Three practical tips to make your innovation sprints more productive
Agility and speed is a hot topic for many organisations - and rightly so.
Consumers, shoppers and retailers are more demanding.
People are changing behaviours and raising expectations like never before.
What’s more, digital transformation is accelerating this pace of change, and reshaping business models.
That's why many organisations are utilising agile methods to co-create and accelerate innovative ideas for the design and marketing of new products and services.
If applied well, agile methods such as design sprints lead to better business performance, ROI and brand health.
Years of running tons of innovation projects has shown us that creative collaboration and a customer-first mindset are the key factors that distinguish high performing teams. This is very relevant to agile methods which need high levels of cooperation and creativity to be successful.
If you are grappling with innovating with pace and being more agile, here are three tips that encourage productive creativity.
THREE TIPS
Switch off autopilot
Experiment to find flaws
Be flexible
1 SWITCH OFF AUTOPILOT
Agility needs an inquiring mindset: a willingness to experiment with incomplete ideas, ask questions, test assumptions and push against the edges of what is possible.
Curiosity, a zeal to explore via iterative design steps are essential pre-requisites of design sprints.
Central to this is a customer-first mindset rather than a product or brand-centric mindset.
Organisations develop a fixed view of how a product sector or category should function. They are on autopilot. These norms go challenged - they are writ large in tablets of stone and even perpetuated in 'category playbooks'.
We develop fixed views on how categories should operate, which hinders innovation
Conversely, the small, nimble, entrepreneurial start-ups who break the rules are now stealing a march on many leading brands, and probably doing so in your category right now.
The implication? Autopilot thinking re-inforces internal biases and norms. This bias includes the way you do marketing activation, develop claims and messaging, choose media, sales channels and design products. These biases get amplified when you implement an agile sprint to solve a business problem.
How do you overcome autopilot thinking?
Define the challenge through the eyes of your target audience.
Be curious and ask yourself 'What problem are we solving for our customer?' Empathise with their needs and identify the dilemma the consumer wants to solve and use it as your agile team's focus.
For instance, when we run learning sessions with University students, we give them a rail travel challenge - to design a better experience for different travellers. Typically, you might develop a 'product-centric' problem definition like 'How might we make it easier to choose the best journey route and buy the right ticket?'. However, this is too generic. If you look at your problem through the eyes of the traveller, say a parent with three children under the age of five, where the experience is fraught with chaos trying to keep kids happy, and under control, the problem definition may be quite different: 'How might we make rail travel less stressful?' By reframing the problem through your customer's eyes, your focus changes and unlocks unexpected ideas that will ultimately be more relevant to their needs.
Switch off the autopilot, get people more customer-focused. It will make your agile efforts more productive.
2 EXPERIMENT TO FIND FLAWS
The tenet of scientific inquiry is that you run experiments to disprove your hypotheses. The more times your assumptions stand up to scrutiny, the more confident you can be in your thinking.
Rapid prototyping = experimentation = greater confidence in your solution.
The prototyping phase of an agile project requires a questioning mindset to be successful - which goes back to our earlier enigma 'What problem are we solving for?'
Let's say you have arranged for some users to come in to give you a perspective on your prototypes. In such instances - when we run consumer co-creation activities - our advice to clients is don't view this as an exercise to find the winning idea, but look for flaws. List your assumptions - the needs you are solving for - and use consumer co-creation to examine these hypotheses. 'What if it worked like this?' 'If it had these features, would that help?' 'If you were presented with this screen at check-in, how would you respond?'.. and so forth.
This approach means you don't lock onto your first idea but are open to blending ideas, uncovering flaws in your thinking to get to a sharper perspective of how an idea has to work to be of value to your consumer.
Rapid prototyping helps you identify flaws in your thinking, improve and optimise ideas.
3 BE FLEXIBLE
The ability to pivot as new information comes to light is critical.
Lengthy innovation programs can lead to groups getting wedded to ideas, and resistant to letting them go even if they prove to have flaws. We've all experienced this group-think. The benefit of short, agile sprints is that you don't have the time to get locked into a single solution.
How do you encourage flexiblility?
Break an initiative down into a series of small time-bound learning steps of say, 2-3 weeks. For instance, these steps might comprise insight hunting, prototyping, co-creation. At the end of each stage, the team share their findings, and if they are making progress, they move to the next step.
This way, you create momentum and pace.
For example, if you are in the insight phase of a project, you'll want to identify potential 'jobs to be done' — i.e. the problems your customers are trying to resolve.
The first steps involve reviewing past market research and analytics to identify opportunities. You can spread to the workload out amongst the team and agency partners. Regroup, after a week, share your findings and determine several focus areas.
The next steps require digging deeper and questioning your assumptions — asking 'are we onto something here? 'where's the biggest opportunity?' ‘what does the user truly value?’ This can involve spending time with your target audience, such as at home, at work, out shopping; shadowing what they do, and observing their rituals and habits. You could run some co-creation workshops — in person or online, to explore the problem in depth, to understand their frustrations and workarounds.
Crucially, look at the topic through the consumer's eyes, experiment with alternative assumptions and be open to unexpected insights.
In many categories, we have seen start-ups, and insurgent brands take-off, because they have focused on the consumer, and are not blinkered by the category rules and norms.
Be willing to change direction as new insights and ideas come to light
To sum up:
Try out the following:
Encourage a consumer-centric rather than a product-centric mindset to get people out of autopilot
Use experimentation to hunt for flaws, and identify the real value your customer is seeking, rather than run with your first idea
Be flexible, and pivot as new insights or ideas arise