Ask your customers for ideas
Originally published May 2017)
On Friday, April 28 SeriouslyCreative was in Manhattan to lead a half-day brainstorming for our client, the New York Academy of Science (NYAS), a 200 year old organization with more than 20,000 members in over 100 countries that is dedicated to advancing scientific research and knowledge, supporting scientific literacy, and promoting the resolution of society’s global challenges through science-based solutions. This is the kind of thing we often do but, unlike the majority of the ideation and brainstormings we lead for clients, this one didn’t include our client’s staff as active participants. Instead, the nearly 30 participants at the session were made up of a diverse group of members of the academy — scientists, educators, and communicators, the majority of which were immigrants to the United States — who were asked to develop ideas for NYAS’ challenge: — How might the New York Academy of Sciences help the immigrant scientific community in the U.S. be successful in their careers?.
The decision that NYAS’ staff members should be observers instead of participants at the brainstorming session was a deliberate and well thought out requirement by our client. Instead of starting by generating ideas from within the organization, NYAS understood that a better starting point would be to invite the exact people they wanted to serve and have them provide both perspective and ideas. During the brainstorming session, we worked with four diverse teams of participants to carefully guide them through a process proven to make ideation work. First, we got them to better understand the challenges of immigrant scientists by having the participants interview each other and reframe the original challenge statement. Once their focus area was defined, participants went through a series of rapid idea generation activities, supported with idea sparking exercises designed to push people “out of the box.” Finally, participants selected and developed their most promising ideas into a more defined concept through a process of convergence and idea prototyping.
The ideas generated by the participants were really great. But what’s more important is that these ideas came from the exact people for whom these solutions are intended to serve. We love doing these types of sessions and we think clients should too. By having your user (customer, recipient, client, etc) brainstorm, you gain a lot of insight into what is important to them and what they are thinking. By having them explore the issue and redefine the challenge, clients can rapidly learn new perspectives on the issue, understand what motivates action, and identity what root problems may be disguised under symptoms. Furthermore, the ideas generated by users provide a rich starting point for internal staff to start their own ideation session. We often convene clients and their staff to do a gallery review of ideas developed by users and have them reflect on the ideas, add to them, and launch off into developing totally new ideas that escaped the users.
One of the most gratifying and surprising benefits that our client’s value most from working with SeriouslyCreative is how we help them engage with their customers. Organizations spend too much time doing one way communications with customers through tone deaf marketing that sings the organizations praises or panders to their customers. Furthermore, when organizations take the time to “listen” it is often through focus groups and surveys that demand customers talk about what the organization thinks is important. But by asking customers to help you, to share ideas, and think with you they in turn feel valued and heard, ultimately becoming advocates for your business. And isn’t that something we all want from our customers after all?
(Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash)
