People often have lots of existing ideas of how to solve a problem. When they’re described it can lead to confusion.

Sketching is really important as a means of expressing your ideas quickly, identify any key uncertainties and provide a means to evaluate the idea.

Work alone - it’s important to give people the time and space to come up with their own ideas. But share regularly: someone else’s idea will stimulate another person’s thinking.

Take notes (20 minutes)

Encourage the team to walk around the room, exploring the assets you’ve put on the wall, taking notes. These don’t have to be structured but should capture the key learnings and implications - gathering your thoughts in one place.

Generate ideas (20 minutes)

A free sketching session - doodles, experiences etc. The team might want to present back their ideas, in order to generate more. You don’t have to show the whole service - core components, particularly screens, ‘moments’ - whatever people wish.

Rapid variations (5-10 minutes)

Try to generate alternative ideas to the ones you produced first. Look for radically different rather than variations on a theme.

Solution sketch (30 minutes)

Call the team back into a group. Figure out the details of the product or service. If you’ve a strong sketcher, they might ‘hold the pen’ whilst the team talk through each step. With any format, there are some key rules to follow:

• Make it self-explanatory
• Keep it anonymous
• Ugly is ok
• Words matter
• Give it a catchy name

Making a decision

There are five steps to making a decision of which solution to take forward:

1. Display the sketches on the wall
2. Use dot voting to mark interesting parts
3. Discuss the highlights of each solution
4. Vote for one solution each (you might want an anonymous ballot if there are strong personalities in the room, or if people are used to a hierarchy)
5. The Decider makes the final decision

A rumble

If you can’t decide on one idea, you can have a competition by splitting the teams and each team works on their preferred prototype. Think ‘the Apprentice’ without the silly team names or crap management.