Is Your Team in a Creative Rut? Try Inspiration Reports
As a product designer, it’s not easy to balance day-to-day business needs with keeping your inspiration cup filled and being able to spot emerging trends that nag you like toddlers demanding attention (how is A.I.-generated art disrupting the art world?!!). My team faced this challenge and experimented with a solution that any group can adopt. We call it “inspiration reports” and it leverages the collective cognitive power of the group to surface and share information about any topic that drives each team member’s curiosity.
Origin Story
This “new” global-work-from-anywhere world has its perks. But our design team has missed working in shared spaces dedicated to designers at the glittering Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. We miss the ability to interact daily to discuss concepts and participate in team events or offsites — like exploring museums or taking a cooking class. Working from our carved-out home “offices” has taken a toll on our creative juices.
So we did what any design team would do — we went at the problem with (digital) sticky notes, a solid “How Might We” statement,” and some dot voting. How might we be more creative at work? The top-three ideas were:
“Do something design work/team related but not necessarily product related.” — Emma Pan
“Inspiration reports. Everyone assigned a topic to report on.” — Ko Nakatsu
“Putting creative mornings time on the calendar and not opening Slack beforehand.” — Amber Bouabdallah
We chose inspiration reports where everyone could investigate a topic of their choosing. We set minimal constraints and picked a date for the shareout. Here is what we learned:
1: Frame the Series to Create Clarity
The first step in any successful collaborative project is to align on purpose and expectations so everyone is on the same page. For example, we needed to decide the scope of the reports, and whether they should build on a theme or become a Strategy Design framework. Instead of having everyone present on the same day, we decided to have two or three people present per one-hour session, with several sessions over the course of multiple weeks. Each person got 10–15 minutes to present, with up to 10 minutes for discussion. This gave us more flexibility.
Some of our designers wanted to dig into topics unrelated to work to get a mental break. There initially was some tension about the extra work required to complete these reports, but people eventually were pleasantly surprised to have the space to think about things other than enterprise software. They also did find connections to work, which made the effort feel worthwhile. So just be aware when choosing a topic.
2: Survey the Topic Landscape and Assemble
After we sorted the logistics, it was time for each designer to plunge into their respective internet rabbit holes and see where the algorithms took them. Essays, books, podcasts, assembly manuals, webinars, beta stage apps — no media type was off-limits. When exploring content, it’s important to keep track of references for crediting purposes and to keep your audience in mind as you assemble materials.
“After I came up with the topic. I could just do Google searches on companies that I knew did it well: ”Why are IKEA instructions so simple?” And it all really just fell into place from there.” — Mike Stickel, “Simplicity”
As you might imagine, for the presentations each designer took a different creative approach. Some got graphic with their slides, others made long scrolling PDFs, and I created a shared Figma file for live collaboration (my topic was about collaborative technologies). This was one place in the process where everyone enjoyed branching out from the corporate slide template to flex their storytelling muscles.
“I spent a lot of time watching Apple keynotes. They are so simple but so compelling — and I wanted to practice making that kind of presentation because what we do every day can be more like documentation.” — Ningdan Zhang, “Boba Trends in China”
3: Present and Loop
As we learned from Nicole’s report on the “extended mind,” “looping” with the team on the reports is just as important as presenting them. The group will broaden your perspective and help clarify your thinking, so creating a structure that promotes discussion and participation is important. Keep an eye on the time. Presenters should bring thought-provoking questions for fodder and record each session to post them afterward for people to add follow-up comments and links.
I was lucky that our Design Program Manager — Emma Wylds — attended my session and was able to give her unique perspective on working to build collaboration into our own organization. This is a conversation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. So don’t be afraid to invite one or two people who might add relevant value.
4: Carry the Inspiration Forward
We found various ways to carry on the momentum. I gave my report to my engineering team a few weeks later during release planning, in addition to embedding learnings into various forward-looking prototypes. This very Medium post has embedded collaborative insights 😉. Other designers had different experiences:
“After learning more about the creator economy, I thought it could be cool if I learned more about it by doing — what if I mentored other designers? And it became a personal experiment to teach myself the skill of building an audience [on Instagram] and creating content myself.” — Emma Pan, “The Creator Economy”
“There has been lasting inspiration on product and personal levels…for the product: an awareness of customer privacy and data. Personally, AI has changed my life, when a product ‘knows’ me in a non-creepy way. Intelligence is a game-changer… when it’s helpful (we live in a world of too much noise, can AI please help me and our customers sort through some of it?!).” — Nimma Bhusri, “Responsible AI”
“I think the initiative was super inspirational. We walked away having a new level of awareness for topics like human augmentation, extended mind, and even bubble tea (though the report was actually on the evolution of business in the Chinese economy).” — Ko Nakatsu, “Recession and Design”
“The topic of human augmentation always comes back to ethics, right? How is this going to affect society or is it just going to continue to exaggerate class divides, etc.? Now those questions are not directly specific to what I design daily at Salesforce, but it felt important to be more aware of as a consumer of technology.” — Jason Moll, “Human 2.0 — Rise of the Cyborgs”
It was interesting to see such a range of inspiration that came from the series: new ways of working and understanding, experiments to carry out, knowledge to share further, and identifying opportunities in product ownership.
5: The Wrap-Up
Another hallmark of a great collaboration is to make space for reflection, feedback, and iteration. This means that when we plan the next inspiration report series, we will be able to incorporate everyone’s perspectives to refine the experience.
So were we successful? We think so! Everyone said they would like to do the reports again (with a few changes), and we were inspired in various surprising ways and capacities. In addition, we found it to be a novel way to build authentic connections within the team.
“The reports can help build real team rapport when everybody is remote. They allow you to have more structured and interesting conversations… so it’s not like let me go meet with John and talk through this work initiative in detail, but it’s also not a light ‘what color represents how you are feeling today’ type of thing either. It’s deeper.” — Nicole McGovern, “Extended Mind”
I would love to hear from anyone who runs their own inspiration series or has other ideas. Remote work is here to stay and we all need to find new ways to engage and stay inspired. And most importantly, have fun!
Amber Bouabdallah is the Lead Product Designer for Collaborative Service at Salesforce. Before building enterprise collaboration tools, she co-founded a studio called Free Time and a non-profit called the Seattle Design Foundation — both of which brought together designers and makers from across disciplines to bring ideas into reality through collaboration. She is inspired by what can be created when various minds come together to problem-solve and create.
Acknowledgments: Special thanks to the Salesforce Service Transformation Team for sharing their research, feedback and spending time after to discuss. Huge appreciation to the talented editorial lead Hsiao-Ching Chou for her ideas and skills every step along the way.
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