The best and most successful products and services are designed with the end-user in mind. When you understand your customer, you can effectively create what they want and need. That’s the idea behind design thinking– a human-centric approach to ideate and solve problems creatively. The methodology is both a mindset and a process to generate bold and innovative ideas and tackle business challenges and problems. You can better understand the human behind your next product, method, service, or process idea using design thinking exercises during any phase of your project. These exercises offer an engaging, interactive, hands-on approach to problem-solving.

Design thinking exercises and design thinking workshops encompass the 5-step design thinking process:

1. Empathize – Understand the perspective of the target audience/customer/consumer to identify and address the problem at hand.
2. Define – Define the problem statement clearly.
3. Ideate –  Brainstorm ways to address identified unmet needs.
4. Prototype – Identity which of the possible solutions can best solve the identified problem(s).
5. Test – Test the product with your target audience to get feedback.

This five-step process enables teams to come up with impactful solutions to real problems that are vetted by the people they intend to serve before they’ve even been built. There are specific design thinking exercises that can help you and your team get the most out of each step. Let’s take a look at some of our favorites.

Design Thinking Exerices

We’ve compiled some of our favorite design thinking exercises for you to use among your teams as soon as tomorrow. Plug them in where you need them in your project process and watch the magic unfold.

1. Warmups

At your next meeting, don’t dive right into logistics or action items. Open with one of these warm-ups or “icebreakers” to set the tone for the meeting. They help shake people up and establish that you will be thinking differently in this session. Use one or two of these design thinking exercises to start your meeting or workshop on the right note. They can also be used to punctuate the day and energize the group after long activities or breaks.

Yes, But vs. Yes, And

This warm-up shows the power of building others’ ideas versus shooting them down. Taken from one of the principles of improv comedy, in this activity, you pair people and have them do the following:

• Part One: Person A suggests doing something with Person B, who has to answer with a reason not to do it, starting with “Yes, but…” Person A responds with a counter-suggestion also using “Yes, but…” (Example: Person A: “Let’s go to the grocery store.” Person B: “Yes, but our refrigerator is broken.” Person A: “Yes, but, we still need to eat.”)
• Part Two: Person A makes a suggestion, but now Person B answers with “Yes, and…” And so on… (Example: Person A: “Let’s go to the grocery store.” Person B: “Yes, and let’s get avocados.” Person A: Yes, and let’s make guacamole.”)

Impromptu Networking

In this exercise, take about 20 minutes for participants to meet in pairs and introduce themselves to each other and answer the question: “What big challenge do you bring to this gathering? What do you hope to get from and give this group or community?” By the end, each person will talk to about four people and learn something new about their colleagues or teammates. Impromptu Networking is excellent when your meeting attendees don’t know each other, or even when they do; either way, participants quickly gain new perspectives on the people they’ll be working with throughout the meeting or day.

Nine Whys

Like Impromptu Networking, the Nine Whys is a Liberating Structures activity. Here’s how they describe this warm-up:

“Ask, “What do you do when working on ______ (the subject matter or challenge at hand)? Please make a short list of activities.” Then ask, “Why is that important to you?” Keep asking, “Why? Why? Why?” up to nine times or until participants can go no deeper because they have reached the fundamental purpose for this work.”

By asking “Why?” so many times in a row, you can ultimately get to a clear understanding of why you are gathering and what the purpose of your meeting is.

2. Empathize

Empathy is a critical starting point for any design thinking endeavor. It means making design and business decisions from the perspective of the end-user or customer and truly understanding and anticipating their needs. These design thinking exercises help you get into the minds of your users, identify patterns and challenges, and relate these to the problem your team needs to solve.

Personas

Creating personas is an effective way to focus on your user and ensure that you are designing for their top needs. Personas are a representation of your target user — their typical characteristics, challenges, and desires. On average, you create one to three personas for your project so that you can focus on different needs and inspire divergent ways of looking at a problem.

This worksheet (available for download here) shows you the different aspects you might define for your persona.

Find another good explanation for how to create a persona here.

User Journey Mapping

User or customer journey mapping is another critical exercise when you are trying to build empathy for the user and uncover new ways to answer their top needs. Start by identifying all of the moments that a user goes through from start to finish when interacting with your particular product, service, or experience. These are your moments or milestones along the top of your journey map.

For example, imagine that you are designing a new experience of going through the TSA checkpoint at the airport. Your moments along the top of this user journey map might be: Pack for Trip — Travel to Airport — Arrive at Airport — Find Security Line — Show ID to TSA — Go through Security — Find Gate — Arrive at Destination.

Once you have your top-level journey moments or touchpoints, use your personas (see above) to go step-by-step and capture what your user is feeling, thinking, and doing at every phase. Through this process, you can begin to map the breadth of problems your user faces to identify the most prominent issues to tackle through design or innovation.

Read more about journey mapping here.

3. Ideation

Ideation is the phase of your project when you need to generate many different possible solutions or answers to your user’s problems or challenges. You don’t want to come up with one idea and put all your energy and focus into that. The goal of ideation is to go wide, come up with tons of ideas (even crazy ones) so that you have a lot to work with when it is time to focus on some ideas to prototype and test. When you need to get the creativity flowing, these design thinking exercises will unleash your thought process.

SCAMPER

SCAMPER is a method of focused brainstorming. But, rather than just saying “Come up with ideas!”, the SCAMPER acronym runs you through seven techniques for idea generation: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate and Reverse.

You use SCAMPER like this: first, identify the product or service you’re working with or the business question at hand. Run through the SCAMPER list and ask yourself questions based on the letters. (You can feel free to jump around and focus on the ones that are inspiring you the most.)

For example, let’s say you work at Uber. You need to think of ways to innovate. You take Combine and think: How could I combine Uber with another experience that riders need? You say to yourself: Riders need food when they are coming home in an Uber late at night. This might lead you to think of an experience where Uber riders can order pizza and a car at the same time. Their driver arrives with a hot pizza in the car and the rider can eat it on the way home. (Ok, this example might just describe UberEats, but you get the idea.)

Read more about SCAMPER and find prompting questions for each letter here.

Crazy 8s

Crazy 8s is an activity that we run as part of every Design Sprint, but it can be used anytime you want to come up with a bunch of ideas quickly. The simplicity of this one is wonderful:

1. Grab a piece of paper and fold it into eight sections
2. Set a timer for 8 minutes
3. Have participants sketch a distinct idea in each section. (Remind them that the ideas don’t have to be amazing, or even viable. The point is getting ideas down on paper and not censoring themselves.)

Find out more about Crazy 8s here.

4. Decisions

It can be easy and fun to come up with new ideas and solutions. But, making decisions? Not always as fun or straightforward. Thankfully, design thinking provides us with some great methods to help filter information. Try these design thinking exercises to help you make creative and impactful decisions.

Affinity Grouping

Affinity grouping is a way to bubble up big themes in a large group of ideas. Assess all of the ideas you’ve generated as a group. Hopefully, you’re working with Post-its, and you can start to move or cluster like ideas together. Create a name or theme for each group of ideas. Once you have a set of big ideas, you can vote as a group about what is most important to focus on.

Dot Voting

Dot voting is another way you can get a sense of what ideas are resonating as most important with the group. Give everyone in the group 3–5 (or more!) sticky dots. At the same time, have everyone put their dots on the idea or concept that they like the most. In the end, you have a heat map of the ideas that the group gravitates toward.

Note and Vote

Note and Vote is another method that comes out of the Design Sprint. The benefit of this exercise is that it gives everyone an equal vote or voice in decision-making. It’s super simple but effective.

Let’s say you have a series of ideas that you are reviewing as a group. Have everyone silently write down which idea is their favorite on a Post-it note. Once they’re done, have everyone put their vote up on the wall or whiteboard at the same time. Review the votes, see what idea has the most votes, and have a conversation around the pros and cons of the 1–3 “winners.”

Design thinking exercises are a highly effective way to ensure your next project is a success. Incorporate them with your team today and create meaningful work together. Pro-tip: use our Liberating Structures templates to get the most out of the design-thinking process with your team.

Learn more about design thinking and facilitation at one of our workshops or events!

We host regular Facilitation Lab meetups, boot camps, summits, and virtual workshops. See a full list of upcoming events here.

The post The Best Design Thinking Exercises for Each Phase of a Project appeared first on Voltage Control.

Where you hold your Sprint is critical. Whether you are running a Design Sprint, Innovation Workshop, Visioning Session, or another type of workshop, your venue or space is part of the event’s success. When planning your next workshop, I recommend that you consider these seven things.

1. LOCATION

Location is often the first consideration. Start with any geographical or budgetary constraints. Often, we pick a location based on where the majority of the workshop participants reside in order to reduce travel costs.

However, it’s important not to settle for whatever rooms might be available at your office. Many offices lack spaces that are ideal for workshops, so we recommend that you consider remote offsite locations. The investment is worth it. Working offsite might be helpful to get people out of their typical mindset. A change of scenery can be helpful for some companies, especially environments entrenched in the status quo.

Sometimes, instead of prioritizing the budget, we have to consider the availability of resources. Is there a participant or expert that we really want to include in-person? Perhaps we want to co-locate with our target users so that we can do our interviews in person. The opportunity cost could easily eclipse any additional cost of an outside venue.

Pro Tip: Check out websites Peerspace and Breather to find great creative spaces to hold your Sprint!

2. SPACE

It might seem nit-picky, but you should carefully consider the details of the room itself. First, it can’t be too small! Choose a space that is big enough to accommodate all attendees at the table(s). Don’t forget that you need enough room to move around and huddle at the walls.

A good rule of thumb is to pull all the chairs out from under the table so there is just a bit of space from the seat of the chair to the table. Is there still enough room to walk past the chair? That’s the absolute smallest room you should accept! Make sure to select a room that can proportionately accommodate the expected number of participants while respecting their personal space.

Pro Tip: For a Design Sprint with seven people, we recommend a room no smaller than 12 x 20 ft.

To take a more scientific approach, consider Proxemics. Proxemics, the study of personal space and boundaries, can give you some quick rules of thumb. During a Sprint, where seven people are in a single room, everyone is operating for an entire workweek in the Personal Distance Zone, which ranges from 2–5 feet. This space is reserved for friends and family — people you know and trust. It’s an easy and relaxed space for talking, shaking hands, gesturing, and making faces.

3. ENVIRONMENT

Think about how the workshop space will make your participants feel. This isn’t touchy-feely stuff, it’s actually key to the success of your event. Is it conducive to focus and fun? Is the space pleasant to work in and free from distractions? Consider air quality, decor, lighting, and the general vibe of the space.

Windows are always nice so that folks don’t feel like they are locked in a closet all day. A room that gets natural light from a window is always a good bet. Fun fact—daylit environments are known to increase productivity! A related consideration is the room’s temperature. Make sure you can control the temperature of the room so people aren’t too hot or too cold. (Or, make a note of it, so you can tell participants to bring a sweater!)

Pro Tip: Music is a powerful way to make your environment more inviting. Bringing a small speaker so you can play appropriate tunes when people arrive, during breaks, or even during brainstorming sessions.

4. FURNITURE

Ideally, your venue comes equipped with all the furniture you’ll need. You’ll need at least one chair for every participant. But, you also don’t want too many chairs or superfluous furniture cluttering up space.

Look for rooms that have tables that are easily moved and can be configured into different arrangements depending on your activities. For example, do you need to be seated in one large group for brainstorming? Or, will you be breaking into smaller groups? In that case, you need tables that can be utilized for breakout teams.

Pro Tip: Factor in time before your workshop starts to rearrange the room and make it *just right* for your agenda and participants. You’ll need at leave 20–30 minutes and more than one person to help!

5. WALL SPACE & WHITEBOARDS

One of the most important features of a great workshop venue is space for creation. You absolutely need dedicated space for hanging ideas, posters and/or Post-its. Make sure there is enough space on the walls to pin or tape things or that there are plenty of whiteboards.

For Design Sprint and most other workshops, you typically need two large whiteboards or 3–5 small ones. If you can’t get whiteboards, the 3M flipcharts can work. If so, consider buying an easel stand or two so they have something to sit on.

Pro Tip: If you have walls to hang on, they should be smooth enough that Post-it notes will stick to them. Avoid the comedy of errors of constantly falling Post-its at all costs!

6. AV / TECH

Ask about the venue’s audio-visual features and make sure it covers your needs. Usually, you can get by with a TV or projector with HDMI, VGA, or Airplay, which is used for projecting your presentation.

Also, having WiFi is preferred, but you could get away without it. Although, your participants might not like it!

7. REFRESHMENTS

When you are looking at venues, think about where the participants will eat. Well-fed participants are happy participants! If you do not have a separate space for lunch, there should be room in your space to accommodate lunch. Have an additional table at the ready where you can lay out your lunch spread without disturbing your workspace.

Lastly, this might sound mundane, but be sure that there are adequate recycling, compost, and landfill containers for the team in the space. Bonus points if you can get the waste bins out of the room after lunch to prevent any distracting odors throughout the afternoon.

These are the criteria we use at Voltage Control when planning and facilitating Design Sprints and innovation workshops for our clients.

Pro-tip: with these considerations in mind, use our Workshop Design Canvas download to design your workshop like a learning experience pro.

Are you in need of a facilitator for your next meeting or workshop? We’re here to help. Voltage Control facilitates events of all kinds, including design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Let’s chat!

The post 7 Things to Consider When Choosing a Workshop Venue appeared first on Voltage Control.

As with almost anything in life, planning is essential. Design Sprints are no exception. Design Sprints are a 5-Day process development by Jake Knapp who documented the process in his NYT bestselling book Sprint. With the Design Sprint method, Jake distilled Design Thinking into a simple and repeatable structure that anybody can follow. This simplicity is both helpful and problematic. Since Design Sprints present such great promise, the idea of doing one generates great excitement. This excitement, combined with an easy-to-follow structure, causes many people to dive in without the requisite thought and preparation. Don’t be one of them!

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” ― Benjamin Franklin

This article is an extension of a prior post on Design Sprint planning tools and resources. In my previous post, I assembled some of my favorite links and assets so that you might more easily find them. In this post, I’ll provide a bit more structured guidance on the types of things you’ll want to consider as you embark on your Sprint. Whether it is your 1st Sprint or your 100th Sprint, you’ll want to keep these things in mind, so bookmark this page!

Figure Out Your “Why”

Just like the Sprint starts with the end in mind, so should your planning. While I don’t advocate that teams lock their goal in stone prior to the Sprint, it is helpful to explore the Goal and have a thoughtful perspective on where you’re generally pointed. The last thing you want is to begin the goal exercise on Day 1 with everyone staring at you like deers blinded by headlights. Start off your Sprint with a solid understanding of the purpose and how that fits into your company’s vision.

TOOLS TO CONSIDER

Liberating Structures is an effective set of methods that are great for planning and aligning stakeholders. If you are struggling with planning, Purpose to Practice (P2P) is a simple-and-rigorous method that you can use to layout the essential elements of your Sprint. This tool works well for both small groups and extremely large groups and is an excellent tool for building alignment early in your process. After using P2P for a few different projects, it will become an everyday method you can use to do anything from planning staff meetings to outlining key elements of your next product design process.

Within each element of P2P, you can use different methods to get at your answers — or you can simply invite your stakeholders to assist by asking core questions for each element. Below are a few things to consider for each element.

1. Purpose: For many teams, purpose is elusive or at least not a daily topic of conversation. There are a few Liberating Structures (LS) that are well suited for helping you articulate your purpose. 9 whys, TRIZ, 1–2–4-All, and 25/10 are great places to start.
2. Principles: If you find it challenging to define or agree on your principles, check out these LS activities: Appreciative Interviews, TRIZ, and Min Specs are effective tools for teasing the details from your team.
3. Participants: Select your facilitator, decider, and other key roles. Consider who is missing.
4. Structure: Think about how you will document the Sprint, prepare for your kickoff meeting, schedule a space, and order coffee/food.
5. Practices: Consider pre-work like: upfront research, unanswered questions, and lack of clarity.

“Who” Matters

I hear from folks all the time who are struggling with who to invite to their Design Sprint. Worst of all are those people who don’t even realize it is such a critical concern and simply invite their peers. If you do not include a diverse set of stakeholders across all the functions of your organization, then there is considerable risk that your project will falter.

Lucky Number Seven

You must limit the number of attendees in the Design Sprint to seven people. For every person you include above seven, you increase the risk of generating so much content that you can’t stay on time and devolving in to an uncontrolled conversation that is difficult to steer. Everyone won’t be heard and it’s difficult to break into small groups. More is not more.

The Sprint book recommends that you include someone who understands the customer, the financials, the messaging, the logistics, and prototyping. You should always remember to include someone who can ensure the project will have support post-Sprint. Within the Purpose to Practice framework, the key question one asks when looking at Participants is: “who must we include to meet our purpose?” Another question I find helpful, which I learned as part of my Liberating Structures learning, is deceptively simple: “who’s missing?”

Strike a Balance

Don’t forget to account for the mindset or attitude of the attendees. It is important to strike a balance. While you want to cultivate an environment conducive to collaboration, you don’t want to avoid the skeptics and cynics either. It is not about seniority or stroking egos, it’s about different points of view and people who will really be able to engage and bring an open mind.

For large organizations, consider tools within the Liberating Structures repertoire to determine who should be in the room. 25/10 Crowd Sourcing can be used to generate ideas from a large group and could be used with either “who must be included to meet our purpose” or “who’s missing” from the discussion thus far. Social Network Webbing, TRIZ, and Discovery and Action Dialogue all have the potential to generate great ideas for composing your sprint participants.

Invite Others In

An excellent way to involve more people in the process without going over the 7 person limit is to bring them in on Monday as an expert or invite them to a daily readout. I’m a big fan of the daily readout as it exposes more of the team to the process and the progress that is being made.

Figure Out Recruiting

You should also have a solid game plan for how you will recruit your testers and who will be in charge of running the interviews. Sometimes I recommend starting your recruit beforehand, but most of the time you can do it during the week. Make sure that your test moderator is skilled at interviewing, knows how to put together a discussion guide, and has an unbiased approach.

Prepping Participants

Always take the time to educate your participants. Most of them will not have heard of Sprints, much less read the book. Even ones who have read the book may have missed parts. It’s important to set expectations. I recommend having a 30-minute kick-off meeting about 1 week prior to the Sprint. This is an opportunity to set expectations with the team and agree on any last-minute items that need to be addressed before your Sprint.

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“What” You’ll Need

Do not wait till the last minute and buy whatever your local office supply store happens to have in stock. Jake carefully selected the supplies he recommends based on running hundreds of Sprints and they really do provide better results.

Don’t Skimp on Supplies

You can follow my supplies post to make sure you get all the correct items. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t have good support for a bill of materials, but I have put links on each of the supplies so you can make sure to get the correct items.

Two common mistakes to avoid are the pop-up Post-Its since the sticky side alternates from top to bottom and the Avery dots as they are difficult to remove from surfaces. If you do decide to get the Avery dots, you should also consider getting a putty knife.

I also like to include a pair of scissors, a Bluetooth speaker with a playlist, 3M flip charts, and a set of Tibetan chimes as sometimes the time timer alarm wears out its welcome.

Brain Food

Design Sprints are deep and intense work. This work requires that our body and mind are functioning at their best. Don’t short circuit your progress by bringing in unhealthy snacks and comfort food. This is tempting for some as they consider these treats a benefit or reward for this special event. Don’t fall prey to that trap. Bring in healthy food that’s high in protein and low in sugar. Nuts, fruit, protein bars, and vegetables are a great place to start.

Also, order delivery for lunch. Going out to lunch with a group this large always takes too long and disrupts your schedule. Also, the team will need time for bathroom breaks, checking email, etc.

“Where” is Critical

Space is critical. I’ve participated in enough Design Sprints in inadequate spaces that I make it a priority to discuss the venue in detail prior to starting the Sprint. There are some great pointers in this article on the pitfalls of facilitation.

You’ll want to have ample room to move around. Consider the fact that you’ll be hanging things on the wall and organizing them as a group. With all attendees in the room, can you comfortably cluster around the walls and still easily move from one side to the other?

Are the plenty of whiteboards? You will write up the goal, the questions, and the map, so you’ll need 2 large or 3 medium whiteboards. The smaller 2′ x 3′ whiteboards aren’t recommended.

Consider the location. Is there natural light and is the environment free of obnoxious sounds and odors? Ensure that there are minimal distractions. For some companies, working off-site might be helpful to get people out of their typical mindset. A change of scenery can be helpful for some companies, especially in environments entrenched in the status quo.

Have you also scheduled time to review? Did you schedule a room to conduct your interviews? Will they be in person? You may also need to consider how you will connect the two rooms for observation.

“How” to End Your Sprint

Reflecting on your Design Sprint after is important. If you are uncertain about how to best conduct your retrospective, consider the Liberating Structure, What, So What, Now What. WWW is well suited for synthesizing your Design Sprint insights because it supports you in building a discipline of reflection and action.

The more you and your team build a reflection-and-action habit, the more capable you become at adjusting in real-time, together. It also helps reduce unproductive conflict and makes space for people to get a sense of what others are oriented to before jumping to action, which is helpful when you are trying to make progress quickly and who don’t want to have to backtrack.

I hope that these tools are as effective for you as they are for me. If you have any questions or have found other approaches that work, I’d love to hear from you.

Want to find out more about planning a Design Sprint? Check out Design Sprint Resources & Planning Tools next!

The post Essential Tips for Planning a Successful Design Sprint appeared first on Voltage Control.

With the future of facilitation confined to the virtual realm, understanding the art of conducting remote design thinking sessions is more important than ever. As 76% of employees use video conferencing for remote work, facilitators must be able to drive engagement in their remote sessions. The trick is to bring the power of design thinking to the world of remote meetings. As you work to stir engagement in your team members, using the power of design thinking will help you harness collaborative engagement and reach your objectives at a faster pace.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to easily and effectively conduct remote design thinking sessions with the following topics:

• What Are Remote Design Thinking Sessions?
• The Challenges and Benefits of Remote Facilitation
• 6 Steps of Conducting Remote Design Thinking Sessions

What are Remote Design Thinking Sessions?

The power of running a design sprint is that these sessions can be held anywhere–whether in-person or online. Remote design thinking sessions prioritize design methodology and focus on the needs of the end-user.

Remote design thinking sessions should focus on three main components:

• Empathy
  • Participants must empathize with the end-user and the problems that they face.
• Ideation
  • During ideation, the team develops several potential solutions to the problems at hand.
• Prototyping 
  • Team members will create a prototype of possible solutions and test them.

The ​Challenges and Benefits of Remote Facilitation

Remote facilitation has its unique challenges. While conducting remote design thinking sessions may seem overly complicated due to its hands-off nature, it doesn’t need to be. Emphasizing collaboration and communication will help you conduct remote design thinking sessions seamlessly. 

While meeting virtually may seem like a barrier to engaging participants, it shouldn’t. Using the right strategies and tools will help you perfect this user-centric approach to problem-solving for remote facilitation.

There are many benefits to taking your design thinking sessions online. Conducting remote design thinking sessions makes it possible to collaborate with a more expansive group of people. Moreover, facilitators can assist more readily when working remotely. 

It’s best to face the unique challenges of conducting remote design thinking sessions with the help of an expert. At Voltage Control, we’re happy to help you navigate these virtual sessions.

6 Steps of Conducting Remote Design Thinking Sessions

Preparation and Planning

Preparation and planning are the essential first steps of conducting remote design thinking sessions. During this phase, it’s essential to identify the following components f your session:

Objectives 

As you plan your remote session, clearly identify the goals you hope to achieve. Ideally, you will design the overarching question or challenge you aim to answer through the session. These may be certain improvements you hope to make to a product or experience. 

Agenda 

The agenda will include the schedule for the session as well as the activities you will use. The key is to choose activities that will boost engagement. Popular remote design sprint activities include drawing and storyboarding via software like Jam Board. 

Location 

Your location is important, even when remote as the environment will determine how collaborative your team can be. Consider digital environments such as Mural or Miro for your sessions.

Materials

In a virtual design sprint, materials may include equipment like laptops, tablets, microphones, and other essentials that you’ll use to make sure your connection and meeting have a continuous flow. 

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Introduction

During the intro of your session, you’ll welcome your team and explain your expectations for the workshop, objectives, and agenda. Use this time to put your participants at ease with an icebreaker or exercise that helps them loosen up. 

The next step in your introduction is to explain design thinking. This allows all participants to get on the same page with understanding design methodology. This user-focused approach to problem-solving is an opportunity to highlight the needs of your clients while exploring the best ways to move forward.  

Empathize with the User

The next step in conducting remote design thinking sessions is to empathize with your end-user. During this phase, you’ll encourage your team to adopt the end-user’s perspective. This way, they can start identifying the needs of the user and consider the most beneficial solutions. 

Remote facilitation should focus on activities like roleplaying or using empathy maps to understand the user’s feelings, language, wants, and needs. Be sure to check in with your team to gather their findings before moving on to the next phase.

Define the Problem 

As your team gets in touch with the user’s needs, now is the time to narrow down the problem. Team members may develop a problem statement to help guide the session and kickstart ideation.  

Defining the problem remotely can include a brainstorming session with breakout groups. Facilitators may benefit from having a co-facilitator monitoring participants’ responses and keeping track of all feedback. 

Ideation 

During the ideation phase, it’s essential to stimulate thoughtful collaboration. During this brainstorming session, it’s important to give your team free rein to develop the most creative solutions. Platforms like Google Slides, Miro, or Mural can help with online collaboration. Encourage your team to be output-focused as they use their time to generate potential solutions.  

Facilitators will find it helpful to be as specific as possible by indicating how many ideas teams should contribute. This way, you’ll avoid wasting time on useless chatter or technological minutiae.

Testing and Prototyping

In this phase, you’ll test the results of the ideation phase before putting them into practice. Testing and prototyping remotely require clear and concise planning.

Tools like Marvel, Keynote, Keynotopi, InVision, and ProtoPie make it easy to upload and share prototypes with others.  This way, users can try these interactive prototypes and offer feedback immediately. 
As the feedback comes in, facilitators should encourage real-time discussion about these interactions and prototypes. Tools like Coggle are excellent for brainstorming and visualizing ideas while Lookback can record and test users’ experience to make it easier to track insights.

Explain the Next Steps

As the workshop closes, it’s important to highlight the next steps for your team. During this phase, discuss your team’s final thoughts and takeaways from the session, as well as what action steps your team will take following the session and how you plan to put their prototypes to work.

Simplifying Remote Facilitation

Conducting remote design thinking sessions is an excellent way to improve cross-departmental engagement, accelerate ideation, and develop actionable output. With a thoughtful approach, a concise agenda, and a level-headed facilitator, your next remote session can transform the way your team works.

At voltage Control, our team of expert facilitators is happy to help you get started with a design sprint consultation as you take your sessions into the virtual realm. Whether you want to learn how to run your design thinking sessions or you want to hire a facilitator to do the work for you, we’re here to help.

The post Your Guide to Conducting Remote Design Thinking Sessions appeared first on Voltage Control.

What have we learned about our businesses in the last two years? What worked? What didn’t? Do you know more about your company and your people now, more than you did two years ago? Or even two months ago?

We know you have asked versions of these questions most likely numerous times. We have asked the question of ourselves because any business should assess the effects of external variables that can disrupt workflow. But asking the questions is only as good as the honesty you want from the answers and the effort you are willing to accept.

Are you ready to implement a strategy that allows you to listen to your employees and lay the groundwork for a paradigm shift in how you conduct the smallest conversation to the most impactful meeting? 

The questions that have surfaced are broad, and vitally important, but don’t let them prevent your action. Action is needed to consistently propel your business, and level up your success. If you as a business leader have questioned what has changed over the last couple of years, asked how can you adapt to improve the culture of your company, and have felt the desire to become an industry innovator of ideas, you are ready for our Innovation Consultation.  

Allow the last two years to be a wake-up call not conceived from fear, but from the realization, that we all control the destiny of our businesses. We empower that vision by seeking new strategies of working and implementing changes. Sometimes it is more then asking the right questions, but by finding the right mentor.

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You have a diverse team, but are you truly honoring their potential? Combining strengths, working styles, specialties’, and a collective of different visions is no easy task. We have to go beyond just talking about it. We have to workshop a collective intelligence so that the team has one vision.

The current landscape can be viewed as grim. Far too many businesses have remained stagnant, or worse, ceased to exist at all. It is easy to suggest that no one could foreshadow the public health, social, and professional crises that have consumed all daily activity, but really this was not and still is not the current reality. Predicting and planning for even the most absurd of worst-case scenarios is still a better option than what so many businesses have endured by not planning at all and not knowing how to sustain an energized, committed workforce.     

The step that can answer many of our questions about our businesses begins with the very component that steers the boat, your people. Your greatest asset might seem like the goods in your warehouses or the health of your bottom line, but truly your wealth is tied to the very people that make your business machine run. You hired all of your employees with trust in mind. Now it is time embrace the trust you ascribed to each of your employees because they are the source to identify the changes that are needed and the driving force to develop ideas that forge a positive path toward innovation and adaptability.  

Creating change within your business environment begins with hiring, cultivating, and retaining a diverse and cross-functional workforce who feel valued as integral members of the team. This requires a commitment to diversity and actively creating a culture of psychological safety. Your employees have tremendous energy and myriad talents, but are they comfortable sharing their opinions even if it diverges from the general atmosphere or consensus?

We believe that meetings can indeed be magical with the right preparation. During the last two years every workplace has faced incredible change, for the better or worse. We feel that some of those changes offer a whole new world of possibility, like remote work.

Adaptability combined with flexibility is what has and what will set businesses apart from those who are intractable to change. 

We suggest beginning a meeting with simple feedback as the most basic approach to conveying trust and appreciation. If you believe every employee makes a difference, then every employee deserves to be recognized for their effort and their accomplishments.  

During a recent workshop I had an employee tell me that meetings are where “her ideas go to die.” No leader, director, manager, or supervisor can risk the psychological safety of their employees or success of the business by having someone on their team to feel so unvalued and useless. This brand of toxic workplace environment can stunt employees to the point that can cause no new ideas to be shared and prevent the business from innovating.   

We can provide you with the tools to set the tone you want for your next meeting and the goals you want to achieve. We have available multiple, comprehensive (FREE!) MURAL templates to help you unleash your teams potential! ​​

The last two years have revealed an abundance of unexpected emergencies and businesses never want to be caught flat-footed again. The more you can initiate and maintain deeply engaged communication while, fostering an inclusive and diverse work environment, the more you will be able to remove obstacles and develop a staff motivated toward success. 

If you are interested in moving your business forward, creating your own magical meeting, and maybe even becoming a master facilitator, contact us today! Our next Facilitator Certification Cohort will run from February 11 – May 13, 2022.

The post Magic Not Required appeared first on Voltage Control.

While most companies were struggling to figure out Zoom meetings in 2020, one large CPG company brought cross-functional, international teams together to remotely prototype packaging and products for the U.S. and abroad. 

These Design Sprints were a response to the CEO encouraging management to embrace a more agile approach to problem solving. Inspired by the nimbleness of startups, he directed his teams to find ways to accelerate product development and how they worked in general.

This inspiration empowered our client — the organization’s Design Thinking Champion — to explore opportunities for rapid iteration. In the year or so prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, she’d begun to assemble stakeholders from various departments and divisions at locations around the world for in-person collaboration. Still, the virus (and subsequent lockdown) upended this practice.

In response, the Champion engaged Voltage Control to help her continue her design thinking sessions remotely. She had been impressed by the wealth of free online resources Voltage Control had created as well as founder Douglas Ferguson’s books. She also liked that we had a relationship with Google Ventures’ Jake Knapp — author of the popular book Sprint — and conducted the five-day Design Sprints he popularized at GV (formerly Google Ventures).

Voltage Control worked closely with the Champion to plan and execute nine Design Sprints in total. One of which was a five-day workshop to explore innovative, sustainable packaging designs for three hot wax hair removal products. The challenge at hand was to use consumer-centric techniques to address the deeper needs of the brand’s customers. To accomplish this, Voltage Control defined the objectives for each day: 

• Monday – Map
• Tuesday – Sketch
• Wednesday – Decide
• Thursday – Prototype
• Friday – Test

Day 1: Map

A big part of the first day was setting goals, asking questions and exploring how the team might arrive at a solution. Because of Covid-19 protocols, each team member joined the workshop via Zoom and collectively recorded thoughts in the online collaboration tool Mural. 

To kick things off, Voltage Control socialized observations from the pre-work everyone did before joining the session. This ensured participants had the chance to connect 1:1, and everyone was heard. We then asked everyone to share what was interesting about the challenge and what questions they had going into the session.

Some of these included:

• Do we understand consumers’ key drivers for purchase?
• Can we find a solution that doesn’t impact other usage aspects like safety?
• Can we combine functionality with aesthetics?
• Will consumers be able to recycle/reuse/compost independently of their country of origin?

These questions were then followed with a review of the problem space. Voltage Control believes no one knows everything, so a group discussion helped unlock individually held knowledge and provided a chance for the larger team to get aligned. 

Day 1 then concluded with the design thinking activity “How Might We” (HMW), which encouraged participants to think big without getting mired down by the painful details of bringing a complete solution to market. Each team member selected their top four HMW notes, and the entire team reviewed these essential questions to keep in mind during testing. Affinity grouping and dot voting were used to select the most significant questions without debate.

Day 2: Sketch

Picasso once said, “great artists steal,” and that’s what guided Voltage Control as the second day of collaborative work began. The team located and shared analogous inspirations via Mural. These included competitor products, adjacent services, intuitive interfaces, strong branding, and compelling content.

This complemented the previous day’s work, where the group discussed the problems and the potential solutions. When they considered what they’d “stolen” along with the goals and solutions they’d volunteered on Monday, it put them in the right frame of mind for a bit of fun Voltage Control calls Crazy 8s. 

During the Crazy 8s exercise, we gave everyone on the team eight minutes to explore eight new ideas quickly. We instructed them to fold a paper in half three times, so they had eight squares to sketch in. We then allocated 1 minute per square for participants to unlock latent ideas and try different versions of an idea.

Once the eight minutes were up, we let participants spend the rest of the day sketching one or two solutions they felt had the most promise. Although each person was together in the same Zoom room, they worked alone. It’s a somewhat controversial opinion, but the Voltage Control team doesn’t believe group brainstorms work, and we’re not the only one. Instead of forcing consensus, we gave each person time to develop solutions on their own.

Day 3: Decide

Our third day commenced with a group review of Tuesday’s independent sketching. The team used small dots to identify parts of sketches they liked. Then, the team was led through each of the sketches, and key ideas were called out. A second “heat mapping” exercise was conducted, where smaller dots were placed on the ideas with  high potential. After these rounds of speed critiquing and straw poll voting, an R&D Manager — who’d been selected as the group’s decider — used three “super vote” dots to determine  the winning solutions. 

Each participant then imagined their ideal user flow in six steps. The group compared the flows and voted on them. Once again, the R&D Manager was the final decision maker, deciding which of the flows matched the chosen solutions. Next, the team collaborated on the storyboard using the solutions and user flows as a framework. To wrap the day, Voltage Control assigned everyone the roles they’d perform during prototyping on Thursday.

Day 4: Prototyping

Our virtual prototyping session heavily leveraged a combination of digital design tools, including Sketch, Craft, and InVision. By collaborating in Google Docs, the distributed team could track jobs on a Kanban board and easily share assets between one another.

Day 5: Test

On the final day of this Design Sprint, the cross-functional team gathered once more on Zoom to observe the remote, real-time interviews of five actual consumers. Using a Voltage Control-created scorecard, the stakeholders quickly assessed the consumers’ responses. 

These consumer insights gave the team potential next steps they could explore in the weeks and months that followed the Design Sprint. When asked about this and three other Design Sprints he attended, one Product Scientist commented they “were incredibly effective at stress testing ideas for safety, sustainability, and other factors. They were also a useful way to explore opportunities to see if what competitors were doing was right for us.”

The Champion had a similar take and said, “We sometimes learned we needed to pivot and not invest a ton of time. Some groups arrived at a seemingly right idea that just needed more vetting, while others had uncovered multiple pathways they could take at the end of the week. Across the board, we exited and applied larger qualitative research with a larger consumer group.”

The Outcome

Voltage Control conducted eight other design sprints in collaboration with the Champion, which concluded with similar positive results. While two of the Design Sprints helped the company offer better customer experiences, many Voltage Control facilitated sessions allowed the company to improve their sustainability efforts.

While not everything will be commercialized, Voltage Control helped the company be more nimble through design thinking exercises. The Champion liked how Voltage Control was able to assist her in answering her CEO’s call to be more agile. By building upon the groundwork she’d already laid pre-Covid, the company was able to get to consumer benefits faster and work smarter, not harder. 

“Conducting remote Design Sprints seemed daunting at first, but it really wasn’t,” said the Champion. “The virtual whiteboard served us really well, and all the info captured through Mural worked better than our pre-Covid methods.”

“I also appreciated the structured roles team members had,” she continued. “Previously, we had worked rather very linearly. It was great to bring decision-makers into the week, having prototypers on hand and achieving progressive movement towards daily goals.” The Champion further thought the remote Design Sprints were well-thought-out.

Taking insights and having an actionable output doesn’t often happen  in the CPG space, so the Champion felt doing nine Design Sprints in 2020 created a bit of “muscle memory” for applying repeatable frameworks, then iterating on these processes. She hopes design thinking — and Design Sprints — will become ingrained at the company, allowing organization to shift from a fixed, linear mindset to readily applied tools & methodology. 

The Champion wants teams across the company to have more opportunities to talk to consumers while working with a broader range of peers. Her ultimate goal: to synergistically work together to achieve something great in a short matter of time. She may just see this come to fruition. The Product Scientist, who admits he was a skeptic at first, became an advocate of the Design Sprints. He believes many of his peers are now in favor of them as well.

“I was worried about them being a mess and team members not participating,” said the Scientist. “The learning curve was so steep that first day — having to get comfortable with new tools like Zoom and Mural. We were up and running by that first afternoon though.” 

“By the time we got to Wednesday, we really liked the structure and flow,” he added. “The team was pumped when we did the storyboard and then again when we got consumer feedback. Everyone I collaborated with during my first Design Sprint was enthusiastic at the end and was already chatting about doing another in Europe.”

The Scientist told Voltage Control that since participating, he’s been conducting internal “roadshows” to evangelize the idea of Design Sprints. Due to the travel time and cost, the Scientist said he and his international colleagues don’t get to do much brainstorming in a physical environment. He feels the experiences facilitated by Voltage Control have opened up the possibility to do more of this kind of work, even after the Covid-19 pandemic has subsided. “These [virtual] Design Sprints make brainstorming with a large, global team more accessible,” he concluded.

Being able to transform a skeptic into an evangelist over four Sprints shows the impact Voltage Control’s efforts can have. As a whole, we taught a wide swath of employees how to meet in meaningful ways, despite distance and the pandemic. These fresh approaches to work (and working together) re-invigorated every participant, from marketers to scientists. Regardless of what they’ll face in the years ahead, they’ve now been trained to let no business disturbance interrupt their innovation. 

Do you have an innovation you want to implement, a company problem you need to solve, or a meeting structure that needs improvement?

Voltage Control facilitates events of all kinds, including design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk or for a consultation.

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Over the years Voltage Control has hosted various Liberating Structures immersion workshops. We hold these workshops as part of a series of Liberating Structures immersion workshops with a focus on scrum masters, agile coaches, and technology leaders. In this post, we’ll take you through what liberating structures are and how we ran a liberating structures immersion workshop in the past. Through our workshops, you will learn the principles behind why Liberating Structures work and experience specific structures that will allow you to tap into the room intelligence no matter how large the team. 

Our next Liberating Structures immersion workshop is scheduled for December 2021 – learn more and sign up here. We are also holding a mini-workshop on Liberating Structures foundations in November.

“It’s so fun to see people from a super wide range of domains connecting to one another and beginning to realize what’s possible if they begin to use Liberating Structures in their work all the time. New ways of working together really begin to open up and you can see how enlivened our everyday work can be.” — Anna Jackson, Liberating Structures Workshop Leader

What are Liberating Structures?

Let’s review Liberating Structures first. Liberating Structures is a framework created by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, intended to promote powerful ways to collaborate and engage everyone within a team and boost collaborative team interactions. Liberating Structures consists of 33 microstructures, which are a collection of exercises that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group. They provide simple rules that make participatory decision-making easier and are a solution to the dysfunctional format of most meetings, or what Lipmanowicz and McCandless refer to as “conventional microstructures.”

Conventional meeting microstructures are either too inhibiting (i.e. status reports/updates, managed discussions, presentations), or too loose and disorganized (i.e. open discussion and brainstorming). They often limit participation and the control is isolated to one individual or a select few–often the extroverted participants in the group. As a result, these conventional microstructures can routinely stifle inclusion and/or engagement. The Liberating Structures framework is built to encourage participation by including all team members–whether teams are in person, work in a virtual environment, or a hybrid one. 

Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop

A couple of years ago Voltage Control co-hosted a 2-day Liberating Structures immersion workshop with Anna at Native, an Austin modern hostel, kitchen, and bar. Liberating Structures had been quickly gaining popularity among the agile coach and scrum masters communities. In addition to Anna’s typical audience of health care, nonprofits, and government we thought it would be great to include these people from the technology world. While not exclusive to them, we designed with them in mind to ensure they would find exceptional value in the workshop.

We also brought in Amanda Bowman, a Liberating Structures practitioner that has extensive experience leading workshops with Anna, to assist in leading the workshop. Like Anna, Amanda is a skilled graphic recorder. They took turns illustrating as we all facilitated individual methods. Adding the visualization always makes an event more engaging and memorable.

The design team used Purpose to Practice, Liberating Structures Principles, and Design Storyboarding to guide our workshop structure. We met four times before the workshop to plan and prepare for the day.

Amanda kicked off day 1 with an Impromptu Networking followed by Douglas facilitating Appreciative Interviews and we wrapped the day with a tour of the Liberating Structures Principles. Day 2 started with Anna facilitating spiral journal and finished the day with everyone’s favorite, 25–10 Crowdsourcing. We also covered TRIZ, Discovery and Action Dialog, Conversation Cafe/What, So What, Now What, Troika, and Open Space led by Anna; 9 Whys, Design 101, What I Need From You led by Amanda; Ecocycle Planning and Critical Uncertainties led by Douglas.

Voltage Control feels strongly that Liberating Structures has an approach to address almost any challenge you may have to overcome. Therefore, we created a suite of free and interactive Liberating Structures templates for MURAL and Miro for the activities we use most often and hope you enjoy using them as much as we do.

During the workshop, Douglas facilitated the strategic methods. Strategic methods are exceptionally well-suited for technology companies or anyone that may face potential disruption. 

Critical Uncertainties and Ecocycle Planning are two of the more robust strategic planning tools in the Liberating Structures repertoire.

Critical Uncertainties

Critical Uncertainties is a tool that helps you to assess the ability of current strategies and build an ability to respond to changes in the future. First, you consider all of the critical and uncertain factors that you are currently facing or may face in the future. From this list, you’ll select the two most important and place them each on an x- & y-axis.

Once you have drawn your matrix, it is helpful to name and describe each quadrant. Once you’ve considered each quadrant, you can then begin to explore each quadrant to determine strategies that may work in those scenarios.

After working on each quadrant, go back and review all your strategies. Consider which strategies are hedging strategies and only work in a specific scenario or prepare you for those conditions and which strategies are robust strategies and will work in all or most situations?

This structure does not help you generate a plan. It is a tool for developing your strategic thinking and building the capacity to respond to and anticipate changes in your environment proactively.

Critical Uncertainties is a great fit for exploring what features to include in your product, planning and preparing for multi-country IT implementations, and executives creating or refining a 10-year strategic vision.

“The workshop helped me learn and practice some of the LS tools. I now understand enough to read about the other tools and apply them as well” — Michael Smith, Director of Orquestando

Ecocycle Planning

Ecocycle Planning helps you to contextualize aspects of the system that you are operating and allows you to scan for bottlenecks objectively. An Ecocycle is drawn as an infinity symbol with four phases and two traps identified. These phases help you to determine where various components of your systems or products in your portfolio exist within the ecosystem lifecycle. The four phases are birth, maturity, creative destruction, and renewal. The two traps are the rigidity trap and the poverty trap. The Ecocycle is a continuous loop and activities and projects can exist in one place on the map and quickly shift to another.

The front half of the loop, birth & maturity is how we typically think of projects. The back of the loop, creative destruction, and renewal, is often new to people. This is an important opportunity for teams to expand how they think of their portfolio or system. Activities can also exit the loop if you decide to end them. The two traps are also an opportunity for series exploration. We find ourselves in the rigidity trap when activity in maturity has become ineffective and we haven’t made requisite changes. Projects live in the poverty trap when we discover opportunities for re-birth and are not investing in the change.

Ecocycle is effective at prioritizing a backlog, balancing a product portfolio, discovering resources that can be repurposed, stepping back, and shedding light on situations where killing one project allows you to proceed on another.

When running an Ecocycle internally, you’ll invite your team to begin by listing out projects and initiatives that occupy their time. Then you’ll organize into groups of four and explore the placement of these activities onto the Ecocycle. After everyone has finished plotting on the Ecocycle, everyone shares and explores areas where there is a lack of consensus. Finally, the group discusses the next steps how they might respond to insights from the Ecocycle.

During the workshop, Douglas asked participants to consider various Facebook products and services and where they fall on the Ecocycle. He encouraged them to think of themselves as part of a focus group, and Facebook is asking them: “As a Facebook user, where do these features and capabilities live on the Ecocycle?” The following Facebook services were explored: Groups, Events, Messenger, Dating, Newsfeed, Security + Privacy, and Facebook Live.

“I found the strategies and techniques provided by the LS methods to be ideal for the groups where there are frequently power differences amongst participants. The LS methods substantially reduce that differential “— Andres Guariguata, LCSW

The Value of Liberating Structures

Liberating Structures have many useful applications in the innovation world, such as for Scrum or a Retrospective. Liberating Structures don’t need to be practiced in person – in fact, Liberating Structures are more important now than ever in today’s virtual environment and are great for optimal remote team communication. For more information on when to use Liberating Structures and solutions on using the best Liberating Structure for the job, download our guide here. 

For additional information and ways to use Liberating Structures, check out our Liberating Structures course where you will learn key Liberating Structures principles, practice 5 key design methods, chart a plan for further application of Liberating Structures and connect with a Liberating Structures community. You can also learn hands-on in real-time at one of our Liberating Structures workshops as discussed in this article: a deep-dive of Liberating Structures, when, and how to use them to unleash creativity in your meetings through maximum participation. And, as an extra bonus, you’ll also learn how to do this virtually!

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This article is based on our downloadable Remote Design Sprint 101 Guide. Check it out!

A lot has changed over the last year and a half, but not our ability to collaborate, creatively solve problems, and design impactfully. While some are beginning to return to physical offices, many companies and employees are opting for a hybrid work model resulting in the shift to a distributed workforce. With the right practices and technology, we can still have meaningful virtual meetings and remote workshops. Namely, remote Design Sprint workshops are an essential tool to utilize during these transitional times. They’re more important now more than ever, as companies adjust to survive and thrive in the pandemic-impacted world – from solving big business challenges quickly, to refining company processes to launching innovative ideas.  

A Design Sprint is used for validating ideas and tackling business problems, guiding teams through a design-thinking-based process to uncover insights, prototype an idea, and test it with users. We at Voltage Control have successfully adapted our tried-and-true Design Sprint model for remote work and documented everything in our Remote Design Sprint 101 Guide. This comprehensive guide is for anyone who wants to plan and run their own remote Design Sprint. Some of these ideas were also featured in The Sprint Book‘s Remote Design Sprint Guide, written by the inventor of the Design Sprint Jake Knapp.

In this article, we’ll review some of the benefits of running a remote Design Sprint in your organization and how to lead your own in the virtual landscape. Let’s continue to work and create together! 

Remote Design Sprint Purpose & Benefits

Before we jump in, let’s recap some reasons you may want to run a Design Sprint. Design Sprints have multiple benefits, including:

• Aligning a team around a shared vision.
• Answering critical business questions.
• Discovering the essence of a creative challenge or problem.

Some excellent times to run a Design Sprint are:

• When kicking off a new initiative.
• When looking for new breakthrough features for a product.
• If you want to test divergent solutions.
• When you’re prioritizing potential business opportunities.
• When you need to switch gears or iterate on a current product.
• When you haven’t talked to your users enough.

Remote Design Sprints are not the same as in-person design sprints in many ways, so we must treat them differently. Read on to find out how you can successfully run your next remote Design Sprint.

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5 Tips to Run an Effective Remote Design Sprint

1. Move slower

We are often asked if we facilitate a remote Design Sprint in the typical week-long format of an in-person sprint. In general, we believe that the pace of the Design Sprint needs to be slower in a remote setting. While technology can indeed speed us up, it can also slow us down. That’s because remote workshops account for many factors that we don’t face when we’re connecting face-to-face, such as time zone differences or Zoom fatigue.

For example, you don’t want remote participants to spend more than four hours at a time on Zoom, as being chained to a desk and laptop for any longer can stifle focus and participation (learn more about tips on how to get rid of Zoom fatigue and energize your remote team here). Another consideration is the limited ability to read the virtual room intelligence to ensure that everyone is on the same page. The physical separation makes it difficult to notice if someone is distracted, struggling, or falling behind. Keep in mind the need for team connection, which is especially important in a virtual setting. If you do manage to detect that someone needs help, it takes extra time to stop and catch them up. Simply put, things take longer online. There are inevitably delays and extra processing time needed to get everyone on board no matter what tools you are using (more on that later). Account for extra buffer time to set up and field mishaps during the remote Design Sprint. You’ll need to prepare to support those that are less familiar with the tools you’ve chosen or having trouble with their internet connection. 

Another factor to consider in a remote Design Sprint is that participants are more likely to get distracted online. An effective Design Sprint ground rule to increase productivity is to ban the use of personal devices. However, it’s impossible to eliminate the distraction of screens during remote Design Sprints because laptops and tablets are the means for connection. In short, you have to wrangle the cats more. That’s because each participant is in their own physical environment. Natural external factors of working from home are also at play, such as pets or children. Facilitators will have the most success when they allocate extra time and are prepared to assist participants through these distractions (note: if you are looking for other general ways to improve remote team alignment, see here). 

2. Tweak the schedule

Running any successful remote workshop (especially a remote Design Sprint as it’s more complex than other remote meetings) requires adjustments to a typical in-person one, as fostering the same spirit of focus and connection can be a major challenge. However, this doesn’t mean that any remote workshop or remote Design Sprint is doomed to fail. With the right perspective and a little bit of tweaking, your remote Design Sprint can provide all of the value and human connection of an in-person one.

Because things move slower virtually, we request our Design Sprint participants commit to a series of mini-workshops rather than asking them to commit to the five full days (which is the typical length of time for an in-person Design Sprint). Between each mini-workshop, we assign homework and set the expectation that they will present their work at the next group session. Setting the expectation that the participant will present creates social pressure to encourage participation and ensure the work gets done. In the Design Sprint tradition of working alone together, participants do work alone offline in addition to the moments where everyone will be on the Zoom call at the same time. 

These mini workshop sessions build chronologically one after the other. This sequence could happen over the course of four days, or even eight if needed. Combined, they create the complete virtual Design Sprint calendar. Designing around the in-between times is powerful and an opportunity that in-person doesn’t support. 

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Another crucial aspect of scheduling a remote Design Sprint is considering different time zones, which isn’t a concern when everyone is in person in the same place. Time zones present a serious challenge and should not be ignored. It is important to be conscientious of all participants’ time differences. For example, it is unrealistic to invite someone to a workshop that would occur at 2:00AM their time. We use Worldtimebuddy and Calendly to easily select times that are convenient for all participants.

The extra headache of aligning time zones is well worth the benefits of connecting a globally diverse team, which is something we don’t get with in-person Design Sprints.

This shift to virtual and hybrid work has required us to see what is possible and has exposed new workshop designs. For instance, you would never fly someone from China to Austin, Texas to have a two-hour workshop on Monday and another one on Friday. It’s just too expensive, even if that was the perfect design for the content and the arc of decision-making. This is now possible because the logistics are different.

And because you will likely be dealing with different time zones in your remote Design Sprint, there is no standard schedule like when you meet at the same location in a physical sprint. You will have to adjust your Virtual Design Sprint schedule for each virtual sprint team so that it is reasonable for each participant’s given time window. We make a bespoke schedule for each virtual Design Sprint that follows the schedule principles mentioned above.

Now that we are immersed in them, we realize that remote workshops offer some incredible things that you CAN’T do in person. 

3. Set the stage and make sure to debrief

PSA: Virtual Design Sprints require more prep!

Remote Design Sprints need more planning because there are more outside factors to consider including the best tools to use and adjustments that need to be made for timing and methods to optimize engagement. At Voltage Control, we’ve developed multiple virtual workshop tools to help individuals, teams, and companies build the skills they need to design and run exceptional virtual workshops and remote Design Sprints. We also put together a Virtual Work Guide highlighting how to set up and facilitate productive virtual meetings to make them just as purposeful and successful as in-person meetings (if not more so). 

First and foremost, participants need to understand the tools, the process, what is expected of them, how things will unfold, and why they are doing all of this in the first place. This is much different than doing a Design Sprint in person. In-person, it doesn’t take a participant very long to properly acquaint themselves with the sticky notes and a whiteboard. That’s why we make sure to spend enough time getting everyone acquainted with the new digital tools and processes so they are set up for success. 

One way we properly set the stage is by investing a lot of preparation time into our Design Sprint MURAL board. This is the digital space where both individuals and the group will participate in most of the Design Sprint exercises. The more prep we can do in the MURAL board, the less headache for the virtual participants. We can’t expect them to be as savvy with our virtual facilitation tools as we are. So we create videos of us walking through the MURAL board, the exercises, and the key features they will be using. And just in case someone didn’t watch the videos, we schedule boot-up time at the beginning of the sprint so everyone can understand this new paradigm.

Another helpful preparation that aids in the process of training up participants is to set expectations before the workshop. Create an agenda that optimizes the remote attendee experience – set clear objectives for why you are running the remote Design Sprint and what your team needs to accomplish by the end of it. Outline the objective for each day of the remote Design Sprint and the activities participants will be engaging in. Remember to pad your agenda to account for potential technical difficulties, clarification, distraction, and other hiccups.

Send a checklist and supplies list ahead of time so participants know what to order and are ready to go. It’s also incredibly helpful to make sure all participants know what their deadlines and deliverables are from the get-go so everyone can successfully accomplish them. As a facilitator, you demo the expectations and process for everyone else, field questions, and then let them go off and do their individual work. You don’t want to surprise anyone or embarrass them. The goal is to have everyone on the same, productive page. 

Schedule cleanup time after each day is over. This should be in addition to the official debrief or retrospective (which should be held after the remote Design Sprint is over). Purposefully dedicating time for both the “cleanup” and debrief is important to provide opportunities that may be otherwise missed in a remote environment, and also ensure everyone is on the same page for next steps.

4. Pick the right tech

The transition to virtual means choosing the right tools and platforms that best support your goals and needs for the remote Design Sprint. Here are several tools we use and recommend:

Zoom

The virtual meeting platform gathers everyone into a main meeting room. Note: ask everyone to turn on their video! It’s crucial to foster the missing element of physical human connection when working remotely. Zoom also has built-in rooms that you can use to assign participants to breakout rooms. We’ve found this especially helpful during storyboarding. The feature to automatically route participants in and out of breakout rooms and back to the main meeting room makes the virtual facilitation experience much easier. You also have the capability to mute all participants at any time (cancels out everyone’s individual background noises) which is helpful when giving directions or speaking to everyone all at once in the main meeting room. 

MURAL 

Imagine a Design Sprint wall of post-it notes, then make it digital. That’s the essence of MURAL. It is a virtual whiteboard tool that supports complex group work and allows teams to virtually share and collaborate on digital stickies. Miro is another option for virtual collaboration. We prefer MURAL for our Design Sprints because it has the most features to support facilitators. For example, you can use a super lock feature to identify elements that can only be unlocked by users with Facilitator Superpowers. It’s a nice feature so that a curious participant doesn’t accidentally mess up your template and confuse the rest of the team.

When working with a dynamic group, MURAL’s ‘Summon’ feature really comes in handy during all of the different activities within a Design Sprint. This helps the facilitator draw focus and attention throughout the sprint. And if summoning isn’t your cup of tea, MURAL also has a ‘follow’ feature where you can request that participants follow your screen. Get acquainted with how to use MURAL with our MURAL Cheat Sheet. By adding the MURAL app to Zoom, attendees will be able to collaborate without leaving Zoom.

Figma

Just like how MURAL allows our team to collaborate in real-time on a Design Sprint digital board, Figma allows the prototyping team to collaborate in real-time on a digital prototype. Whether you are prototyping a mobile app concept, a website marketing page, a software feature idea, or other forms of digital collateral, Figma allows many designers to rapidly create, assemble, and then present a believable prototype facade that a test user can interact with and react to. One pro tip is that we recommend embedding GIFs into your Figma prototype if you need to create video explanations or interesting animations to compel your test user. 

And to pair well with the Figma prototyping, we built out a MURAL template to help the prototyping stitcher to more effectively coordinate with the team on prototyping day. 

Control Room App

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Pen & Paper

We still like attendees to do some of the Design Sprint activities locally before sharing them on the MURAL board, and we have learned that you cannot assume that they have the basic supplies with them. So, you can either drop ship pens, paper, and stickies to the attendees, or you can confirm that they have something equivalent before the sprint begins. And if you can’t send them supplies and they don’t have any, we recommend discussing digital methods for them to do solo work on their tablet or computer before surfacing it on the MURAL board. 

Finally, we also curated a guide for all the hardware you need to run virtual magical meetings here.

5. Engage a Professional Facilitator

Depending on your specific situation, it may be beneficial to hire an outside facilitator (especially when making big decisions). It’s also beneficial to have an outside facilitator when you don’t feel confident that someone internal can do the job effectively. The facilitator is the key ingredient to the Design Sprint process; it is critical that they be confident in their role and have a deep understanding of the design thinking process. If you are wary or unsure whether an internal facilitator will lead your remote Design Sprint participants to excellence, it may be best to bring in an expert from the outside. This will also allow internal team members to see expert facilitation in action and may give them the insight they need to successfully lead a Design Sprint in the future.

Working remotely certainly has its challenges, but it also has great potential. Now more than ever we have the opportunity to connect and collaborate on a global scale. This shift to virtual is shaping the future of facilitation in ways that will benefit us for years to come. Instead of waiting to be in person with your team to reap the benefits of a Design Sprint, adapt it to the virtual landscape and run a (just as effective) remote Design Sprint. 

We offer virtual facilitation services.

Voltage Control facilitates virtual design thinking workshops and Design Sprints, virtual innovation sessions, and virtual transitions. Please reach out at info@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

The post How to Run Remote Design Sprints appeared first on Voltage Control.

We’ve all heard how Design Sprints can transform the way companies can work better — from solving big business challenges quickly to refining company processes to launching innovative ideas. 

Now, as companies adjust to survive and thrive in the pandemic-impacted world, Design Sprints are more important than ever. They were originally created to be done in person, but the working world changed in ways no one anticipated in 2020, and most businesses were forced to adapt to the virtual landscape. In response, facilitators had to rethink how to run workshops like Design Sprints with a distributed team. 

We’re currently facing another shift as many companies are considering a hybrid workplace, and workshop facilitation must adapt to accommodate hybrid events. In fact, prior to last year’s lockdown, Voltage Control had only ever facilitated one hybrid Design Sprint. After everything we’ve experienced over the past 18 months, however, we expect hybrid Design Sprints to become more commonplace.

How a hybrid Design Sprint differs from an in-person one

In theory, how a hybrid Design Sprint happens is not tremendously different from a more traditional in-person Design Sprint. While hybrid sprints require a bit more preparation — and technology — the overall framework is the same. At Voltage Control, we follow the five-day methodology established by Jake Knapp at Google Ventures:

• Monday Map the problem space.
• Tuesday Sketch big ideas, and take risks.
• Wednesday Decide on a solution and create a step-by-step plan.
• Thursday Build a prototype experience.
• Friday Test with real users and observe.

To be honest, the most obvious change in the shift to hybrid is using an online collaboration space like Mural vs. placing sticky notes on a whiteboard (more on that later). For the most part, thanks to advances in video conferencing, almost everything else can happen as it would’ve in 2019 — with an important schedule adjustment. 

Any Design Sprint with a distributed team, whether remote or hybrid, must move at a slower pace to accommodate remote attendees and give them the best experience possible. You don’t want distributed participants to spend more than four hours on Zoom as being chained to a desk and laptop for any longer can stifle focus and participation. Therefore, you must adapt the Sprint agenda for all attendees. This could mean supplementing shorter live-working sessions with asynchronous work that all attendees can complete no matter where they are (and on their own time). 

How to prepare for a hybrid Design Sprint

As companies reopen their offices, it’s a given that some employees will be hesitant to return. Their reasoning, however, will be radically different. Some won’t be comfortable complying with a mandatory vaccination policy while others won’t want to give up the comfort (and flexibility) of working from home. And those are just two of the many reasons people may not be eager to return to the workplace.

A hybrid Design Sprint can accommodate those who want to be in office and those who don’t. It’ll just require a little more forethought to ensure things run smoothly and no one feels left out. First, make a list of your ideal participants then verify who can attend in person and who will attend remotely. Next, think about the geographic alignment of these participants. Finally, identify the physical locations that will be required to meet in person. 

Knowing all of this will help you book any necessary physical meeting spaces, set up an appropriate number of video conferencing rooms, source the necessary A/V equipment and use physical proximity to determine the team structure for breakout sessions. As you can see, accommodating everyone’s needs will require detailed planning. This careful attention, however, will show that you equally value what everyone — regardless of their location — has to contribute.

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How to run a hybrid Design Sprint

The one hybrid Design Sprint Voltage Control conducted pre-pandemic was a last-minute change due to an employee’s sudden inability to travel to the meeting site. We managed it OK (and have learned how to adequately adapt since then). We diligently repeated things and drew our remote attendee into the conversation. We also had to adapt our facilitation approach when we got to heat mapping the sketches on Day 3. Our prototyper simply held a camera phone up to the wall so the remote attendee could let her know where to place dots on the sketches. 

Conducting this impromptu hybrid Design Sprint taught us an important lesson about inclusion. To foster connectivity with those not in the room, it’s a good idea to have more than one facilitator. In the above instance, I deputized the prototyper — who had facilitation experience — to stay on top of chat messages from the remote attendee so their comments weren’t ignored in favor of what those in the room were saying. 

This is why I recommend every hybrid Design Sprint has one facilitator for each physical environment and one facilitator for the virtual environment. I also suggest the co-facilitators have a separate online collaboration space where they can communicate or coordinate both prior to and during the sprint. Before the Sprint occurs, they can use this space to get in sync about the arc of the event, the necessary preparations, the potential pitfalls, and everyone’s individual roles. During the Sprint, the facilitators can use this same space to chat with each other about what cameras should be used, what mics should be muted, etc. 

The tools you’ll need to succeed

To make sure you’re capturing what’s happening in the rooms — and giving those who are remotely participating a way to engage — here are the tools and gear we recommend:

Video conferencing platforms

While you’ve likely used Zoom, Google Meet, and Webex in the past, there are also upstarts like Butter. While none of these are perfect solutions — we’d love to pin multiple feeds so we could specifically monitor those not in the room — each service has useful features.

Online collaboration spaces

While participants will each work on their own laptops, we also recommend the use of a virtual whiteboard like Mural or Miro. Working in tandem or asynchronously, each team member will be able to see what everyone else is doing — no matter where they are.

Project management software

While we’re partial to Trello here at Voltage Control, we’ve also used Basecamp, Asana, and Monday. Some of these services have steeper learning curves than others, so make sure you choose the one that works for the majority of your team.

Omnidirectional microphones

An omnidirectional mic ensures remote participants hear everything that’s said in the room. For a large conference room, you’ll want to link two of them together (positioning each towards the ends of the table). While Webex sells its own A/V gear, the Blue Yeti Microphone and Jabra Speakerphones are also worth considering.

Check out our free guides for even more advice

For additional insights on how to execute hybrid Design Sprints, I encourage you to download our 21-page Hybrid Work Guide. It goes beyond what’s above and covers much of what you’ll need to know to establish a hybridized workplace. We also have a Remote Design Sprint 101 Guide that can help you plan for the remote attendee experience. If you have any questions after reading — or want to schedule a consultation — you can contact us at hello@voltagecontrol.com.

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The post How to successfully conduct a hybrid Design Sprint appeared first on Voltage Control.

If your team is considering a Design Sprint, you’re probably also considering if the cost is worth it. It’s not just a small, simple 30-minute status meeting after all. A Design Sprint is a five-day process, initially developed at Google Ventures, used for validating ideas and tackling a business problem. Teams are guided through a design thinking process to uncover insights, prototype an idea, and test it with users. Design Sprints help answer important business questions and solve big challenges through design, prototyping, and testing ideas directly with users. Benefits include team alignment (creating a shortcut to the debate cycle), less risk, and the ability to compress months of time into a single week. 

If you are wondering if your team could benefit from a Design Sprint, first check out our article on 5 times you should run a Design Sprint. If and when you decide this is right for you and your team, you’ll need to consider the overall investment cost. In this post, we outline the considerations to take into account and the factors that contribute to the cost of a Design Sprint.

5 Considerations For Investing:

1) Time

This five-day process that requires careful planning. Note: we believe in giving your Design Sprint the full five days and not taking shortcuts. The activities and workshops take up the full five days, not including the pre-planning time, so you’ll want to factor that in. Consider what that means for your team – the participants will need to focus all of their time and attention on the Design Sprint, so their other projects and tasks will either need to be covered by someone else or put on hold for the week. The good news is what happens in a week can be equal to three or even six months of “regular” work.

“Design thinking research can lead to a 75% reduction in design and delivery time, often reducing an 8-month project to 3 or 4 months.” – IBM

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2) Resources

A Design Sprint team is typically made up of seven people who will provide diverse and critical perspectives on the project (including a Facilitator, Decider, Sponsor, some mix of Experts, Prototypers, Designers, Product and Tech leads). As mentioned above, this Sprint team will be fully focused on the Design Sprint over the five days, therefore their time and salary are factors to consider. In addition to time and salary, any other projects they are working on should also be factored into consideration.

3) Complexity

The complexity and impact of the project will also be a factor in the overall cost. For example, redesigning an existing piece of product functionality will likely be more straightforward than conceptualizing net new functionality from the ground up, and therefore requires less planning, time and resources. First decide on what the overarching challenge or question is that you hope to solve by utilizing a Design Sprint. Then you will have a more informed way to determine cost based upon the complexity of that challenge.

4) Expert Facilitators

Another consideration that will factor into the overall cost will be deciding to hire an expert facilitator or using someone internally. Consider bringing in an expert facilitator when dealing with big or sensitive topics. They offer a non-biased opinion, are removed from office politics, and take care of logistics while making sure everyone stays on track. The facilitator’s role is to increase engagement and positivity in the group, and an outside facilitator is a fresh face who can help to break patterns and promote productivity. Alternatively teams can run Design Sprints on their own, if there’s a neutral leader in the group who is well-versed in the process and facilitation.

Looking for someone to run a Design Sprint for you? We can help!

5) In-Person vs. Virtual

A final consideration and cost variable, especially relevant in today’s environment, is if the Design Sprint will be in-person or virtual. Traditionally, they have been held with all participants attending in-person, but they don’t have to be. Virtual Design Sprints can be just as effective but must be treated differently, as they are in a completely different landscape. If you decide to hold the Design Sprint in-person, you’ll need to consider travel, lodging and event costs if everyone is not located in the same place.

If you decide to go the virtual route, we recommend moving at a slower pace and scheduling a series of mini-workshops as opposed to five full days of activities. These mini workshop sessions are built chronologically one after the other. This sequence could happen over the course of four days, or even eight if needed. Combined, they create the complete virtual Design Sprint calendar. Designing around the in-between times is powerful and an opportunity that in-person doesn’t support. Between each mini-workshop, we assign homework and set the expectation that they will present their work at the next group session. Setting the expectation that the participant will present creates social pressure to encourage participation and ensure the work gets done. It’s easier for participants to get distracted during a virtual gathering, therefore it’s even more important for the Facilitator to pay attention to participant engagement and be proactive in including everyone in each activity.

We Think It Is Worth It!

Design Sprints can seem daunting, especially when thinking of all the immediate investment costs. But you also are getting a positive return on investment – lots of ideas and experiments in a relatively short period of time. Think about the long term – what you could be risking by continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done.

Consider these reasons why a Design Sprint is a sound investment:

1. Accomplish a month’s worth of work in 1 week
2. Get user feedback before it’s too late
3. Improve visibility & alignment for your team 
4. Gain speed & momentum for your project
5. Foster a culture of innovation

Learn how we helped IDB Invest’s Technology team improve its customer engagement and experience with a Design Sprint.

The true financial benefit of a Design Sprint is the upfront decision-making and alignment, resulting in a more efficient and simplified future process and product. By helping your company or team find the deep value for the end-user before building anything, and removing potentially useless or time-consuming features, you can save your team months of design, engineering, and development work and costs. You will be able to get your product or idea to market more quickly. Considering that Design Sprints minimize risk, reduce time to market, and accelerate innovation, we believe it’s worth the time and money when done correctly.

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You Don’t Have to Design Sprint Alone

If you want to run a Design Sprint at your company but are overwhelmed by the idea of planning and facilitating it, we can help you. Voltage Control designs and leads sprints for companies large and small. Having a professional facilitator run your Design Sprint ensures that you can focus on the ideas and the work, not the logistics or “doing it right.” Reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com or get in touch with us here if you want to talk about running a Design Sprint at your company.

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