Looking for a distraction from a crazy world? Why not join me on our week-long innovation sprint with client Baker Tilly. It’s Day 3 and the group has really started to gel. Maybe it’s the afterglow from the heated ax-throwing tournament Tuesday night. Maybe it’s the thoughtful appreciations they shared with their teammates Tuesday afternoon. Maybe it’s the unusually human feeling of a whole week away from the computer. Whatever it is, the vibe in the room is casual, veering on raucous. Just the right ingredients for creativity to blossom.

In every innovation sprint, we teach a concept we learned from Stanford's d.school: “flare” vs “focus.” Human-centered design sometimes calls for flaring - coming up with lots of divergent possibilities, and at other times calls for focusing - narrowing in on one good idea.

Wednesday of the sprint starts as a giant flare-fest as teams brainstorm solutions for their challenges. We offer a series of prompts to stoke the brainstorm:

• How would you solve the problem if you had $10,000 a month to throw at it?
• How would you solve it with no budget, by next week?
• How would a child solve this problem?
• How would someone you admire solve this problem?
• What’s an opposite idea - a solution that would make the problem worse?
• How would you solve it by questioning an assumption?

After this and a few other brainstorming activities, teams have generated up to 100 ideas. It’s time to focus.

We offer them a set of axes for evaluating their ideas. On the Y axis, we measure ease of implementation. On the X axis, delight to the user. When you sort ideas onto this graph, the winning ideas float to the top right corner, which they label “bright stars.”

This afternoon, teams choose just one bright star to build a prototype of, which they test with stakeholders in real time. We tell the teams,

“Don’t hope for great feedback from your testers! Hope that they’ll tell you everything that doesn’t work about your idea. Then you can make it better.”

There are lots of other fun things that happen on Wednesday, too many to describe in detail. A drawing lesson. A spaghetti and marshmallow tower challenge (to illustrate the purpose of testing ideas early and often). A rock-paper-scissors tournament (ask about it in the comments and I’ll tell you the purpose it serves)! Suffice it to say, we’ve gone from casual and raucous to flat out bonded. Can’t wait for Day 4!