The problem with anything that requires creative thinking is that it’s easy to get lost—lose focus and fall into the trap of having useless, open-ended, unstructured discussions. Here’s the most effective solution I’ve found: Replace all open, unstructured discussion with a clear process.

What to use this exercise for: Anything which requires a group of people to make decisions, solve problems or discuss challenges. It’s always good to frame an LDJ session with a broad topic, here are some examples:

• The conversion flow of our checkout
• Our internal design process
• How we organise events
• Keeping up with our competition
• Improving sales flow

An empathy map is a tool to help a design team to empathize with the people they are designing for. You can make an empathy map for a group of people or for a persona.

To be used after doing personas when more insights are needed.

MoSCoW is a method that allows the team to prioritize the different features that they will work on. Features are then categorized into “Must have”, “Should have”, “Could have”, or “Would like but won‘t get”.

To be used at the beginning of a timeslot (for example during Sprint planning) and when planning is needed.

Future workshop is a method that aims to have stakeholders design their desired future, avoiding constraints imposed by experts or organizations.

To be used when ideas need to be developed outside of the design team.

Customer experience mapping is a method of documenting and visualizing the experience a customer has as they use the product or service. It also maps out their responses to their experiences.

To be used when there is a solution (even in a conceptual stage) that can be analyzed.

Inspired by Google’s design sprint process, this workshop provides a structure that teams can use to rapidly prototype and test new ideas. Use this workshop to rapidly ideate, prototype and try out a new concept and practice working creatively and quickly with your team.

An emotional journey is a visualization that maps and illustrates a user’s emotional experience through the experience of interacting with an organization, product or brand.

Backcasting is a method for planning the actions necessary to reach desired future goals. This method is often applied in a workshop format with stakeholders participating.

To be used when a future goal (even if it is vague) has been identified.

Get inspired today by a world 20 years away.

Sometimes it helps to start from the end. This exercise will help you align with your team on an audacious vision for your project - one that you can work backward from.

90-Minute Prototypes is a short and sweet prototyping workshop that challenges teams to build basic clickable app prototypes within 90 minutes. It’s easy to plan and run and demonstrates how rapidly an insight can be turned into a test-ready prototype. Use it to inspire your team to embrace a prototyping mindset.

You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking.

This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun!

Dot voting is a collective way of prioritizing and converging on a design solution that uses group voting.

To be used when there are more ideas than can be feasible to develop further.