Appendix B
The Art of Box Breaking
Overview
Design thinking rests on abductive reasoning, or playing pretend. In highly analytic environments, such as high-tech engineering firms, pretending is an unfamiliar approach to problem solving. Organizations relying on deductive or inductive reasoning equate pretending with guessing. No one is going to bet their budget on a guess, because, well, it’s a guess! It is based on intuition, gut feeling, and personal bias.
These organizations have a philosophical orientation towards error (pessimistic) diametrically opposed to that of organizations based on design thinking (optimistic). For manufacturing, engineering, finance, quality assurance, and any Six Sigma–focused process, error is a negative condition. It must be eliminated below or within a set of acceptable constraints. For designers, error is a source of inspiration and delight.
Abductive reasoning, as the starting position for design thinking, is the embrace of error.
In this appendix, we provide techniques to shift teams into a playful state of mind. With a sense of play, guessing and being wrong is not only okay but also the exact right thing to do. These techniques are not unique to PrD, but we have found them accessible, easy to facilitate, and effective. They are not the only such creative exercises, and they are not appropriate for every Creation Session. We offer them for consideration in larger/longer Creation Sessions. Larger sessions require formality to accommodate the diversity of team members and to address the organization’s investment. Ad hoc sessions have just as much need for abductive reasoning, but getting team members into an abductive frame of mind is much easier. The exercises we describe can, with adjustments, be used for ad hoc sessions. The principles behind the exercises are important regardless of the scale of the Creation Session.
The Art of Abductive Reasoning
Remember the games we played in childhood? Think about the amazing worlds children imagine, their fresh viewpoints, and the sometimes puzzling, sometimes profound interpretations they offer. For most of us, childhood is a time of exploration and rationalization of the world, micro-acts of scientific discovery. And most of the time we get it all wrong.
Playing pretend is key to abductive reasoning. We don’t have all the relevant data, so we make our best guess, pretend it’s correct and see what happens. Kids do it constantly, building up a storehouse of knowledge by starting with their imaginings, then tempered by real-world events. Toddlers learn so much through trial and error, and who knows what imaginings lead them to try the things they do (Figure B.1)? Over time, with coaching from adults, peers, and the world itself, we spend less and less time imagining alternative worlds.1
Figure B.1 Discovering through trial and error
That is, unless you’re an artist or a designer. These individuals spend a considerable amount of time imagining the world as it could be—whether as an expression of a personal point of view or in service of a patron. Art, as Plato argued so vehemently, is so wrong, on so many levels, it is unfit for civil society.2 Art, it turns out, is the expression of error; it is a purposeful effort to render a world, not as it is but as it is perceived or imagined to be.
Where art is pursued for personal expression, design is pursued in service of someone or something else. Regardless of their motivation, the two disciplines share abductive reasoning as their primary process for approaching the world.
But back to those kids. Early on, our theories about the world are wrong so often we must be protected from ourselves. What would happen if I jumped off this rock? These stairs? This cliff? When provided a safe environment to explore, however, these imaginary theories become the basis for extended, engrossed thinking: the endless playing with dolls, houses, and action figures. Unless the testing of the theories ends up in injury (running the tricycle into a brick wall, for example), there is great joy and delight in these engagements.
And so it is with PrD. In a safe environment in which adults are given permission to reason abductively, the room is filled with laughter, surprise, and delight. The PrD Creation Session is a designed experience, specifically focused on enhancing the team’s abductive reasoning. Getting everyone to agree it’s okay to be “silly” can be a challenge: Not all team members are prepared for silliness in an engagement ostensibly meant to be serious.
The Creation Session implies creativity. Abductive reasoning requires people to make stuff up. Therefore, for the Creation Session to be successful, the team needs to recognize and leverage its creativity.
In their book, Convivial Toolbox, Sanders and Stappers offer counsel for helping teams recognize their own creativity.3 First, we must accept everyone is creative, but for some it is latent. Individuals reside in one of four levels of creativity: doing (getting something done), adapting (making things better), making (crafting with one’s own hands), and creating (expressing one’s ability). Depending on the context, each of us inhabits a particular level at any given time.
Some people move to higher levels because:
• They are motivated.
• They have an innate ability that fits with their chosen context.
• They have gained experience with creating things over time.
In any given group individuals will vary in their attainment of these levels.
The authors offer four principles they believe establish common ground for teams entering into a Creation Session:
1. All people are creative.
2. All people have dreams.
3. People will fill in what is unseen and unsaid based on their own experience and imagination.
4. People project their needs onto ambiguous stimuli because they are driven to make meaning.4
PrD embraces these same principles, notably, the two addressing ambiguity. As the early 20th century educationalist Graham Wallas suggested in his seminal book on creativity, The Art of Thought, creativity happens over time and emerges through five stages: preparation, incubation, intimation, illumination, and verification.5
We offer activities for these stages in the remainder of this appendix. We organize the activities in the order in which attendees experience them.
Creation Session Activities
The purpose of this appendix is not to provide an exhaustive set of exercises that build teams, break ice, inspire creativity, or improve prototyping skills. We offer examples to show how we structure the Creation Session. Naturally, which exercise we choose depends on the objectives of the effort—PrD always comes back to the objectives.
Prework
Prework is essential to priming Creation Session attendees’ thinking, equivalent to Wallas’s notion of preparation. In many workshops, brainstorming is used to get the ball rolling; attendees are asked to brainstorm about a problem, for example. We improve the Creation Session by asking attendees to consider a problem statement in advance. Making the problem statement a prework activity accomplishes several objectives:
1. It prepares the attendees for the Creation Session by focusing their attention on the problem(s) in advance.
2. It allows for a period of incubation between their consideration of the problems and the actual session.
3. It frees up time during the session to engage in more synthetic activities (as opposed to analyzing the problem).
4. It supports team building by revealing problem statements that are shared by multiple individuals.
This is not to suggest prework is limited to problem statements. We’ve requested several types of prework from Creation Session attendees:
• The assumptions the team holds dear
• The key markets they believe the company should pursue
• The most important objectives to achieve on the project
Any focus that ultimately moves the goals of the session forward is game. The key is to start attendees thinking about those goals in advance.
We use the prework as the participants’ entry ticket to the workshop. We leverage it to prime internal stakeholders as discussed at the start of this section. We also use their responses during the Creation Session. In the session, we focus attendees’ attention on their prework responses to identify the issues most important to the group as a whole.
Prework Logistics
We ask internal stakeholders to return their prework at least three days in advance of the session and make it a prerequisite of attending. In addition to signaling the high expectations and quality for the session, it raises the attendees’ level of attention to the work itself.
We request the prework to be returned digitally—usually by email, but perhaps on a shared location—and we process the work to prepare it for the Creation Session.
Here’s an example in which we ask participants to offer the top three challenges they perceive about the effort. We send out the following request to prospective attendees:
Thank you for your interest in participating in the New Venture Visioning workshop. You’ve been invited because of your knowledge and expertise. To help make the workshop a success for you and the other attendees, please complete and return the prework described below by 〈one week〉 from today. We estimate the prework will take less than 30 minutes to complete.
Prework is answering a maddeningly simple question: What are the top three challenges New Venture must address within the next three years?
Please format your answers as follows:
Challenge Statement 1 〈20 words or less〉
〈Brief paragraph explaining the challenge—100 words or less〉
Challenge Statement 2 〈20 words or less〉
〈Brief paragraph explaining the challenge—100 words or less〉
Challenge Statement 3 〈20 words or less〉
〈Brief paragraph explaining the challenge—100 words or less〉
After collecting incoming statements, we print them on large sticky notes (5.5 × 8.5) in preparation for one of the first exercises in the Creation Session.
Arriving and Introductions
We exercise attendees’ abductive reasoning to introduce each other and the workshop. Remember, the Creation Session is mostly theater. It’s an Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass environment in which abductive reasoning and silly make-believe are the norm. Every opportunity to shift participants’ modes of thinking keeps them in an appropriate state of disorientation, at least disoriented from their usual day-to-day practice.
Arriving Off-Site
As mentioned in Chapter 15, hosting the Creation Session off-site reduces interruptions and distractions. But there’s another benefit to hosting Creation Sessions in unfamiliar locations: enhancing the effect of separation from the “normal” way of doing things. As participants arrive, they see signage, carefully branded with the theme for the event. We position a table of name tags outside the door to the workshop room (Figure B.2); the tags are customized for the event. (We discuss creating a theme and badging in more detail in the sections that follow.) These touches establish a sense of theater, signaling this meeting is out-of-the-ordinary before attendees pass through the door.
Figure B.2 Establish a theme for signage and badges
In many large organizations (where people are in meetings with others they’ve never met), meetings begin with introductions. Individuals offer their names, years of service, and what organizations they’re in. For workshops, attendees are asked to embellish on the standard fare by offering what they hope to get out of the workshop. For Creation Sessions, we want the introduction to set the stage for abductive reasoning and creative delight. The name tags are the first of many props we use, telegraphing to internal stakeholders they are about to engage in something different from the usual all-day meeting.
Creating a Theme
We create name tags for larger Creation Sessions branded to the underlying theme of the PrD itself. For a sales-focused product, for example, we crafted a theme around famous salespeople through the ages. In addition to using the corporate brand, we embellished the name tags with a set of sales-oriented images. With each participant’s name preprinted with whimsical imagery on the tag, we communicated a sense of both playfulness and seriousness.
We have created themes around collaboration, multinational projects, and explorers, to name a few. In each case, we brainstorm about the theme, identifying candidate images, exemplar individuals, or projects. The theme extends beyond the name tags, as we mentioned in Chapter 15. Signage, table tent cards (discussed further along), the program, imagery in presentations, posters, and the like all contribute and conform to the theme.
Introductions
We use the imagery on the name tags to serve a completely different purpose, an initially hidden but also playful intention. As we described in Chapters 10 and 15, we create teams based on a variety of attributes (role, personality, level of subject matter expertise, level of design expertise, e.g.). Getting attendees into their teams provides another opportunity for abductive reasoning. After arriving, name tags in place, coffee in hand, the internal stakeholders are called to attention by the Facilitator. The Facilitator welcomes them and lets them know the workshop will begin in a few minutes, after everyone has had a chance to meet each other and separate into their teams.
Finding Your Tribe
For introductions, we ask attendees to find other members of their team, based solely on the images on their name tags. Every attendee has a different image. While they may notice the image (because it is unusual to have a name tag at all, let alone one with a picture on it), rarely do attendees notice that everyone’s image is different, until the Facilitator calls their attention to it.
We use a simple process to find appropriate imagery categories for each team and then appropriate images for each team member. Here is a small design problem in and of itself: identifying several sets of good images to enable clustering. For the “famous salespeople” theme, we first identified top salespeople through the ages. John Henry Patterson, the founder of NCR, for example, is considered one of the towering figures of sales. Without using anything specific to Patterson, we identified a variety of icons and images associated with Patterson. Selecting eight or so, we arbitrarily assigned an image to each member of team, placing it on each name tag.
Imagine the scene in which 30 people from four teams are mingling, trying to figure out whether the image on their badges are part of the same set as 29 other people. We don’t inform them of the number of teams. We don’t tell them how many people should be in their team. We don’t give a clue about the nature of the images. What we do ask is for them to introduce themselves, as they usually do, to anyone they’ve never met before, and continue to try and solve the puzzle.
One of the key elements of this exercise (an element we return to in all of our Creation Session exercises) is multichannel or multimodal cognitive engagement. Rather than relying on a text-based way of solving the problem, we ask our participants to engage language and imagery to complete the exercise. For some this is a completely novel and disruptive exercise; for others it is merely delightful. This exercise, as with many others we employ, relies on “both sides of the brain.” In doing so, we start people moving through the design thinking cycle by exercising their abductive reasoning.
Eventually, clusters appear in the crowd, and stragglers are left looking for help. The Facilitator asks each of the clusters to provide the overarching theme for their images, and the stragglers eventually find their way to their teams. In some cases, the Facilitator will have to offer the “decoder ring,” to help get everyone properly situated.
In the end, the Facilitator asks if anyone sees another participant whom they’ve never met, and final introductions are completed before everyone is invited to sit at their team table.
Remember, the key point here is to set the stage for creativity and abductive reasoning, even during such prosaic activities as arrival and introductions.
Team Building
With the group properly introduced and teams formed, we continue team building. Even if everyone already knows each other, they may not have had the opportunity to work together on a common problem. As discussed in Chapters 10 and 15, we work hard to compose the teams in advance. We populate teams with individuals from all quadrants in the design thinking framework. Putting diverse people into a group is a good first step, but doesn’t guarantee they’ll cohere into a team. As in the “Introductions” exercise described earlier on, team building exercises are excellent opportunities to promote creativity and abductive reasoning.
Once again, we start with the theme. Just as we theme the session itself, we provide subthemes to help teams create their identity and brand. This isn’t meant to drive competition (although a little bit of between-team competition can be useful in the Creation Sessions). It starts the cohesion process. Since these sessions are always short on time, we use whatever methods we can to move through the “forming”6 stage. The attendees got a taste of their team theme during the introduction; their next touchpoint is at their table. As the Facilitator asks the teams to move to their table, members of the hosting team (marketing, UX, strategy) flip over a table card on each table.
For one Creation Session, in which the overarching theme was “working together,” we chose monumental engineering projects as the team themes: the Eiffel Tower, Hoover Dam, International Space Station, etc. At each table, the table card provided the answer to the team’s organizing theme. In addition to an image of the monument, the table card provided a brief paragraph relating the team’s theme to the session. We take this opportunity to shape attendees’ thinking, priming them for exercises to come.
Pictophone
We rely on several team building exercises, all of which share the common characteristic we mentioned previously: multimodal engagement by attendees. (At least two forms of mental processing are required to complete the exercise.) In one favorite of ours, a variation of a game popularly known as Pictophone, each table plays the familiar childhood game of “telephone,” but with a twist (Figure B.3). As in the usual game, the Facilitator goes to each table, selects someone to start the game, and whispers a word or phrase in her ear. The prompt relates to the theme of the Creation Session or, more importantly, the focus of the PrD. Each team is usually, but not necessarily, offered a different phrase.
Figure B.3 A Pictophone example: “Team work” becomes “Circus Act”
In our variation of Pictophone, the first player must draw an image of the phrase she heard. She then passes the drawing to the next player, who must interpret it and whisper his interpretation to his neighbor next in line. (An alternative is to write a phrase and pass it to his neighbor.) And so it goes until the last player has drawn an image or announces his interpretation of the image provided to him. Note: All drawings must be kept guarded so downstream team members at the table don’t get an advanced peek.
This particular exercise accomplishes several goals at once:
1. Of course, it builds teams by having everyone contribute to a common goal.
2. It continues the process of right-brain thinking for both the artist who’s drawing what she’s heard (or read) and the speaker who is interpreting what he sees.
This exercise, as with most of the Creation Session, requires facilitation. Attendees will be shy about drawing, or apologetic for their skills. Some individuals may protest or refuse (we’ve never had anyone refuse, but we have had to help individuals accept their drawing skills are more than adequate for the job). If the environment is safe, everyone actively engages.
Multimodal Exercises
Exercises don’t have to be generic. To reinforce objectives of a games-based workshop, one of our associates started the day with an interactive game design exercise, a “metagame.” He asked attendees to craft rules associated with the rolling of dice. As the game progressed, they needed to invent new rules for emerging dice patterns they hadn’t encountered already. With each new rule they invented, they had to go back and consider the rules already in place, potentially revising them. The metagame experience was key to the attendees’ purpose for the day (crafting a game-based experience for their own stakeholders), even though the exercise itself had nothing to do with the focus of the day.
Any exercise that drives multimodal interaction will work. Many of the exercises we use are culled from the discipline of improvisational comedy, again to establish an atmosphere of fun, spontaneity, and, yes, abductive reasoning. We start the morning session with an exercise, and we also use improv games later in the day, usually after lunch when energy is lagging.
One game we use to pump up the energy is a variation on Monkey See, Monkey Do. Teams are asked to stand up around the table or in a circle somewhere convenient in the room. The Facilitator usually demonstrates the exercise, since merely describing it can be difficult. In brief, participants are supposed to mime an action while describing a completely different action. For example, a team member might mime bouncing a ball, but say “I’m brushing my teeth.” The next team member to the right must now mime brushing her teeth, and say “I’m petting a cat.” And so it goes around the circle. The key to this exercise is the realization by everyone, almost immediately, how silly they and their teammates look. More important, individuals don’t realize how challenging the activity is until it’s their turn. We usually let the cycle go twice, to give people a practice round followed by mastery.
The room is usually very loud by the time that exercise is over, with a lot of laughing.
Whether in the morning or the afternoon, we use these exercises to put people in the right mood to tackle the more critical effort of the session: crafting an artifact that reveals their assumptions.
Affinitizing the Prework
An initial exercise in the Creation Session has attendees affinitize the prework statements we collected and printed (Figure B.4). Individuals take a stack of notes placing each one on a large open wall. Over the next 30 minutes, the statements begin to fall into clusters, and eventually somebody places a label above the clusters.
Figure B.4 Affinitizing prework
We do this exercise for several reasons:
• It demonstrates common themes across the group. Some individuals may think their challenge statements are unique, only to discover their concerns are shared by others.
• It allows everyone to see and “interact” with everyone else’s statements, improving comprehension and possibly triggering other ideas.
• It gets people on their feet.
To the last point, going through the agenda, house rules, and other introductory material may take a half-hour of “downtime.” We get people out of their seats and their blood moving to increase their creativity.
In a typical Creation Session, after the challenge statement affinitization, we ask teams to vote on the top three (five, 10, whatever makes sense) statements by marking the statements with a sticky dot or pen. One trick we’ve learned is to divide the total number of ideas by three; the result is the number of votes each individual has. Attendees can put all of their votes on one idea, or spread them around. Each team then selects one of the top scorers as their challenge statement. Using that statement as their focus, teams begin their first brainstorm exercise: “What will address this challenge?”
Ideation
Within every workshop is the need for generating ideas. Quantity over quality is the mantra. When we introduce brainstorming exercises, we also introduce ground rules to improve the teams’ success.
Brainstorming Rules
• Defer Judgment.
• Encourage wild ideas!
• First thoughts first. Put down the first thing that comes to mind and don’t over think your responses.
• Use the “yes and ...” rule, building on the ideas of others.
• Stay focused on the topic.
• Hold one conversation at a time.
• Be visual!
• Go for quantity over quality.
• Have fun!
All of these should sound familiar to anyone who’s been in brainstorming sessions. Reminding attendees of the rules is essential, but it doesn’t guarantee compliance. Be aware of seasoned veterans who have long since gotten over brainstorming and may be less cooperative or interested than their teammates.
We switch exercises up a little. Sometimes we use a process called “brainwriting.”7 Brainwriting expects individuals to silently write down as many ideas as they can think of in the first five minutes. After each person has a pile, the Facilitator prompts them to put their sticky notes up on a common board. With the ideas up, the team is asked to do the process again, but building on an idea they saw from someone else. A variation is to put ideas into a common “pool” in the center of the table. When individuals get stuck, they pull a card from the pool and use it for additional inspiration.
Another variation is to offer each team a “random” object (they may truly be arbitrary—things the hosting team has grabbed out of their desks, or perhaps from the junk prototyping materials) in the center of the table, and ask them to incorporate it into the ideas they’re generating.
Of greatest importance, over anything else, is keeping the first brainstorm exercise short. Reducing the length of time in the first one, in particular, helps keep the pace, reduces the likelihood of overanalyzing, and gets those first ideas out on paper.
Innovation Games, Gamestorming, and the Convivial Toolbox
There exist entire books and businesses focused on creative exercises to engage stakeholders to generate ideas. The three books listed at the start of this section are just a few we have in our reference shelf.
Because PrD relies on crafting “an artifact from the future” for others to engage with, many of these exercises may not quite apply, or may need some adjustment.
For multiday workshops we don’t attack the final artifact right at once, or all in a piece. We decompose the effort, ramping up the teams’ creativity while simultaneously focusing them on the artifact.
News from the Future
This is a common exercise with several variations. It works well for teams with little graphical skills or who are highly verbal. The exercise is pure abductive reasoning: Teams are asked to write a newspaper article that has mysteriously and magically come from the future. The article is about the venture for which the Creation Session has been organized, written as if it has already been successful.
This exercise illuminates something odd about our brains. When we write something as if it is going to occur, we think about it completely differently from writing about something that has already occurred. By authoring the piece as if it has already happened, we suddenly need to consider all sorts of domino events that would have likely occurred as well. Those help shape or modify our original notions.
News from the future is one of the easiest, and most direct, expressions of PrD. The only reason it isn’t PrD is stakeholders can’t use the articles. We have offered such science fiction stories to stakeholders to gauge their reaction, solicit their input, and the like, but simply reading about something is not the same as engaging with it.
As a result, we consider this a powerful exercise to loosen up the teams’ thinking and get them ready for the big event, but in and of itself “News from the Future” is not a suitable artifact as an outcome.
A Key Feature
We have attendees at PrD workshops who have very little design experience. We have attendees who’ve not attended a design-based workshop. At the other extreme, designers who attend the workshops bring a sense of perfectionism that is definitely not what PrD is about.
We offer teams a “practice run” before we have them jump into the main event. After the initial exercises described earlier on, we have them identify a single feature of the new venture that must be offered over any other: a key feature (Figure B.5).
Figure B.5 Crafting a key feature
The exercise gives people practice in crafting artifacts. It begins with brainstorming (or brainwriting), usually limited to 15 minutes, to identify the key feature. Whether teams land on the right feature is immaterial. With that said, teams do become attached to the ideas they’ve generated in this brainstorm. They may revisit and embellish on the feature later on in the workshop. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because eventually their artifact will be in front of stakeholders. The stakeholders will quickly let the team know what is of value or irrelevant.
After identifying the key feature, the teams are challenged to create an artifact expressing the feature. For extra credit they build one that stakeholders can use. This last bit is often more than the teams can achieve because it requires a solid understanding of prototype “design patterns.”8 The point is to get familiar with the cadence, rhythm, and challenges of creating artifacts.
As with all exercises, the “singular feature” exercise is timeboxed (no more than 60 minutes allotted, including brainstorming/ideation) to force the team to go with their first thoughts—their “gut” reaction.
The exercise ends with a brief, five-minute report out so the entire group can learn and share.
Artifacts from the Future
The “main event” of the workshop is to craft an artifact addressing the key challenges the teams have identified. As with “News from the Future,” it is an abductive approach: creating an artifact, not which stakeholders will use, but one they have already used. (Eventually, during the Engagement Session, stakeholders will use the artifact, but during the Creation Session, teams must believe they are simply reproducing an artifact that already exists and has conveniently traveled back in time.)
We allocate at least three hours for this exercise. Once again, it begins with an ideation session, perhaps revisiting the challenge statements, but equally likely focusing on the task or tasks the team expects stakeholders to perform. By focusing on a task, the team must consider how the artifact will be used, a key attribute of the Engagement Session.
We suggest teams rapidly create three different solutions. In design school, we’re taught to identify three completely divergent solutions to the same problem—so, too, in this exercise. Teams are urged to complete not just one artifact, but at least three artifacts addressing the challenge statement(s) or problem they’ve selected. Faced with that prospect, three hours isn’t very much time. We don’t expect the teams to develop each idea fully, but they should be prepared to report out on the three ideas, and provide justification for the one they believe should be offered to external stakeholders.
The Facilitator must be on her toes during this exercise to help teams keep track of the time. Teams significantly underestimate the amount of time they need to produce an artifact. About halfway through, we usually announce teams should be on their way to building something. We announce the remaining time every 30 minutes thereafter. Teams will overinvest in their creations, whether to get every detail correct, or to add features. It’s like a real product development cycle in miniature, replete with uncertainty, scope creep, and a desire to make it the best.
The Facilitator continues to reinforce the end goal: to build an artifact that provokes a conversation addressing the objectives. In many cases, less is more: The more ambiguous an artifact, the more open ended it is for interpretation by the stakeholders. Team members, Designers in particular, may not fully appreciate the need for ambiguity and push for more definition, but every element added to the artifact is an assumption. Before adding to the artifact, therefore, the team should quickly determine whether the addition would provoke the right kind of conversation.
Breaking Boxes
Three Solutions
As mentioned in the prior section, when the Facilitator requests teams to create three divergent solutions, she is forcing them to do several things at once:
1. Remain aloof from any one solution, a critical attitude teams must maintain as they move into the Engagement Sessions.
2. Question their initial solution to get fresh perspectives on the problem space and their assumptions.
3. Move through the design thinking cycle.
This approach will be familiar to the Designers on the team, but may not be to others.
Devil’s Advocate
As discussed in Chapter 10, homogeneity in groups reduces their ability to find novel solutions. After the Bay of Pigs disaster, President Kennedy requested a postaction review of how things went wrong.9 The review identified a key problem with the process Kennedy used: He didn’t permit naysayers on his team to challenge his assumptions. Even if he wasn’t conscious of it, his seniority in the group carried a tacit belief with the rest of the team his assumptions shouldn’t be questioned.
Kennedy reconfigured his team process. In subsequent engagements, a specific individual was appointed as the “devil’s advocate,” to explicitly oppose the current approach the team was taking. The opposing view is designed to disrupt groupthink before it becomes counterproductive.
Consider offering this option to teams, especially if there is already a contrarian in the mix. By legitimatizing the role, the Facilitator defuses dysfunctional team dynamics. Assigning a devil’s advocate increases the team’s ability to devise divergent outcomes.
Literally Breaking Boxes
All of the previous sections provide a lengthy discussion of how to break our participants’ mental boxes. There comes a time in every Creation Session when participants literally break real boxes (Figure B.6).
Figure B.6 Building artifacts by breaking boxes
In The Case of the Pushy Pillboxes, Leo learned firsthand the differences in approach designers and researchers took when creating an artifact from the future. Designers, and especially industrial designers, immediately began crafting solutions by sketching and imagining outcomes. The researchers spent their time analyzing the likely tasks, decomposing the steps, and charting key pieces of the experience on whiteboards.
More intriguing were the materials designers used to craft their artifacts. Although a wide variety of stuff was offered, many of the industrial designers took apart the packaging and used it. The plastic containers became the artifacts. Not only were the designers engaging directly with the materials almost immediately, but also they were using “meta materials” to express their ideas.
That experience was extreme but not unique: Designers tear stuff apart. Even while a design is evolving, designers tear it apart, literally, and put the pieces back together in some other configuration. Through this physical destruction, designers make manifest the internal box breaking they are doing. This act of reconfiguration expresses the design thinking cycle more clearly than any other. As the designer reflects on the artifact, she crosses over from analysis to concept, envisioning a different approach. Each new cycle involves deconstruction of the prior.
Summary
PrD rests on the design thinking cycle: flipping between creating artifacts and evaluating them. The Creation Session is a journey through the design thinking cycle, from the moment attendees arrive until they have crafted an artifact. Many attendees will not be familiar with the design thinking cycle; others will not feel confident in their creativity. The objective of the session is to have everyone contribute to artifact creation with good humor and delight.
Although we mention a few of our favorite exercises and approaches, there are hundreds to choose from. We bias ours toward multimodal thinking because it facilitates moving people through the design thinking cycle. We design our Creation Sessions to be mildly disorientating. In their disorientation, attendees maintain a fresh perspective, both during the concept stage and during the analysis stage.
• Prepare attendees for the Creation Session by requiring prework.
• Consider hosting the session off-site, to disrupt the normal environment.
• Imbue every encounter with abductive reasoning, from the arrival, introductions, team building, and artifact creation.
• Get people on their feet, early and often. Creativity flourishes with an active mind and body.
• Pick activities and exercises to build up to the main event, allowing attendees to practice their design thinking skills.
• Keep up the pace. Purposely reduce the time for an exercise by 15%. Brainstorming isn’t improved by letting time drag on.
• Help participants reduce their investment in their artifacts by having them create more than one, preferably three if time permits.
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