Explore the unknown

A look at the Sensing phase of the Business Design process

Note: The following is the first in a four-part series detailing the phases of NEXT’s Business Design process, which takes teams of innovators from an initial insight to a fully fledged business case.

“We run [Google] on questions, not answers,” said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a 2006 interview with “Time” magazine. “That stimulates conversation. Out of the conversation comes innovation. Innovation is not something that I just wake up one day and say ‘I want to innovate.’ I think you get a better innovative culture if you ask it as a question.”

Enter the Sensing phase of the Business Design process. As the first step in understanding your future innovation, your team will conduct a close examination of its topic, combining rational analysis with an intuitive, associative, and question-fuelled insight-gathering process.

Check out our ‘Introduction to Sensing’ video.

While Sensing, you will take the plunge and begin to explore the unknown, diverging in an attempt to discover as many faint signals, overlooked perspectives, and unarticulated user needs as possible. These discoveries will allow you to define a Persona, for whom you will be able to converge upon User Goals, Pains, Insights and Behaviors that are most relevant to your project, and which will be combined into your Creative Question.

But to make these discoveries, you must open yourself up to the world. You must be sensitive.

How to be sensitive

1. Stay curious and naive — try to look at scenarios through new eyes.
2. Think critically, analytically, and intuitively. Try to empathize with your users. And be patient!
3. Recognize serendipity. Be open and aware. Accept any ambiguity from your findings. Remember, you don’t know what you’re looking for until you’ve found it.

To help you open up to the world around you, to reserve judgment, and to filter the information into valuable and meaningful innovation fuel, NEXT provides you with the necessary tools, called “Design Tasks.”

Tools of the trade

During the Sensing phase, teams have access to 20-plus “Design Tasks,” each designed to further reveal the needs and behaviors of their Persona. Examples of these Design Tasks include:

1. Wild Safari — Teams will get out of their seats and onto the streets, observing users in their natural habitats to gain empathy and become aware of their needs.
2. User Interview — Teams will earn the trust of the user through an interview to jointly explore and articulate user needs.
3. Facts & Figures — Teams will collect data to dispel myths, discover surprise opportunities, and bring weak signals to the surface.
4. Scanning the Landscape — Teams will create an inspiration gallery of interesting trends relevant to their project and weed-out any customer pains, goals, insights or behaviors.
5. Creative Question — Teams will narrow, broaden, or deepen the original brief into compelling questions that beg to be answered. The Creative Question is the culmination of the entire Sensing phase.

The big question

At the end of the Sensing phase, you will have captured relevant customer Pains, Goals, Insights and Behaviors, from which you will mould a Creative Question that will ignite ideation during the Visioning phase. It should adhere to the following formula:

How might we [action verb] for [a user] with [a need], given that they [insight]?

The Creative Question is all about desirability and legitimacy, essentially asking, “Should we or shouldn’t we try to solve this problem?”

Stay tuned for next week’s entry to the “Business Design process” series: Visioning.

Contributing editor: Adam Kohut