Why your innovation workshops and design sprints might be reinforcing the problems they are trying to solve
Innovation workshops often fail not because of a lack of creativity, but because subtle conditions in the room hinder fresh thinking while the process appears to be working.
Ideas flow, energy is high, people participate. Yet the output often mirrors previous beliefs.
If that sounds familiar, here are FOUR things to do differently to break this pattern.
Protect curiosity from expertise.
The most common failure in innovation workshops isn't a lack of ideas. It's the most experienced people in the room, who are often the most senior, who unconsciously filter out anything that doesn't fit what they already know.
For example, every insight that surfaces gets interpreted through existing assumptions: "Yes, we knew that."
The result? A restatement of old thinking, simply dressed up as discovery.
So, how do you solve this issue?
In the early stages of observation, insight-gathering, and problem definition, give the less experienced people in the room more airspace, not less. Better still, bring in someone from outside your function with a fresh set of eyes. Break the team into small groups with mixed backgrounds to spark new and unexpected conversations.
Their naïve questions will surface things your experts have long since stopped noticing.
If you don’t do this, your competitors will. Think of all those entrepreneurial startups that have challenged category norms and captured consumers’ attention by doing so.
To help with this, organise your insights into two buckets.
Bucket 1: What we know we know, but have ignored and never solved.
Bucket 2: What’s new and interesting that we’ve not paid attention to.
This forces people to pay attention to the unexpected, unusual and overlooked insights.
Curiosity has to be protected from expertise, or expertise will win every time.
Separate insights from ideas
When people think of an innovation workshop, they think of ideas, blue-sky thinking, and thinking outside the box.
However, most solutions fail because they don't address a customer's unmet need. Not through novelty. Meaningful relevance wins every time.
Run your workshops or design sprints in two distinct phases. Interrogate your research, trends, customer feedback, etc., to identify insight-based opportunities first, based on your Bucket 1 and 2 insights. Prioritise where to focus based on your findings and objectives.
These become the focus for ideation, prototyping and experimentation, resulting in more meaningful solutions.
Treat prototypes as questions, not answers.
There's a moment in many innovation projects when things go wrong. And it rarely feels like anything has gone wrong at the time.
It's the moment a prototype gets shown to a senior stakeholder, and they start treating it as a product decision.
Sunk-cost dynamics kick in. The stakeholder anchors to what they've seen. The team, sensing this, stops exploring and starts defending. What was designed as a learning tool becomes a commitment. The most valuable part of the process, the learning, gets skipped in favour of execution.
Before you build anything, define the hypothesis you're testing in a single sentence. If you can't do that, you're too far downstream. Agree with your stakeholders upfront: success means generating insight, not building a product.
Create discomfort, not just goodwill.
This is the one most facilitators avoid. A well-run workshop that makes everyone feel positive and aligned can be the least useful workshop you run.
Culture doesn't change because people attend a workshop.
It changes when the workshop makes people genuinely uncomfortable.
When it surfaces assumptions they didn't know they were holding, and asks them to question how things are actually done around here.
It comes back to our first point: people defend and are comfortable with the familiar.
But you won’t progress if you don’t challenge ingrained assumptions and established playbooks and avoid the obvious truth that the external environment and customer expectations are changing, and you have to respond.
If you need help to create productive discomfort to drive real change, drop us a line. We’d love to help!