Tony Eaton
Nov 3 · 2 min read

Originating Ideas & Getting them Done

In the past few years I have been designing and facilitating workshops for clients in all industries at fairly large organizations. The one thing they all have in common is that companies are all faced with the same challenges. Mainly on generating ideas and getting them done.

Many organizations don’t suffer from a shortage of ideas. We may be familiar with various innovation focused quotes that talk about ideas without action. Though validating the business value of our ideas remains constant even after we’ve decided which ideas to move forward with.

As we prepare our workshops we hear the need to consider our client’s vision and opportunities with a specific ask to finish with some sort of roadmap or plan on how we might get things done. Or at least advanced enough to begin validating our ideas in order to adjust and make them better.

“This has opened up my exploration of combining Design Thinking activities along with Agile methods”


This continued ask has opened up my exploration of combining Design Thinking activities along with Agile methods for how we operationalize our teams and ideas. With our innovation consulting work we typically focus on exploring related market and emerging technology trends. We call this Explore and Inspire. Design Thinking activities are really great for active listening and understanding what our client’s vision of the future might be and what we know about our customers. As we share trends these inspire our thinking and help leverage our knowledge. We like to toggle between sharing trends and then unpacking what clicked with some sort of activity.

We then combine Agile methods and Design Thinking to Co-create and Transform. This is where we go through divergent exercises, explore and then converge. We combine activities that land on Epics or areas of our focus that we might implement to get the validation process started. To start all of that we execute Personas, User Stories and Story Mapping to help us think through our Features and prioritized stories. We then finish our workshop with ideas on what we might test and what our short, medium and long term actions might be.

To get to this point we use activities like a Creative Matrix, Zen Voting, Concept Posters and Visioning. With the addition of defining our user stories and sprints we consider how we’ll get ideas into action. Often from the close of our workshops we have begun sprints the very next week with Product Owners, Scrum Masters and our Development teams jumping right in.

“A combination of Design Thinking with Agile methods has helped us quickly generate and validate untapped opportunities”


Our workshops include cross-functional teams from various areas of our client’s businesses and include our designers, engineers, product managers, industry SMEs and business owners all originating ideas together. We quickly spring into action with clearly defined goals.

Originating our ideas together and using a combination of Design Thinking with Agile methods has helped us quickly generate and validate untapped opportunities that often result in generating new revenue streams or bottom line efficiencies in a short period of time.

Tony Eaton

Written by

Design Thinking & Human-centered design, Scrum Master & Agile Coach with a passion for co-creating ideas and enabling teams to deliver innovation with results.

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