Innovation Workshop Activities

In Wicked Questions, participants ask, “How is it that we are doing two things in tension with each other simultaneously?” These questions reveal entangled challenges that are unintuitive or difficult to discuss. Wicked Questions can reduce either-or thinking and engage everyone in thinking strategically about how to balance competing priorities. It can be particularly useful in transitions because it exposes the tension between what is being said and what is actually being done. This structure reinforces LS Principle #7, Emphasize Possibilities: Believe Before You See.

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.

A simple exercise that complements exploratory, discursive, and creative workshops with insights and opinions from outside. Use this exercise when brainstorming ideas, developing a new product or service or creating a strategy or plan that will include others. Participants phone a co-worker and ask them questions relevant to the task. This quickly generates meaningful input from a range of “outside” perspectives. Often, participants will be surprised at how simple it was to solicit this input and how valuable it is to the process.

This is an exercise to inspire your team with products or services that they think they can use as inspiration for their concepts in the next phases of their design sprints.

This tool helps small and large groups to identify key transformative trends over the next few years, explore their consequences, and begin to look at how they can be met to create business opportunities. By the end of the workshop, participants create a list of most relevant trends; and an elaboration on three most-important trends, including ideas around how their organization/s could act to meet those trends. Can be run both online and face-to-face.

You can enable participants to find novel approaches to challenges by immersing themselves in the activities of the people with local experience—often their colleagues on the front line or anyone who uses their product or service. You open the door to change and innovation by helping participants explore what people actually do and feel in creating, delivering, or using their offering. Their observations and experience can spur rapid performance improvements and expedite prototype development. The combined observations may make it easy to spot important patterns.

A short exercise to bring ‘story-building’ to life: a key emerging concept in networked digital communications.

This is a practical, dynamic and versatile method for groups to explore ideas and questions together. Something like a physical questionnaire; participants respond to questions by walking around the space and placing themselves on an imaginary line. This provides a starting point for reflection and discussion and brings teams together.

The purpose of this simple exercise is to demonstrate three key principles useful for creativity and idea generation: quantity is a condition for quality; building on the ideas of others; the ideas we come up with are usually all the same. The format is simple, with small groups standing and drawing apples. At the end of the exercise, the whole group reflects and draws out learnings and reflections.

In Min Specs, participants generate a list of all potential dos and don’ts for achieving a purpose and then reduce it to the absolute minimum requirements. By eliminating nonessential rules (max specs), Min Specs gives groups more freedom and promotes responsibility. It can also help a group scale up innovations with fidelity. Following the rules makes it possible for the group to go wild! This structure gives life to LS Principle #6, Amplify Freedom and Responsibility.

Teams need to explore, test and try new things to innovate. Early efforts will be improved and progress when feedback is given and received. Feedback is a key part of any project development and crucial to the iterative process.

It's important to have a learning/growth mindset to see new possibilities and a framework in place to provide boundaries and a safe container for both the receiver and the giver of the feedback at hand.

A process such as I Like, I Wish, I Wonder can support teams (big and small) to collect feedback quickly. Can be run online or face-to-face. A Miro template is attached below.

In this workshop groups examine the unintended consequences of new technologies and use those to inspire new potential business opportunities. It looks beyond the common understanding of new technologies, challenging participants to discover unexpected potential and how it might be harnessed. For instance, Instagram was created as a virtual photo album for smartphones, but through the human connection between the people who use it, it has the potential to affect something as deep as our grieving and healing process, as a recent example of this author’s daughter showed.