How do you design the future in just 5 days in a field?
It’s not a sprint, it’s a relay
It’s Wednesday and my team are working through the ‘hump day’ of our design sprint. The morning kicked off with yoga, now we’re designing a water company from scratch. And later this evening there will be beach volleyball, comedians and music in the main teepee. This can mean only one thing — I’m at Northumbrian Water Group’s Innovation Festival.
We have 5 days to pass ideas between us, test them out and build a prototype for a new water company that wins the support of 2,000 festival-goers. With so much packed into the week, this event has a ‘work hard, play hard’ feel to it — something that our band of misfits from Fluxx relish. And by creating a festival atmosphere Northumbrian are getting the most out of people— as a ‘zero waste event’ even our effluent is getting recycled as bio fuel.
Why does a water company host a 5 day innovation festival?
Organisations have lots of great ideas but often ‘business as usual’ prevents them from developing these ideas into propositions that they can run with. The festival creates the opportunity for Northumbrian to partner with different organisations, bringing diverse thinking and kick-starting ideas into something real. During the week teams are spread across several tents working concurrently on different design challenges. Fluxx have been invited to work alongside IBM and facilitate their sprint. Myself and my fellow Fluxxers are each working with a team of around 15–20 people, (it’s a fluid arrangement where your team can change each day), but every day was about making further progress on designing a water company from scratch.
If people can experience a new way of working, see faster and smarter ideas turn into real actions and results, those habits will spread throughout the whole organisation. You can try to transform a business with a grand plan, or you can make work feel more like a festival. Easy decision.
Designing a smarter sprint
A design sprint is a well-recognised approach to kick-start ideas but initially the 5 day format feels a little different. Alongside client projects that can last weeks and months Fluxx have our own RapidStart approach that accelerates a proposition over just 48 hours, so ironically my initial concern is: “5 days feels a luxury — how will we use that?” It‘s time to review the best sprint models and I find the Google Design Sprint Kit to be a useful start-point.
Our preferred approach is to keep the structure of these sessions as minimal and organic as possible, especially in the early stages when the team is getting to know each other and the ideas are most vulnerable. So I adapt some elements from the Google Design Sprint Kit but then I create my own Trello board to work from. I also use the event to try some new exercises, inspired by other creative companies — like the IDEO.org Design Kit Travel Pack. I don’t want a rigid agenda on the walls so using Trello to get a high-level plan onto my iPhone serves as a great solution.
My main objective is to ensure that the team move through one of the 5 phases* of the design sprint each day:
- Understand
- Ideas
- Proposition
- Experiment
- Validate
*I adapted the standard phases and used words that I was more comfortable with.
Day One: Understand
The morning kicks-off with an inspiring introduction by Nigel Watson, Northumbrian’s CIO. Today’s focus will be on connecting with people and understanding the big problems, he shares a video featuring David Flood as inspiration.
Back at the IBM tent and we’re kicking-off our challenge. We’ve separated into three tracks:
- Nic is leading a team that’s exploring Wholesale — how the company creates, operates, maintains and decommissions its assets.
- Jenn is exploring Retail — what the company offers to its customers.
- I’m looking at Enterprise — design a new organisation culture, skills, tools, ways of working.
The first day is all about understanding the challenge. It’s an exercise in divergent thinking that requires patience and a lot of Post-it notes. As the day progresses we’re honing in on some focus areas and the team are feeling positive.
Fluxxers are an eclectic mix of people — we revere the awesomeness that happens when different creative minds overlap and develop ideas. At the festival it’s intriguing to notice the different approaches that Nic, Jenn and myself are taking with our teams. We’re all super excited to see how that diverse thinking will create something special as we bring it all together.
Day 2: Ideas
Today we’re going to think of hundreds of ideas before we start to converge on the strongest ones. We’re using a range of techniques:
- Coming up with really bad unethical ideas and seeing if we can flip them
- Designing superheroes that will solve our problem
- Crazy 8s — 8 ideas per person in 8 minutes.
My favourite exercise is the ‘bad idea brainstorm’. Each member of the team has 5 minutes to think of the worst possible idea to solve our problem, then they have to pitch it back to the group. For such a short exercise, (15 minutes), it is incredibly fun and helped to get everybody into a creative mindset. Some of our bad ideas include:
- Firing all of the people in the company and automating the entire service
- Using apprentices as cheap labour
- Creating a scarcity of water and pushing the price up
Whilst it’s a fun exercise it quickly helps us to identify themes like automation, training and pricing which can be ‘flipped’ into good ideas.
Day 3: Proposition
It’s hump day and we’ve got work to do. To focus in on our vision our first challenge is to write a future press release, describing the launch of our new product or service. This is based on Amazon’s ‘working backwards’ approach.
The team design a bold vision, our press release begins like this:
11th July 2021
Fifteen teenagers have successfully graduated from Northumbrian Water Group’s new Eco-Campus and are already helping design and build Eco Village — the community that Northumbrian Water Group is building to showcase emerging solutions for water conservation.
To help the team develop our idea into a proposition I draw an ‘Idea Canvas’ on one of the whiteboards, this will continue to be iterated upon for the rest of the week.
It helps us to define our:
- Vision
- Customers, (developed as personas)
- Biggest assumptions
- Enablers and partnerships
- Plan
- Costs vs. Value
I’m keen that we test our proposition as early as possible. Fortunately for us the next generation is attending the festival. We spend 30 minutes with a group of ten year olds; it’s a magical moment as we observe them brainstorming — They’re respectful of each other, are thinking completely outside of the box without reservations and are sketching their designs as they work. We wrap-up the day feeling positive but with some tough decisions to make about our focus for the rest of the week.
On Wednesday evening the social activities reach a climax with people taking part in an improv comedy show, beach volleyball competitions and of course, it’s England’s first World Cup semi final in 28 years!
Day 4: Experiment
To get us over the hump, we’re going to be using today for experiments. Fluxx learned the idea of lean business experiments from startups. Someone bootstrapping an idea from their kitchen table can’t afford to waste time or money on ideas that are unlikely to succeed. So the best-run startups run experiments to test their ideas with real customers. Experiments generate real evidence, they replace opinions with facts and they do it quickly.
Today we’ve got two teenagers co-creating the proposition with us which actually serves as our first experiment. We’re quickly discovering that young people are as motivated by the environment, sustainability and having work that they can be passionate about as they are by the money they might earn.
Our proposition is taking shape and it’s bold.
Within the next 5 years we want to open Northumbrian Water Group’s Eco-Campus, a school nestled in an area of Newcastle that is under regeneration. It will be no ordinary school. Through the hard work of it’s pupils and teachers, and with support of NWG and the Department of Education, the school will recycle 80% of its water, using innovative technologies to capture and separate drinking water from waste water. To help the pupils deliver this they will follow a vocational curriculum that teaches them a range of hard and soft skills needed for a career in the water industry.
Now we need an experiment, something that can be created at pace and test our biggest assumptions. Getting the experiment right requires thinking and creativity, fortunately we’ve got some of the brightest young minds in the tent. One of our teenagers reminds us that it’s the summer holidays next week, “why don’t we run a summer camp?” he suggests. So we work quickly to create a website promoting our new summer camp.
Day 5: Validation
We wake up to some great feedback from our ‘summer camp’ experiment. That’s a good start but today’s going to be mostly focused on playing back our propositions. Whilst I’ve been pushing my team through the phases of the design sprint my colleagues Nic & Jenn have been driving forward some fantastic propositions for the Wholesale and Retail teams. Now, along with our other colleagues Chesca and Rich we’ve got to work with the teams to bring the whole story together, culminating in a 2 minute pitch to thousands of festival-goers in the main tent. It’s starting to feel less like a sprint or a marathon and more like a relay!
After the pitch in the main tent we have a stream of festival folk visiting the tent to find out more about our propositions. We tell our story of a water company that we have designed from scratch:
‘Reservoir’ will create the greener water homes of the future with smarter ways to connect and recycle water within every home. We will value our customers, offering them more than just bills and nudging them to the right thing for their budgets and for the planet. We will grow together with the community, making smarter investments and building the skills to make it all happen.
But today was also about validation, so what did people think? They loved the ideas and Gateshead College expressed interest in co-creating and running the Eco-Campus summer camps with Northumbrian Water Group. A well-earned outcome for a team that sweated through one of the hottest weeks you’ll experience in England, took themselves light-years outside of their comfort zones, used their brains in ways that they’d never used them before and came together to tell a story about an ambitious future for their company.
Epilogue
In just 5 days I met some wonderfully inspiring people, facilitated my first 5 day design relay, practised yoga, honed my beach volleyball skills and still have a ‘temporary’ tattoo of Gareth Southgate on my arm. You wouldn’t think that you could design a water company for the future in 5 days but with diverse thinking and open minds we actually made progress and have a minimum viable business that we’re ready to test.
If you would like to learn more about the techniques that we use at Fluxx please give some applause 👏 — it helps guide us on what to write next.
Tricky is the Creative Director at Fluxx. He loves getting the best out of people, designing new experiences and making sure that the customer is at the heart of anything we create. If you’re trying to break the back of a design challenge, or building a new business, you can contact him directly at tricky@fluxx.uk.com.
