With Valentine’s Day around the corner (yes, those candy hearts can already be found on local shelves), we thought we’d share one of our favorite tools with you — Love Letter / Breakup Letter. Whether you’re struggling with donations or visibility, this simple tool can help elevate your brand, and create experiences that resonate and drive action. Download the facilitator’s guide and template and learn how to better connect with those you serve!
I recently watched David Letterman’s ‘My Next Guest is’ interview with Tina Fey — while the entire episode is worthy of your time, the clip below is the inspiration for this post. In it, Tina explains that one of the key rules of improv is “yes, and…”. Someone starts the scene with an idea or scenario and the next person agrees to it, and then builds upon it.
“Yes, and…” is also something we practice in design thinking. It pushes us to expand ideas and add onto them instead of saying, “No,” or “How about this instead?” When we can get beyond our own ideas and truly listen to others, that’s when the possibilities for innovation become limitless.
Tina further explains her rules of improv in the book “Bossypants.” She explains, “Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.”
Another rule she shares is that there are no mistakes – only opportunities.
“If I start a scene as what I think is very clearly a cop riding a bicycle, but you think I am a hamster in a hamster wheel, guess what? Now I’m a hamster in a hamster wheel. I’m not going to stop everything to explain that it was really supposed to be a bike. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up being a police hamster who’s been put on ‘hamster wheel’ duty because I’m ‘too much of a loose cannon’ in the field. In improv there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy accidents. And many of the world’s greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.”
This is similar to one of our rules for ideation – there are no bad ideas. Keeping an open mind and deferring judgment allow us to explore avenues and take risks with our ideas.
So what could an improv-based exercise look like? Here’s how it might work:
Activity: Improv Your Way to New Ideas
Goal: Prototype
Time Frame: 2-5 minutes per idea explored
People: at least two people; a third person to document could be helpful
Materials Needed: video for recording (bonus)
Difficulty Level: Medium (role-playing might be better suited for certain personalities)
Step One: Choose the idea to prototype.
Step Two: The first person creates a scenario related to the idea. For example, if the idea is to build a mobile health clinic, the person might set up the scene to signify they’re taking their daughter to the clinic.
Step Three: Whatever the first person says, no matter how whacky, the second must agree to by following lead and then introducing a new element to the scene. Perhaps they’re a doctor onsite, or they bring life to the mobile clinic and assume a characterized version of it.
Step Four: The first person then responds, and continues to build the scene. With each element that’s added, new details about the mobile clinic will emerge, making room for collaborative iteration. Piecing the puzzle together, you should end up with detailed description of how your mobile health clinic will function, what it looks like, how visitors engage with it, and so on and so forth.
Stay tuned to hear how this exercise works for us, or drop us a note if you decide to try it yourself. Let’s be honest though, anything inspired by Liz Lemon has to be great, right?
A common myth on the topic of innovation is that there’s just no time for it. It’s hard to get a group of people in a room, with clear minds, to really focus and come up with the next idea. Other deadlines wait, schedules are packed, and we’re all just too busy to get to that visionary state of mind.
While all of that may actually be true – the real problem lies in the notion that innovation will happen from the inside out. Sure there are internal drivers that can help you achieve innovation – curiosity, a fail-first mentality, perhaps even obsession. But even with these things in place, the best ideas aren’t created when groups of people sit around and think. The best ideas come from actively engaging with and talking to those you serve. Innovation starts with Hello.
Starting conversations and working directly with your audiences is how you will uncover new insights. Until you truly know the way your audience interacts with your product or service, and perhaps more importantly, the motivations behind those interactions, it’s nearly impossible for you to continuously grow and improve.
This is why we practice human-centered design at SmallBox. With a commitment to design research – a type of research rooted in empathizing with real people and understanding their unique environments and contexts – we are constantly striving to keep the end-user at the core of all solutions and ideas. We co-design alongside them, test and iterate directly with them, and ultimately work to ensure the final outcome is truly something that will serve them.
When was the last time you spoke directly to a customer?
Here are three methods we commonly use to spark conversations, ideas, and opportunities:
Once you have selected your research method(s), take a look at our suggested mindsets to help ensure a successful conversation!
Have you ever pulled your team together for an ideation session that just didn’t go the way you expected? You presented a problem to solve, asked for ideas and the cold, blank stares left you feeling chilled to your bones.
Or maybe you’ve attended a session like this and without preparation, a 900-pound-guerilla-of-a-question is thrown your way so you sheepishly hand it a banana in hopes that it doesn’t eat you.
Whether participating or facilitating, we’ve all been there. When you want to get the most out of your teams’ creative energies, there are endless tips and tricks on how to prepare your team for the session, how to keep the energy alive, how to keep everyone on track, etc.
Today, I thought I’d share a tip on how to warm up your time – the trick to getting to the good ideas is to actually start with the bad ideas.
One way to do this is a quick exercise designed to ease nerves, and help people tap into their creative sides with quick doodles.
To take this exercise a step further, you could add a second round and ask participants to go back through their bad ideas and flip them into something that could work. This will help show that there is a fine line between the “bad” and “good” and that all ideas are useful in some way.
A third iteration is to have participants start with a stack of fresh cards and go for the wildest idea, pushing them to think outside of the box, no limitations – the crazier the better.
Once you get to the real ideation exercise, you can apply the ‘bad ideas’ approach again by getting out all of the obvious, already-stated ideas that everyone is already thinking about. We often put pressure on ourselves to come up with something new and inventive, but until we let go of what’s already there, there isn’t room to explore the not-so-obvious. To that end, encourage participants (or yourself!) to get those ideas out, even if you know they aren’t the greatest. Don’t wait until the perfect one hits, just write them all down and you’ll certainly get closer to the next big thing a bit sooner.
During an ideation session with ACSM, we asked the group to give us their best ‘bad ideas’ on how to improve communication with their members. One suggestion, shown here, was to use a telephone tree to release all news and information – amazing!