Sprinting for Future Smart Residential Areas — Learnings from Design Sprint 2.0 in a B2B context
Imagine that in your residential area a nearby supermarket needs cold energy for cooling down their store during hot summer months. When producing this cold energy, warmth is generated as a byproduct. Now, imagine that this warmth could be captured in the supermarket and transferred to your apartment building nearby to warm the apartments during the colder autumn. In the future this will become the reality. Future residential areas must circulate the energy streams in order to lower emissions and their carbon dioxide footprint, which are both necessities when fighting against global warming. Besides, it also just makes sense to utilize the energy that is born as surplus in these processes.
To make this leap from imagination to reality, Fortum Design helped the heating and cooling team at Fortum to plan for this future. 13 experts in the fields of energy, smart living, and heating and cooling, were brought together to run the first two days of Design Sprint 2.0. The goal of the 2-day workshop was to explore how Fortum could help future cities with smart and sustainable energy planning in a B2B context.
It was the very first time for our team to facilitate the 2.0 version of the Design Sprint, which squeezes the original five Sprint days into only four; the main difference of the two is that the problem and solution part of the sprint is completed already by the end of the second day, leaving day three and four dedicated to prototyping and testing the solution. It was interesting to see this rapid-Sprint in action. If you keep reading you will find out what we learned during these two days.
Ready, steady, GO!
As most of you probably know, the first steps in any sprint (e.g. a 100-meter race) are crucial as your body works hard to accelerate to its maximal speed as quickly as possible. The same also happens in the Design Sprint 2.0: this acceleration was mimicked by starting our early morning with Expert Interviews (1) and How Might We -note taking (2). Gathering and sharing the most important insights from the experts of different fields was important in order to ensure everyone was getting up to the same speed. It was also a moment of truth for the workshop since the participants were required to work efficiently together despite being from different divisions and units and not knowing each other beforehand. Luckily, our experts passed the test and active discussions and note taking accelerated us into a good speed for the day.
Naturally, when creating something new even experts might have more questions than answers, but the How Might We -note taking worked nicely as a way to set common ground. Doing this exercise seemed to increase the feeling of “doing-things-together” as well as helped the participants to look towards the same finish line.
Good preparation leads to excellent results and customization can make or break the process
The known fact in sports is that during the race there is no room for doubts. All of the extensive physical and mental training is done before the race starts. The same can be seen to apply in Design Sprint as well.
I was anxious about the mapping exercise (3) when planning our Sprint. First of my concerns was related to the phases of the mapping, often defined as discover, learn, use. I felt that these phases did not give enough support for the individual exercises in our B2B context. To address this concern, we facilitators consulted some of the experts and created a set of tailored phases before running the Sprint. Our hard work paid off; we had a very concrete set of phases that were still adjustable during the Sprint.
We first asked the participants to individually describe a stakeholder’s goal with empathy and then map out the steps that take them through the different phases and into the stakeholder’s goal.
My second concern was about the individual exercise in which the Sprint participants map the different stakeholders’ (on the left of the map) action steps towards our defined long-term goal of the Sprint (on the right of the map). Personally, I did not feel that this set up was correct because action steps are created from the stakeholder’s perspective on as-is basis; their long-term goal can be very different than our Sprint goal. To tackle this concern, we modified the exercise slightly. We first asked the participants to individually describe a stakeholder’s goal with empathy and then map out the steps that take them through the different phases and into the stakeholder’s goal. To make it easier to tie these goals into our goals, we also had our own long-term goal visible on the very right corner of the map. It was encouraging to notice that the experts also found it useful to empathize with the stakeholders’ goals when writing down their action steps.
The First Half of the Sprint
“Our future offering — what and to whom; our future service concept, and customer value proposition”, I read in the e-mail sent to us by our internal clients. How should we fulfill these needs? Even though I knew that it is not perfect to give boundaries for sketching and to limit people’s creativity, it would still be needed to ensure that these questions are answered to.
We ended up giving guidance to our participants in the Doodling session (4) so that they would be thinking about their future service concept in particular. We also contextualized the Crazy 8’s exercise (5) so it was used to ideate on the customer value proposition. As for the final solution sketches (6), we gave our workshop participants the guideline to have the results of the previous two exercises as well as the customer segment visible in their sketches to pull the big picture tighter together. It seemed that overall our experts were very happy about the outcomes that they produced in the very end of the first day of Design Sprinting.
The Second Half of the Sprint
Even when you start feeling the lactic acid in your muscles and your whole body is starting to ache during the last part of your sprint, you just have to push forward and keep going since the finishing line looms right in front of your eyes — just a little bit further! At this point you just need to keep your legs rolling, no matter if you are in the sports track or in a Design Sprint workshop.
The hardest part of the Sprint — in my opinion — is to choose which one sketch out of the many interesting ones should be chosen. And then bring that to a very tangible level by adding details and concrete elements.
I’m still thinking whether we should have made the bold decision to diverge from the Sprint process and replace the storyboard with an exercise more focused on a concrete service offering.
It is evident that sketching a mobile app or a web service is a little bit different from designing a complete service offering. The Sprint’s Storyboard exercise (7) forced our participants to describe a step-by-step process of a story. In order to create a tangible service concept, we would have needed a more static description that we could have tested with clients. I’m still thinking whether we should have made the bold decision to diverge from the Sprint process and replace the storyboard with an exercise more focused on a concrete service offering. This is something we had discussed with our internal clients but in the end decided not to do; however, perhaps we’ll try it out the next time when we have a similar type of a case at hand.
Crossing the Finish Line
Exhausted but happy, right? After a race you need to take a deep breath and calm your pulse down before reflecting back on what just happened. After a brief moment of recovery we also took a look back and started to gather the main learnings of this Sprint and their implications for the future.
At the end of this Design Sprint 2.0 we received very good and valuable feedback both from our internal clients as well as the Sprint participants. One of the biggest improvement areas we found was about bringing the concepts into a more tangible level. One potential way to solve this could be by framing the storyboarding into a very narrow sequence of actions and with that force the experts to ideate on more tangible outcomes. Similarly, replacing the storyboard with an exercise that supports a more static outcome could be tried out.
During the two days of Design Sprinting it was great to observe that all of the experts were concentrating on the topics at hand: they were extremely disciplined, creative, and also willing to challenge their thinking and step outside of their comfort zones. Open feedback and comments like “time was flying” and “it felt like very short two days full of events” gave me the feeling that our participants concentrated with high focus and enjoyed themselves in the process.
From the organizational point of view there is another important finding that we made: nearly half of the How might we -questions were about concerns regarding internal policies and how people could work together in order to achieve something new in the future. This is a very important topic for discussion but was scoped out in the Design Sprint since it’s something that large companies like Fortum can spend a lot of time discussing and which is better handled outside the workshop. However, it still emerged as a very concrete learning that when organizational silos are crossed, there must be time to discuss and focus on also these types of questions.
Now is a good time to step back, stretch a little, before heading back to the tracks with warmed up feet and a sharp mind, ready for the next Sprint!
References:
Knapp et al., 2016.
‘Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days’
(1) Expert Interviews, p. 68–74
(2) ‘How Might We’, p. 75–82
(3) The Map, p. 59–67
(4) Doodling, p. 111
(5) Crazy 8’s, p. 111–113
(6) Solution Sketch, p. 114–118
(7) Storyboard, p. 148–158
