Harnessing Fresh Minds: How to Kickstart the New Year with a Creative Workshop
Written by Mike Tracz
As the new year is upon us, it’s time to allow ourselves to step back, reflect, and prepare for 2024. The holidays have a way of resetting our minds, and you have an opportunity to channel this fresh energy into new and innovative value for your business.
At Balance Innovation, we specialize in full-service innovation consulting. Our framework includes planning, defining the problem space, and creating the solution space. But sometimes, you might have small and/or clear challenges that might not require the whole gamut. This article will focus on part of the solution space: how we prepare for and facilitate creative workshops. This is something you can do yourself for the right-sized challenges, and we’ve outlined a step-by-step guide below. If you feel you can benefit from our team’s full framework and expertise, please feel free to reach out to us.
The Power of Fresh Perspectives
The holiday season often acts as a mental reset, offering a much-needed break from the usual grind. The study “Well Recovered and More Creative? A Longitudinal Study on the Relationship Between Vacation and Creativity*” has shown that time away from work can enhance self-reported creativity and problem-solving abilities. As team members return with renewed vigor, they can bring a treasure trove of fresh ideas and perspectives. This post-holiday energy can be a catalyst for groundbreaking innovations. But don’t hit them with a creative workshop right away. Allow your team to settle in and attend to loose ends before jumping into what’s next. This is your time to prepare for an efficient and actionable workshop.
Preparing for a Workshop
A successful workshop begins with planning. Start by stepping back to ask yourself some simple questions. Which stakeholders should attend? (hint: anyone with a role in the success of the products or services you sell) What are the key challenges your team should focus on? What does success look like post-workshop?
At Balance, we are typically hired to help our clients find hidden opportunities and understand consumers’ context and needs. We create a toolkit we use as the foundation of ideation called the Experience Design Toolkit. While you may not have the research to support creating these tools, you can work with your team to develop similar stimuli for ideation. Here’s a breakdown of the tools in our toolkit and how to use them.
01
Opportunities for Innovation
These help describe the most significant unmet needs that your team can address. By focusing on these opportunities, the workshop can generate ideas with the potential for high impact and innovation.
Example: Say you work in garment care. A few opportunities for innovation include reducing fabric wear and tear, eliminating complex laundry steps, or minimizing environmental impact.
02
Mindsets
Understanding your user's diverse mental states and attitudes is crucial. This involves identifying customers' mindsets and how these affect their decisions and behaviors. This insight helps in tailoring solutions that are empathetic and effective.
Example: If we stay on the same topic of garment care, a couple of mindsets could be Efficiency Seeker and Quality Preserver. Although they may seem conflicting, one person could bounce back and forth between these mindsets while caring for their clothing, and it is essential to consider each perspective.
03
Experience Principles
These represent the universal needs of users. They serve as a north star for making and evaluating design and business decisions. By aligning your workshop's outcomes with these principles, you ensure the solutions developed are user-centric and resonate with your audience.
Example: Ensure effectiveness, prioritize safety, educate and support, and simplify usage are all examples of Experience Principles for an innovation program in the garment care category. You can select ideas to pursue and evaluate their development based on these principles because anything you create must hit these marks.
04
Circumstances
Consider the various conditions or situations in which your solutions will be used. Understanding the circumstances surrounding user experiences helps create more relevant and practical solutions.
Example: When I have limited time for laundry, when I need to do laundry in a small living space, when I want to understand the care for different fabric types, or when I’m trying to preserve the color and texture of my clothes are a few examples of circumstances that could affect how you approach a solution. It’s actionable context that forms meaningful solutions.
If you found it difficult to identify the Opportunities, Mindsets, Experience Principles, or Circumstances, we recommend working with innovation experts like Balance Innovation. When the problem space is well-researched and defined, you’ll exponentially improve your solutions and innovation.
Conducting a Workshop - From Problem Identification to Solution Ideation
This is the fun bit. The team is gathered in person or virtual (it doesn’t matter much anymore), and you have the tools ready to start. The first thing is an icebreaker to get everyone talking, laughing, and oriented with the space (in-person or virtual). We use a virtual whiteboard to facilitate and collect solutions during the session, and this is a perfect time to try out sticky notes, stickers, pasting images, and importing sketches. Once everyone is ready, it’s time to start a session. BTW - We try to keep each session at or under sixty minutes. Any longer, you will start losing focus, and forcing creativity is worse than running out of time, trust me. If you have to juggle schedules, split up the sessions over a couple of days or a week. We’ve done this before, and it works well.
Session Setup:
Guardrails: Establish clear rules for each session. This might include:
no criticism during the ideation phase
focus on the quantity of ideas
commitment to staying on topic.
These guardrails ensure a safe and productive environment for creativity.
Objective Setting: Begin each session by clearly stating its objective based on the tools you’ve either gathered or created - Opportunities for Innovation, Mindsets, Experience Principles, and Circumstances. Allow time for a discussion so every team member has a chance to understand and take on the objective.
Facilitation: Assign a facilitator for each session to guide the discussion, keep the team on track, and ensure that all voices are heard. Lean on the tools you have created to prompt and help the team get unstuck.
Closed Ideation: After the Objective Setting, we begin with closed ideation. This means we take 5-10 minutes to ideate on our own. We create personal spaces in the virtual whiteboard so the team isn’t distracted and can get as many solutions as possible.
Collaboration: Immediately, we share, one at a time. This ensures everyone has a voice and has contributed to the overarching goal. While each team member is sharing their ideas, the facilitator, and maybe another helper, can start grouping similar ideas and naming the emerging themes. This will be helpful later; more on this in a bit. Once everyone has shared their ideas, it’s time to build on and refine them. This is so important because the lines of ownership should become blurred, and any solution is everyone’s solution. This is also where you will see where the group’s interests are gravitating.
Deciding: Anyone who has facilitated knows that a hundred ideas is worse than having no ideas. Now is the time to attack this. You have what you need to get started here. You have grouped ideas into themes and refined those themes as a group, and have the session’s objectives either on the wall or at the top of the virtual whiteboard. And no, it’s not on you. Because you have invited a diverse group of participants who all have some role in moving this forward, lead them in a voting session that considers all of this and any criteria specific to their expertise. Have them vote with the decision criteria above. It only takes a few minutes, and it is a perfect starting point for what’s next.
In our next article, we will share more about what we do with the top-ranking solutions. But as a teaser, we will get into combining themes, concept writing, and storyboarding.
If you have any questions, please hit me up. I’d love to chat more about integrating these practices into your team’s process. You can start small and still make an impact.