prototype these solutions and test them with real users in an Alpha, and hopefully — a Beta.
And unfortunately for Hagrid, it looks like his part in First Year Onboarding at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is over.
