Design Sprints: Party Edition
After over 10 years of consulting, my co-founder Diana and I were used to confused looks as we tried to explain what we did to friends and family. Throw in phrases like “design thinking”, “human-centered”, “analogous inspiration” and the responses turned into mild incomprehension and disinterest, coupled with a healthy dose of skepticism. A friend in finance once sniffed “that sounds like made-up stuff that only people in New York and San Francisco would pay for.” She lives in Napa.
So last week, we held our first meet up in San Francisco. We had two primary objectives: demystify not just what we do but also how we do it.
Our plan was simple: on a Monday night, at the end of a long workday, we compressed a 5-day Design Sprint into one hour and put our guests to work on some really interesting problems, the future of:
- Food
- Work
- Education
- and Death
If that sounds like your idea of a party, get a copy of ‘The SIX Mini Sprint Guide’ used for this meet-up.
Meet The SIX
We were so lucky to have the opportunity to hold our first event at the beautiful Lumina building in SOMA. The staff was amazing and the space was both inspiring and enhanced our guests’ ability to co-create.
After check-in and a bit of mingling, my co-founder Diana kicked off with a quick introduction to The SIX and our founding team.
What we do
The-SIX.co is a boutique innovation and strategy consultancy that takes a human-centered, outcome-based approach to solving complex business challenges. We help leaders and their teams get their groove on. Management consultants by trade, we help design better business operating models, process, and product experiences. We use human-centered design approaches grounded by evidence to solve complex business problems in one week or less.
From our experience over the last decade, the biggest game-changer for companies was not just the ‘Next Big Technology’ (there will always be a new one), but simply to find, prioritize, and solve for the problem(s) that really matter.
We have observed that successful companies are able to look at problem-solving through a combination of dimensions: human-centered design, data literacy, computational thinking and then technology disruption. Business, IT, Operations, and Design teams who only look at problems through one of those dimensions end up solving the wrong problem or only one part of the problem.
The SIX Sprint aka “Come join my future of death party”
The format of our 1-hour mini sprint was a mashup of approaches from Design Thinking and Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint.
Before the sprint, each guest chose the topic they personally felt most passionate about and wanted to solve for. To our surprise, the Future of Death won the majority.
We definitely attracted a macabre bunch.
Ask the Experts: Sharing Research and Empathy
After the four teams formed around their Future of … topic, members of The SIX facilitated each group, acted as experts introducing each topic, reviewed the inspiration wall, and discussed key emerging themes and trends. I had the role of master facilitator, running the overall sprint, ensuring everyone moved seamlessly (more or less) through the process and managing time like a demented referee.
The Future of Food, facilitated by Tutu, focused on increasing culinary confidence and learning about food through tangible experiences, improving current food systems through ingredient and supply chain innovation, and aligning eastern and western cultures’ approach to food and health.
For the Future of Death, Emily guided the team through discussions around how we might make death less of a bummer, living forever through technology, and how different cultures integrate death into life.
Elaine and her team considered how the Gig economy, pervasive income equality, and technologies like automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence are reshaping the Future of Work and what skills we’ll need to thrive in that future.
Finally, for the Future of Education, Diana and Adri considered the rise of alternative learning channels, the pace of change, and how we might evolve learning to enable people of the world to be successful regardless of age, ability, economy, and circumstance.
How Might We
While actively listening to their expert, members of each group asked questions, provided additional insights, and began creating as many How Might We (HMW) statements as possible on Post-It stickies.
Following a process of affinity mapping and deduping the HMW stickies, each team prioritized and voted on their HMW’s to determine the challenge they would solve for in the next step.
The teams landed on the following HMW’s to focus their solutions on:
- Future of Death: How might we build connections while living that death cannot sever?
- Future of Work: How might we be an advocate for workplace rights in a gig economy?
- Future of Education: How might we teach topics that transcend age? (mixed-age classrooms)
- Future of Food: How might we make healthy food options the most convenient options?
Facilitator Tip: Need silence? No need to shout. Become a human andon system. Facilitator raises hands and then everyone else follows as a visual cue for the room to quiet. It works!
Defining our Target User
During typical Design Sprints, we’ve found that developing the user journey maps, which shows the relevant interactions of each user and selecting the target user and target moment to solution for, is one of the most rewarding but challenging and time-consuming aspects of a sprint for most clients.
Instead, for this 1-hour mini sprint we circumvented that challenge by allowing the team to have a brief discussion and quickly select the persona/user they wished to solution for.
Next, we moved straight into everyone’s favorite part of the sprint — ideating all possible solutions in the time allowed.
Ideate, Vote & Prioritize Solutions
After each person wrote as many solutions on stickies for their group’s HMW, solutions were placed under the appropriate HMW to be voted on.
This phase took about twice the time we’d originally allocated because of the number of solutions each team generated and the level of effort to affinity map and dedupe solutions. We encouraged the teams to be unconstrained and to come up with risky ideas worth testing.
Keeping Options Healthy and Energy High
We marveled that most of our guest have stayed late into the evening and remained engaged throughout the Sprint. The amazing food could have been one factor. La Cocina Community Kitchen provided the catering. This incredible organization is focused on helping women, immigrants and people of color become successful food entrepreneurs. The chef, Adriana Lahl, from Sal De Vida provided an enviable spread.
Deciding What to Execute
Each team then used an Effort/Impact Scale to quickly prioritize solutions starting with the top voted. This exercise proved a little challenging for some groups but we survived.
Turn Solutions into Actionable Testable Tasks & Sketch
After each team selected one winning solution from the “sweet spot” quadrant of high impact/low effort, the person who wrote the selected solution provided more context and actionable steps toward testing the solution within 2 weeks.
The team then individually designed/sketched their approach to creating or testing the solution in a 3-panel template and displayed their sketches on the wall, art gallery style.
Solution sketches were completed in silence to ensure each member of the team could be focused on individual work and fully define their ideas … the very model of working alone, together.
The Decider Decides
Instead of having a team vote on the sketches, we had the Decider vote for the best-sketched idea.
Share Out
Each team then shared out their original HMW and the final solution they chose. The energy level was high and the laughs were contagious as a presenter for each group shared their solution.
Future of Education Solution: Mixed Class Rooms
This group decided to solve for K-12 students and solve for an educational environment where learning can transcend age. The basis of the idea is that there are both non-cognitive and cognitive benefits to children in multi-age classrooms. In this first prototype, children would participate in mixed class sessions around the topic of ‘Empathy’. Concepts would be taught in the class, the students would be given exercises and scenarios to provoke thought and discussion across the ages in the classrooms, during lunch, recess, and at home with their families.
Future of Death Solution: Ask Dad Anything App
While death is a tricky topic, this group focused on how to maintain connections between the living and the dead through the persona of Jane who recently lost her father. The group came up with a Siri-like solution called “Ask Dad Anything.” For this product, they looked at scenarios like if Jane wanted to remember when she and her dad last visited Yosemite, she could fire up the app and say “Hey when did we go to Yosemite together” and it would reply back with “2007” as well as pull up photos of Jane and her dad in front of Half Dome. Another scenario was considered for daily life situations like fixing a plumbing leak that Jane might typically ask for Dad’s help with. The app might aggregate information from online DIY sites and customize instructions for Jane. These instructions would be relayed in Dad’s voice to personalize the experience and simulate the feeling that Dad was there helping.
Future of Food — Veggie Ice Cream Truck.
The team looked for a way to make healthy food the most convenient option for children in grade school. The team identified that a big aspect of the challenge is marketing effectively to children in a language that was appropriate for their age.
The proposed solution was to create a vegetable ice cream truck. Children will be attracted by the music they like, then they can get the ice cream made of vegetables, fruit yogurt, quinoa chips or other healthy options. The truck would travel to school, swimming pools, and other locations with a high density of children.
Future of Work. Using the persona of an Uber driver who may be feeling underpaid and overworked, the team jumped into how might we give a lonely worker in a vast gig economy a stronger voice. The solution that evolved was to create a community and a platform that allowed gig workers to pool together to exchange ideas and resources, and more importantly build a community as one voice.
While our mini Six Sprint took about half an hour longer than we’d planned, all the guests remained really enthusiastic and engaged throughout the exercise, and stayed on even longer for an impromptu Q&A session where we discussed how we’ve been able to leverage Design Thinking and Design Sprints for clients we had worked with before like Adient, AMEX, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Sprint, Deutsche Telecom, BP, Honeywell, Eversource, and others.
That’s our kind of party!!
Thanks to everyone who came out to co-create with us and special thanks to Susana Dominguez from Blowology Dry Bar who worked very hard to make us look smart and sassy for our event. Susana and her team are such great people and awesome stylists. One of Susana’s many passions is to change women’s lives at The Women’s Initiative and Dress for Success where she often donates her time and talents. Sometimes, it is the simple and less obvious things that make the difference.
The SIX is a strategy and experience innovation consultancy. We help people design better businesses.
If you are in or near New York, meet us face to face at a Design Sprint NYC meetup. Each month we’ll help teams understand what Google-style Design Sprints are and how to run them. We’ll also highlight upcoming Sprint events in New York and San Francisco on LinkedIn.
