Creativity hacks
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Five Sketches™
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| Document your ideas whenever you have an idea, in any medium.Try journaling to recognise how creative you are. You can be as creative as you want in your personal journal. It’s a “safe space” that is yours alone. |
We keep all sketches, but they are not private. Instead, they become documentation for your Canadian SR&ED tax-credit program. A portion of the design work may be eligible for a tax credit from Canada Revenue Agency. Journaling is a good habit, but not required by Five Sketches™. |
| Escape to give yourself the opportunity to hear your ideas. Escape while running, doing housework, driving, showering, suntanning—any rote or mindless activity. A problem-solving brain goes through three phases: understanding, incubation, elaboration. Escape promotes incubation. |
Design participants do the initial round of sketching alone, in advance, which means you can do it outside your usual workplace. |
Invert the problem. Solve the opposite problem. For example, if you have to design a shopping-mall directory, ask: “What’s the worst that a mall directory could be?”
- It lies.
- It moves (changes location).
- It smells or stinks.
- It’s hidden.
Later, invert each of those ideas to find the desired attributes.
Inverting the problem is a “game” that leads to productive solutions by imposing an unusual constraint on the problem. |
Five Sketches™ changes your usual work setting by using music, food, sketching, and short story-telling to draw people out of their day-to-day routine. |
| Partner. Pairings force more new ideas to surface than on your own. Partner with people who have divergent skill sets. If you cannot find a partner, find a rival to compete with, as Michaelangelo did with Leonardo da Vinci. For great creative work to happen, seek out creative abrasion: some sort of tension between management and the team, or within the team, to encourage some interplay or competition. |
Five Sketches™ partners three or four people on a team. |
| Fail. Commit to taking risks to such an extent that you fail some of the time. If you’re not failing, you’re not doing anything sufficiently difficult. Fail in prototypes, in your journal (which is a “safe space” to fail), and so on. According to Berkun, Ernest Hemingway said: “The first draft of anything is shit.” |
Not every ideation-design project is an immediate, stellar success. Some design meetings uncover additional problem statements or the need for additional information that was overlooked during the pre-sketch preparation. |
| Plan for roadblocks. Politics are incredibly frustrating to creative people. Ask yourself why your last three ideas failed. Berkun listed the common reasons: You couldn’t convince the right people. You lost motivation. You ran out of time. Your team lead is an idiot. You gave up. Someone stole your idea. Commit to overcoming obstacles. If you are a manager, make these delegatable tasks. Recommendation: find out what people want, then try to give it to them. Take responsibility for your idea and how it will be perceived. |
Our ordered approach keeps Five Sketches™ organised. A flow chart helps the team decide when to use Five Sketches™, and who influences the product at which stage. The team conducts retrospectives, talk about the roadblocks, and continue to find ways to make the Five-Sketches™ method better for the individual team. |
Switch modes. Ideas can best be discovered:
- Visually.
- Verbally.
- Audibly.
- Physically.
If you are stuck, find a new way to represent the problem, using a different mode of communication. |
Sketching, with markers, on paper. For really complex problems: Lichert-scale ratings of different solutions. Affinity diagrams help with the nonlinear representation of ideas. Card sorting helps us physically move ideas around the space. Skits and short story-telling helps to clarify a scenario. Customers or user personas, and photos of their workplaces, bring users into the design process. |
Do something new/different/unusual. Go to a conference in a field outside your domain. Go to a part of the bookstore that you don’t normally go to—architecture? Chemistry? How would those disciplines approach problems similar to yours? Berkun took an improvisation (acting) course, and learned these rules:
- No half-assing. Give your all.
- No apologies.
- Make the other guy look good.
- Say “Yes, and…” instead of “No, but…”. This is the most important of these 4 rules, because you add something.
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In the re-sketching or mash-up stage, you “add something, and add something.” Sketching happens on paper with markers—not a developer’s usual medium. It asks you to come up with five different ideas, and makes room for “silly” or “impossible” ideas. |
