We have developed several tools that help facilitate creativity and business innovation during our design sprints. All our tools have been rigorously researched and tested to ensure that they deliver practical business results.
Tiny Game Ideation
There is nothing worse than facing a blank page or post-it note in a forced ideation session. We have created a set of cards that help the ideation process along by starting you off with a succession of quick ideation sessions giving you a few core variables. This helps teams focus on creating small projects – from which the large quickly grow!
Stakeholder Empathy & Design Bias
We use our human archetypes cards and workbooks to start the process of identifying a profile of your target audience, or how we call it in our sprints – focusing on the ‘hero’ in the problem we are trying to solve. Human motivations, goals, values, personality and drivers are universal, and are commonly used in narrative, storytelling, communication and culture formation.
There are many significant models and insights, however none have (thankfully) ‘cracked the human code’. There is a commonality in human values, desires and emotions, and the pervasiveness of culture to shape our behaviour and we have built these into our ‘hero discovery’ process.
There are 12+ key archetypes that have appeared in stories and myths around the world
Based on the works of Jung, Campbell, Vogler, Mark & Pearson and others. We use these as a skeleton to start building hero personas and product stories. We always follow up with objective research and validation to build evidence-based profiles and personas between sprints. An important part of our process is working on identifying the ‘design bias’ inside our organisation that sometimes gets in the way of true
Core Strengths and Blockers
This is a great human-factors approach we use to get to the root cause of a problem and build teamwork and empathy. We work with the exisiting core strengths in your team and with your stakeholders (we like to call them ‘superpowers’) so we can build or ‘amplify’ what is already working well. We then identify the blockers (or the anti-superpowers) to remove these obstacles. The great thing about using our design cards is that it ‘depersonalises’ the issues and challenges.
Design Taxonomy – Gameful and Playful Elements
Taxonomies are an important resource in organising information on a topic so the content can be used strategically and consistently in an organisation. I created an Enterprise Gamification Taxonomy several years ago as part of my doctoral research based on an audit and analysis of over 300 enterprise gamification projects. This taxonomy provides a valuable resource that we use in the sprint design process.
The key value of a taxonomy for a field as new as gamification is that it codifies best-practice and provides a common language for when you’re developing your own strategy. It also provides practical insights into the characteristics of these applications for business purposes. At the highest level, the enterprise gamification taxonomy comprises of six dimensions. This taxonomy provides a framework to guide your design decisions with a set of six key questions to work though.
Capability Framework
Our expertise doesn’t leave you with a pile of post-it notes, butchers paper and a bundle of lovely team building experiences, and wondering “well, where do I do from here?” Our strength in in business strategy and implementation and we have a well researched capability model that will help you develop the means to develop a business case, implementation plan to bring your project to life. Our Capability Checklist and Capability Audit provides a framework to manage the post-sprint implementation process.
Forever Creating
We are constantly developing new tools and techniques, its in our DNA. Watch this space!
Innovation Design Sprint 