Creativity Workshops


Creativity workshops are an outgrowth of the drive for innovative products discussed earlier. Use them when a large number of stakeholders are involved in the invention process. Creativity workshops are also appropriate when you want stakeholders to see the advantages of developing an innovative product, as opposed to just rebuilding the same old system.

There is a growing acknowledgment that creative thinking early in the requirements activities is a powerful way of helping people to think past the current way of doing things. When stakeholders free themselves from the status quo, they can invent new and undreamed-of ideas.

When Eurocontrol decided to investigate the requirements for the air traffic control systems of the future, the organization found it difficult to think past how things are done now. With our colleague Neil Maiden from City University, we developed requirements creativity workshops as a way of encouraging air traffic controllers, pilots, airline representatives, and systems developers to think of innovative requirements for the future. The outcome of the workshops was the invention of several hundred innovative requirements. Participants agreed that the requirements coming from the workshops made a significant, almost startling difference to the final air traffic product. They also agreed that these requirements would never have seen the light of day except for the creativity workshops.

The best time to run a creativity workshop is close to the beginning of the project, before people become too attached to their ideas for a solution. At the same time, it is necessary to have some structure on which to hang the new ideas, because otherwise everything is too intangible and hard to relate to the problem at hand. Here is our technique for planning and running the creative workshops:

  1. Set the scope of the investigation, identify the project goals, and run a first-cut stakeholder analysis.

  2. Partition the scope of the investigation, using business events to lead to business use cases.

  3. Plan the workshop, using a variety of creativity techniques designed to help people to be inventive and to discover new ideas.

  4. Run the workshop and use the business events as a focus for clustering the new ideas.

  5. After the workshop, summarize the results and feed them back to participants.

Creativity techniques are designed to encourage people to innovate. For example, one technique is to ask an expert in an unrelated field to talk about his work to the group. The group then uses analogies from the unrelated field to trigger ideas for their own field of study. As experts unrelated to air traffic, we have heard from a Hollywood screenwriter, a musician, a textile designer, and a chef. Peter Gordon, the chef at the Providores Restaurant in London, was extremely popular. His talk on ingredients was useful to the air traffic controllers, and his cooking lunch for the workshop participants was a distinct bonus. Susan Rogers, the screenwriter, used an example from the film Alien to illustrate how a script is used as the basis for designing and filming a scene. She showed us how the director annotates the script with ideas and uses storyboards as a way of capturing new ideas. Following this presentation, the stakeholders (mostly air traffic controllers) used the film storyboarding techniques as an inspiration and source of ideas for building huge storyboards for the project in their own domain.

Other creativity techniques include combining seemingly disparate ideas to create a new idea. Perhaps the one we are most grateful for happened when Gutenberg combined the coin stamp and the wine press to make a printing press. More recentlyand we make no claim as to the virtue of the result the telephone and the camera have been combined. Perhaps of more practicality is the combination of a GPS-equipped phone and spoken driving or walking directions.

Transformational thinking involves putting an idea into another domain. For example, eBay transformed the traditional auction sale into a Web-based auction sale. Constraint removal is the methodical removal of constraints to explore the possibilities for generating new, different, and potentially useful ideas.

Maiden, Neil, Sharon Manning, Suzanne Robertson, and John Greenwood. Integrating Creativity Workshops into Requirements Processes. Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems Conference, Cambridge, Mass., 2004.


The ideas from the creativity sessions for air traffic controllers were triggered by practices and ideas from another discipline, the inspiration that comes from listening to expert people, the storyboard as a way of generating new ideas, and use of all the ideas as a springboard to leap past the existing and the obvious.

We continue to run the workshops in many different domains and to experiment with new techniques. Many of these techniques make use of the principles of brainstorming.




Mastering the Requirements Process
Mastering the Requirements Process (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0321419499
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 371

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