BA Academy — self-paced module
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
Module 3 introduced workshops as an elicitation technique; Module 16 taught the fundamentals that make any meeting worth attending (agenda in advance, a deck for structure, recording with consent, a closing recap, understand-then-solution, quick wins). This module is the advanced course: the craft of designing and running innovation workshops: sessions whose job is not to gather requirements for a known solution, but to discover what the solution should be.
Why this is a BA elective: facilitation is the visible tip of every skill this course teaches. The BA who can hold a room (or a video call) full of executives, end users, and skeptics, and guide them to ideas none of them arrived with, is the BA clients ask for by name. And the innovation-workshop toolkit is remarkably transferable: pieces of it upgrade your discovery sessions, journey-mapping workshops (Module 19), retrospectives (Modules 10 and 17), and training (Module 13).
Throughout this module we will follow the source material's running example: a fictional hotel company, Aqua Blue, innovating toward effortless, delightful guest experiences.
Customer-centric innovation starts with an appreciation for your customers: their powers, pitfalls, passions, and possibilities. The temptation is to say "I already know what my customers want; let's build." Resist it: your customers ultimately decide whether the solution makes a difference in their lives, so involve them from the start.
The good news: you do not need a PhD researcher or the budget to hire one. Empathetic research is the process of getting to know your audience directly, like an anthropologist: walking in their shoes, talking with them, listening. It does not need to be a perfect scientific study. There is no right amount of discovery, only the right kind: empathize as much as you can within the time you have (a few weeks accomplishes a lot), and remember discovery never stops.
Think deliberately about which segments will teach you the most. Aqua Blue chose: loyal guests (ten or more nights), formerly loyal guests who have not booked in the past year (to learn why they left), and platinum-level loyalists of competitors' programs who have stayed at least once (to learn what better looks like). And, crucially, a second population of "customer": employees: call-center bookers, front-desk staff managing twenty-person check-in lines, housekeepers with daily guest contact. Understanding how staff serve guests, with all their struggles and saves, is half the innovation picture. (This mirrors Module 19's audience lesson: employee journeys shape customer journeys.)
You return with hundreds of notes, photos, and recordings. Now what?
Step 1: Capture and cluster insights. Read everything and hunt for: direct quotes carrying emotional or behavioral insight; recurring themes across actions, opinions, and pain points; blind spots (things you never suspected: these crack open new opportunities); and validation of prior hypotheses with evidence. Call out the gold visually, on a whiteboard or wall.
Step 2: Edit and refine patterns and themes, keeping your project charter in mind. For Aqua Blue's "effortless and delightful" goal, themes like speed, convenience, and feeling cared-for emerge quickly: that is the low-hanging fruit. The prize is the standout patterns: about two-thirds of travelers complained about packing (the hassle of packing right for weather and activities, refusing to check a bag, arriving under-equipped and having to shop). An insight like that is an ideation springboard nobody expected.
To bring insights to life, build archetypes: ageless, genderless representations of types of people, defined by behavior. The mischievous child is an archetype; in business contexts, so are "DIYers" (who prefer making things themselves) and "Window Shoppers" (whose joy is dreaming over possibilities rather than buying). An innovation archetype represents a market segment while amplifying a specific behavioral quality: Aqua Blue's guest archetypes included Proud Planners, Wistful Worriers, and Dauntless Delegators: names that instantly convey how each type approaches a trip.
How does this differ from a persona? Personas are fictionalized characters built mainly on demographics ("Ana, 30, front-desk associate, part-time dance instructor, night classes"). Archetypes have a bias toward the habits people exhibit when performing tasks: and for designing experiences, behavior beats demographics. If the goal is effortless arrival, "how Proud Planners approach the week before check-in" is more useful than Ana's age. Use personas when audience demographics drive decisions (Module 13's training personas); use archetypes when behavior does.
Before solving, put your innovation quest in the context of the future. Futurecasting is seeking out and sensing the trends, technologies, and forces that will change how we live 5, 10, 15, even 20 years out. It is how innovators identify game-changing solutions, and, just as practically, it creates a sense of urgency and a burning case for change (Kotter's step one, Module 15, by another road).
A futurecast is a mash-up of three ingredient types, culminating in a vision:
The culmination connects the dots into a compelling prediction. Aqua Blue's: hospitality will no longer begin at the hotel door or even at booking: brand loyalty will mean concierge-grade service every day, untethered from the property.
Habits of good futurecasters: consume diverse media (mix tech, science, business, art, and pop culture into your feed); collect experiences like it is a job (you will not design the future in a spreadsheet: go do interesting things); and talk with unusual suspects (branch beyond your comfortable circle to people with different expertise and opinions).
Integrating the futurecast: revisit your project's central "How Might We" question (the open, optimistic framing of your challenge: "How might we make guests' arrival effortless?") in light of what the futurecast revealed, and reconsider your team's V2MOM (Module 16) in the same light. If the future you foresee makes your current methods look small, that is the futurecast doing its job.
With research synthesized and a futurecast in hand, it is time for divergent thinking: creating choices. This is the moment to rally the whole innovation circle, including the decision-makers and influencers who have drifted from the effort, into a dedicated working session: the source material calls these Dare events: gatherings where you dare people to dream.
The temptation is to skip it: your core team has a groove; you could draft solutions and circulate them for review. Danger: bad idea. Do not innovate in a vacuum. Real change requires adoption across the organization, and your vision sticks when key stakeholders were part of creating it: this is co-creation, and it is the same lesson Patrick's expense-system failure taught in Module 16, run in the positive direction.
Live working sessions also deliver:
And plan on a series of working sessions rather than one grand event: ideation and development work better organically and iteratively.
Crafting the agenda is an art: icebreakers that signal this is not a typical day at the office; surprise guests to break group-think; a rhythm that alternates input (inspiration) with output (creation). If event planning is not your gift, lean on core-team members who love it, or engage outside facilitation: the investment of your colleagues' collective time deserves professional-grade design.
Logistics carry more weight than people expect: a space that fits movement, wall-posting, and small groups; ambiance (light, music, materials, refreshments) that signals creative permission; and a facilitator (quite possibly you) who is energetic, neutral about ideas but ruthless about process, comfortable with silence, and unafraid to redirect a senior executive. Those facilitator qualities are learnable, and every module of this course has been quietly building them.
Within the first minutes, signal that this meeting is creative, dynamic, and action-oriented: even your framing language matters (say "here are the rules of play," not "considerations for today's meeting"). The classic rules:
Warm the room with an exercise that produces laughter and loosens self-editing. The source material's favorite, Heroes and Villains: in pairs or trios, choose an animated hero or villain and write down a superpower they possess, a time they failed or were heartbroken, and how you would adapt one smartphone app to make their life better. Post the results on the wall. The takeaway message lands itself: we are here to invent solutions that make our customers feel like superheroes.
Duke Ellington composed his first original piece by riffing on the rhythm of an ice-cream soda machine. Whether you are aiming for incremental or breakthrough innovation, grease the wheels by immersing the team in insights, trends, and achievements from other arenas and asking how they apply to your challenge. Then share the futurecast: an ignite-style presentation (by an outside voice or your core team) that sets the context of what is changing in the world, and spark conversation around "what might happen if we wait..." and "in 15 years, our customers will want ______." Capture everything on stickies.
Bring out the archetypes. Ground the room in who they are inventing for: the Proud Planner's pre-trip rituals, the Wistful Worrier's packing anxiety. Ideas generated in the presence of vividly drawn customers stay tethered to reality.
A deliberately playful exercise: pick the disruptive companies the room admires (the "darlings"), and ask: how would they attack our challenge? How would a one-tap ride company design hotel check-in? How would a subscription-everything retailer run our donor program? Borrowed genius breaks local assumptions, and the answers are often one adaptation away from usable.
Channel the divergent energy into job stories (Module 3's craft): When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome]. Job stories frame the challenges your best ideas will solve, in solution-agnostic form that survives the workshop. A wall of dot-voted job stories is a magnificent workshop output: it is a backlog seed, an alignment artifact, and proof the day produced substance.
The link between big ideas and customer job stories is a solution people can react to, and that requires prototyping. A prototype is a first pass: a simple sketch of an idea. It does not have to be pretty, complete, or final. Its virtues:
You may know the minimum viable product (MVP): think big for the long term, small for the short term: the smallest first product that is a sound launching pad. The source material challenges you further: pursue the minimum lovable product (MLP): the minimum set of features needed to maximize love from a small population of core, ardent users. Design for your most loyal users and you are closer to immediate adoption, and happy users become an extension of your marketing. (Adoption-first thinking again: TAM's "perceived value," Module 15, with feelings.)
Expect resistance: phones come out, steps back are taken, someone laughs "I can't draw." Dissolve it fast: play five minutes of Pictionary to prove nobody needs to be Picasso to communicate. Then model the method with an app everyone knows: have the room shout out its main steps (sign up, load a payment card, set location, request, rate), and sketch each step as a rough screen on paper. Now teams do the same for their top job stories: paper prototypes, one screen per step, stick figures welcome.
Close with an idea pitch contest: each team presents its prototype in a tight format (the problem, the archetype it serves, the walk-through, the love it will earn), and the room prioritizes: dot voting, impact/effort placement (Module 5's grid, reborn), or leadership picks with stated reasons. Winners leave with owners and next steps: usually deeper validation research, a genuine build candidate for the backlog (Module 4 machinery), or both. An innovation workshop that ends without owners and next steps was a party, not a workshop.
Step back and notice what this module has assembled: research empathy (Module 3), synthesis (Modules 5 and 18), strategic framing (Modules 15 and 16), group psychology (Modules 13 and 16), and structured creativity: all orchestrated by one person with sticky notes and a plan. That person does not need the biggest title in the room; they need the best process. Facilitation is the most senior-looking work a junior person can legitimately do, and every technique here scales down gracefully: rules of play improve a requirements workshop; an icebreaker rescues a stiff UAT kickoff; darling disruptors unsticks a stale retrospective; paper prototypes settle a layout debate in minutes.
Volunteer to facilitate early and often. It is the fastest reputation-builder in the consulting toolkit.
8 questions. Answer at your own pace, then check the explanation for each.
Nice work. Review any question again using the menu (top right), or move on.