6 Things to do when taking part in an OpenIDEO Challenge.
Since I joined the Design Think Forum (aka DTF), with some great interest in IDEO’s work, I was eager to put Design Thinking to work and try to solve big problems that would create even a bigger impact.
That’s why I was delighted when I was given the responsibility of leading the DTF’s first design team to take part in an OpenIDEO Challenge, The New Life Challenge!
Since our idea ended up getting listed as one of the top 5 ideas in the Challenge, I thought of writing about our learning, in order to help the other teams who would be taking part in OpenIDEO challenges to do better.
1. Build the right team
To start things off, DTF created a Slack channel and invited many design enthusiasts through social media channels to submit their research on ‘New Life’ so that we could get inspired by each other’s stories. Then it was the time for the first physical meet up! Everyone who were committed to submit their research were invited to Cambio Colombo office for our first workshop on this Challenge.
Remember: Commitment is key! No matter how talented and skilled your team is, if they are not committed to what they are doing, the team will go nowhere.
2. Get inspired by each other and maintain focus
Everyone presented their findings once more and then the others brought out the things that they can relate to. This kept the conversation going and we gained a lot of insights through these ‘Lightening Talks’. In this stage we needed to identify many problems that exist in this domain and to capture those problems and to take them as challenges, we created ‘How Might We’ notes while one person is presenting. Soon after the lightening talks, we put these HMW notes on the wall and clustered them into categories and made some kind of an affinity map.
It is not good to go for a discussion mode in these meetings with time limitations. Time box all the sessions!
At the end of this tiring but fascinating day, everyone went through all the How Might We notes and picked one or two of their favourite HMWs and went home to do further research or may be to try generating ideas until the next meet up.
3. Motivate individual work
Even though we kept the conversation going on Slack, we felt that physically being at the same place would boost our energy and make things more efficient. So we decided to meet up and do an idea generation workshop! Before the meetup, we did some homework individually to generate ideas to solve the HMWs we picked. We did a quick round of Crazy 8s to make those ideas tangible and everyone came to Cambio office again with a bunch of ideas.
Always go for individual brainstorming! In a group brainstorm, only the loudest people will be heard.
Then individually we picked and further developed the best idea we generated. We drew 3 step story boards and put them on the wall for others to critique based on the feasibility as well as the value it will create for our users. Then we silently voted for our favorite ideas using dot stickers
It is necessary to let everyone be heard. Silent voting gives everyone an equal opportunity to show their opinion.
4. Do not be afraid to make decisions
Since two ideas had equal votes and since we did not feel like dropping either of them we decided to go with both.
We created two sub teams within our team and built these two ideas into two concepts. The game was prototyped using MarvelApp and we could not prototype the second concept. May be we lost focus on the second concept and we felt that we should have decided to go with only the first idea in the first place!
It is really important to have a Decider in your team. This saves time and gets the job done with no hard feelings.
5. Continuously Improve — It’s never done!
Even after we submitted the ideas, we kept working on them, refined them here and there based on feedback. We thought about business models, we reached out to the IDEO Global Chapter and Community Organizers for help and it was really fruitful. We received advice from really good mentors around the globe, Family Health Bureau of Sri Lanka and also from other participants as well.
6. Remember why you started
OpenIDEO brings people together to create impact through innovative design. They support communities to take their ideas to the next level in order to make this world a better place.
That should be the main and the biggest motive of any team or an individual who takes part in an OpenIDEO Challenge. This motivation will keep you going when the tide gets tough.
