A 7 year old’s journey to build grit through lessons in design thinking and entrepreneurship…with some help from her mom. Think of it like Product Management 101, but with a 1st grader.
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A recap
Elena is on a roll. To get up to speed on her progress, I suggest you read:
- Part 1: What’s the problem?
- Part 2: Get out of the building.
- Part 3: Digging for nuggets.
- Part 4: Let’s ask Siri.
- Part 5: Finding a North Star.
In Part 5, Elena crafted an Ideal State to complement her Customer Problem Statement. Elena’s Ideal State is:
Though that exercise, she learned:
- The Ideal State should describe a future where the customer problem is solved to “such an amazing degree that the outcome seems almost impossible.”
- The Ideal State should not refer to any particular solution. You don’t want to box yourself in as you move into the solutioning and experimentation phase.
- PG-13 Bonus Tip: Someone once told me that you know you have a great Ideal State if you add “…damnit!” to the end and it sounds awesome. For example: “I know I will have good dreams, damnit!”
Go broad, girl!
It’s time for Elena to transition to the second diamond in Design Thinking’s double diamond.
It’s finally time to talk solutions, and Elena is more than ready to go broad.
“Brainstorm time!” she exclaims as she sits at my desk.
The best way to come up with a great idea is to come up with lots of ideas and throw out the bad ones later.
For this part of the process, we aren’t throwing anything out, no matter how improbable, weird, or otherwise. We are going broad, remember? Nothing is off the table right now. Don’t hold back.
To go broad on ideas, I teach Elena “Crazy 8s.” I take a piece of paper for each of us and fold them into 8 squares. Then, I set a timer for 8 minutes.
“Draw a different idea in each square,” I tell her. “But each drawing needs to be different from one another. A stuffy is one idea and can be in one square. What else can you think of?”
“Ready, go!” she yells. I start the timer.
Over the next eight minutes, Elena draws eight different ideas and I only draw four.
“I win!” she shouts. Elena loves to win, even when it isn’t a competition.
“You win by a landslide!”
It’s funny how kids’ brains don’t get stuck on details. I struggled to think of more ideas because my brain is a boring grown up brain. I spent too much of my eight minutes thinking about how potential ideas wouldn’t work.
“Why don’t you tell me about your ideas?” I ask.
I notice one of her drawings looks suspiciously identical to mine. That little cheater peeked at my paper!
But it’s not really cheating. In fact, she described it differently than my version. She took my idea and unintentionally riffed on it.
If I was doing this Design Thinking session at work, we’d do our Crazy 8s by ourself, share with the group, and then do another Crazy 8s by ourself so we could come up with new ideas inspired by everyone else’s ideas. This cross-pollination is called “brainswarming,” and it is supposed to lead to more and better ideas than traditional group brainstorming or working entirely by yourself.
Back to Mural
Elena (with some help from me) types our ideas into Mural. Remember Mural from Part 3? It is a canvas tool that, among other things, helps you organize ideas, learnings, and data, and then turn them into insights. Also, Uncle Nick works at Mural, which Elena thinks is super cool. Hi, Uncle Nick!
“Do any of these ideas seem alike?” I ask.
“Well, yoga and music both make you calm and still.” Elena holds her hand to her heart, closes her eyes, and takes a few deep breaths.
“You’re right! How interesting. Is there anything else that is calm and still?” I probe.
“Reading a story, and…..” she looks around the canvas…. “drinking a glass of warm milk.”
“Wow! Those four ideas are alike!” I group them together on the canvas.
“It also looks like some of the ideas are about making good dreams, and other ideas are about stopping bad dreams,” I mention.
Elena nods as I group the cards on the canvas.
“I wonder which will work better at helping kids know for sure they will have good dreams,” I ask, referencing Elena’s Ideal State.
Elena stares at me, expecting me to answer my own question.
“What’s the answer?” she finally asks. I shrug my shoulders and she grimaces. Kids don’t like it when their parents don’t know the answer to something.
“Can you look it up on your phone?” she suggests.
“Nope. Siri won’t know. You are going to have to figure it out.” I reply. Elena looks baffled. How could my phone not know the answer to something? Isn’t Siri all knowing?
“You are going to need to do some tests,” I say. “What is your hypothesis?”
Elena takes a moment to think. “Bad dreams are scary. Catching bad dreams would mean you will still be scared. But making good dreams feels happy, and it means you will sleep well.”
I like that assumption. It almost seems like a mission statement for her future company. We make good dreams.
== UPDATE ==
Elena’s 5 year old sister, Luisa decided she wanted to take a turn playing Crazy 8s. You can see Luisa’s ideas here.
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Want to know what Elena does next?
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You can also join this email list for an early bird announcement of the launch of Elena’s yet to be determined solution. She is still a ways away from this, but it’s never too early to start building your Kickstarter list!
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→ Read Part 6.5: Luisa too!
