Imagine it’s the early 1900s. You’re drinking a nice hot cup of coffee. Only . . . it’s not so nice. Coffee grounds stick in your teeth, and the liquid is so bitter your mouth puckers. If it weren’t for the caffeine, you probably wouldn’t bother. Back in those days, coffee was brewed like tea, by dunking a pouch of ground beans into boiling water. There was a lot of room for error: over-brewing, under-brewing, and plenty of grit at the bottom of the cup. Some people strained their coffee through filters made of cloth, but the material was overly porous and a mess to clean up.
In 1908, a German woman named Melitta Bentz got fed up with gritty, bitter coffee. Convinced there had to be a better way, Bentz went looking for ideas. She came across the blotting paper in her son’s school notebook. The material was designed for mopping up excess ink. It was thick and absorbent—and disposable.
Inspired, Bentz tore out a sheet of the blotting paper. She punctured holes in a brass pot with a nail, placed the pot on top of a cup, put the paper inside, filled it with ground coffee, and added hot water. The resulting drink was smooth, grit-free, and a snap to clean up after. Bentz had invented the paper coffee filter. More than a hundred years later, it remains one of the most popular (and best) tools for brewing coffee.
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We all want a flash of divine inspiration that changes the world—and impresses our teammates. We want to create something completely new. But amazing ideas don’t happen like that. The lesson of Melitta Bentz is that great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision. Coffee filters had been tried before, but they were made of cloth. And the blotting paper? It was just sitting there.
This combination of existing ideas doesn’t take anything away from Bentz’s achievement, but it is promising news for the rest of us would-be inventors. In your sprint, you’ll follow her example: remix and improve—but never blindly copy.
You’ll begin Tuesday morning by searching for existing ideas you can use in the afternoon to inform your solution. It’s like playing with Lego bricks: first gather useful components, then convert them into something original and new.
Our method for collecting and synthesizing these existing ideas is an exercise we call Lightning Demos. Your team will take turns giving three-minute tours of their favorite solutions: from other products, from different domains, and from within your own company. This exercise is about finding raw materials, not about copying your competitors. We’ve found limited benefit in looking at products from the same industry. Time and time again, the ideas that spark the best solutions come from similar problems in different environments.
Blue Bottle wanted to help customers find coffee they’d love. But coffee beans all look alike, so photos wouldn’t be helpful. To find useful solutions, the team did Lightning Demos of websites selling everything from clothes to wine, looking for ways to describe sensory details such as flavor, aroma, and texture.
In the end, it was a chocolate-bar wrapper that provided the most useful idea. Tcho is a chocolate manufacturer in Berkeley, California. Printed on the wrapper of every Tcho bar is a simple flavor wheel with just six words: Bright, Fruity, Floral, Earthy, Nutty, and Chocolatey. When Blue Bottle looked at that wheel, they got inspired, and when we sketched, someone repurposed the idea as a simple flavor vocabulary for describing Blue Bottle’s coffee beans:
In Friday’s test, and later, at the new online store, customers loved the simple descriptions. It’s a prime example of finding inspiration outside your domain (and yet another reason to be grateful for chocolate).
Sometimes, the best way to broaden your search is to look inside your own organization. Great solutions often come along at the wrong time, and the sprint can be a perfect opportunity to rejuvenate them. Also look for ideas that are in progress but unfinished—and even old ideas that have been abandoned. In Savioke’s sprint, an unfinished design for the robot’s eyes became the heart of the Relay’s personality.
Savioke wanted to avoid the expectations of fictional robots who can carry on conversations and think independently. Both Steve, the CEO, and Adrian, the head designer, were convinced they could convey the right feeling with just a pair of eyes. So on Tuesday morning of our sprint with Savioke, we spent an hour looking at eyes. We reviewed the eyes of robots in movies. We reviewed the eyes of animated characters. One stood out: a nontalking cartoon creature from the Japanese movie My Neighbor Totoro, who conveyed a peaceful expression with a placid, slow-moving gaze.
But the eyes that won our hearts had been there all along. Adrian showed us a variety of styles he had created long before the sprint. One design had the peaceful manner of the Totoro creature, combined with a simple visual style that perfectly fit the robot’s aesthetic. In Friday’s test, those simple blinking eyes conveyed a friendly personality, without promising conversation.
Like Savioke, you and your team should look far afield and close to home in your search for existing solutions. If you do, you’re sure to uncover surprising and useful ideas.
Lightning Demos are pretty informal. Here’s how they work:
Make a list
Ask everyone on your team to come up with a list of products or services to review for inspiring solutions. (Coming up with these lists on the spot is easier than it sounds—but if you like, you can assign it as homework on Monday night.) Remind people to think outside of your industry or field, and to consider inspiration from within the company. In Flatiron’s sprint, the team looked at products in the medical field, such as websites for clinical trials and software that analyzed DNA. But they also looked at similar problems in different fields. They looked at tools for filtering email, task apps that sorted to-dos, management software that sorted projects and deadlines, and even the way airlines let passengers configure flight notifications. Finally, they looked at experimental projects that their own engineers had built, but not quite finished.
Everything you review should contain something good you can learn from. It’s not helpful to review crummy products. After a few minutes of thinking, everyone should narrow down to his or her top one or two products. Write the collected list on the whiteboard. It’s time to begin the demos.
Give three-minute demos
One at a time, the person who suggested each product gives a tour—showing the whole team what’s so cool about it. It’s a good idea to keep a timer going: Each tour should be around three minutes long. (In case you’re wondering, yes, you can use laptops, phones, and other devices for these tours. We like to connect them to a big screen so everyone can easily see.)
Capture big ideas as you go
Your three-minute Lightning Demos will go by quickly, and you don’t want to rely on short-term memory to keep track of all the good ideas. Remember the “Always be capturing” mantra and take notes on the whiteboard as you go. Start by asking the person who’s giving the tour, “What’s the big idea here that might be useful?” Then make a quick drawing of that inspiring component, write a simple headline above it, and note the source underneath.
For example, someone from the Flatiron team thought it would be interesting to see how comments worked in Google spreadsheets, in case we wanted to add commenting to our clinical trial matching tool. We quickly demonstrated the software, wrote the big idea (“Inline Commenting”), and jotted a quick drawing:
These notes are just to jog your memory later in the day, so they don’t have to be fancy or detailed. We usually end up with a whiteboard full of ideas, such as this one from Flatiron’s sprint:
Flatiron found plenty of interesting elements, but in the end they discarded most of them. If you record on the whiteboard as you go, you don’t have to decide which ideas should be discarded and which are worth remixing and improving. You can figure that out later, when you sketch—a much more efficient use of your energy. For now, don’t make decisions and don’t debate. Just capture anything that might be useful.
By the end of your Lightning Demos, you should have a whiteboard full of ten to twenty ideas. That’s enough to make sure you’ve captured each person’s best inspiration—but it’s a small enough set that you won’t be overwhelmed when you start to sketch. Like the ideas on Flatiron’s list, most won’t turn into anything, but one or two may inspire a great solution. If you look hard enough, you can usually find your blotting paper.
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When you combine the ideas you just captured with Monday’s map, your sprint questions, and your How Might We notes, you’ve got a wealth of raw material. In the afternoon, you’ll turn that raw material into solutions. But before you do, you need to form a quick strategy. Should your team split up to tackle different parts of the problem, or should you all focus on the same spot?
Blue Bottle Coffee had one specific target for their sprint: helping customers choose beans. But there were several smaller pieces of the website that were involved: the home page, the list of coffees, and the shopping cart. Without a plan, every person in the sprint might sketch the same part—say, the home page—leaving Blue Bottle without enough ideas for a whole prototype. So they divided up. Each person picked a spot, then the team checked the distribution on the map (page 102).
As you can see, the distribution wasn’t even, but the team was spread out enough to ensure there would be at least a couple of solutions for each important part.
Should you divide the problem? Take a good look at your map and have a quick team discussion. If you’ve picked a super-focused target, it might be fine to skip assignments and have the whole team swarm the same part of your problem. If there are several key pieces to cover, you should divide up.
If you do decide to divide up, the easiest approach is to ask each person to write down the part he or she is most interested in. Then go around the room and mark each person’s name next to the piece of the map that person wants to tackle in the sketches. If you end up with too many people on one spot and not enough on another, ask for volunteers to switch.
Once each person knows his or her assignment, it’s time to get yourself some lunch. You’ll need energy for the afternoon, because after all of your preparation, you’re finally going to get a chance to sketch some solutions.
Wait a minute. Did somebody say “sketch”?
