Exploring Playgrounds
Successful Business Design projects rely on fresh and surprising insights from research. Learn more about what kind of insights we are looking for and how we generate them.
Gabriele Bacher
Team Coach
Sabine Schoen
Team Coach
1. Purpose
Once you decide to explore a Playground when uncertainty is high, you set up a team for that Playground and start an exploration project. Every exploration project has a focus, set by the uncertainty you identified. Examples are:
Technological Playgrounds where the focus is on using new technologies — whether that's new digitalisation opportunities, new materials with better properties, new sources of energy supply, and so on.
Organisational Playgrounds where you focus on understanding your own organisation's structures and processes better, aimed at building a high-performing value chain for the future.
Market-driven Playgrounds to better understand existing and new customers, users, and competitors who stay — or become — important for your business going forward.
A Playground can also have a regulatory or a sustainability focus — it's important to be clear about it because it calls for different experts on your Project Team and a different research approach. The Project Team digs into various research areas based on the focus of the selected Playground.
2. Duration
6 weeks
3. Key Activities
Step 1: Setup — Secure a sponsor, sharpen the research frame in the Project Charter "Exploration", and assemble a team whose expertise matches the focus of the Playground. Depending on that focus, you can already prepare the ground: identify suitable interview partners and experts, and clarify how you will get hold of the data you need, internally or externally.
Step 2: Research — The team starts with the Kick-off Workshop: define the research questions, develop suitable methods for them, and distribute the tasks for conducting the research. Halfway through, a Review Workshop checks whether the findings are surprising enough and whether the frame still holds.
Step 3: Consolidate — Each research area is documented and reviewed, and the findings come together in the Consolidation Workshop.
The result of this phase is documented knowledge that can be used and digested in an Ideation Workshop.