Crazy Eights: How Sketching for 8×1 Minute Can Help You Be Creative

- How can you stop feeling stuck and quickly explore different ways to solve a problem you are facing? In this video we're gonna talk about the Crazy Eights which is a fun workshop exercise to quickly generate lots of ideas within eight minutes. Let me check if we really got eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Crazy Eights will help you to combinr the winning ideas into the best possible solution. I've used this exercise in more than 100 design sprints and workshops and is a great way to make people feel comfortable in sharing crazy ideas. And it's not only a great exercise for groups but also for yourself because of the short time frame.

And if you want to get super-duper extra creative there are some bonus tips and tricks in this video as well. Ready to get creative? Let's go! (upbeat music) Hi, I'm Arthur. And I'm the founder of Workshop Wednesday a new online community that helps you to run high energy and result-driven workshops so that you can take back control over your work.

Crazy Eights are a great workshop exercise to get any group of people into creative mode. They are often used in a design sprint but they're also great as a stand-alone exercise in any workshop where you want to try and solve a problem. The goal of this exercise is to generate as many ideas as possible within a short time frame.

So you go wide with a lot of ideas focusing on quantity and not quality. And then once you have those ideas then you'll go narrow again and the ideas that you have chosen, they can be worked out into a prototype or a more refined design or you could do even another round of rapid sketching and then fold again and pick those best ideas to continue with.

This exercise is in silence and it gives you, in a group of people, more room to think through your ideas and make them more concrete. And it's important to remind the participants of the workshop that the sketches don't need to be perfect. The purpose of this exercise is to generate a variety of ideas.

To put people at ease you could show some examples to set the expectations on the quality of the sketches. Okay let's say we are in real-life workshop and we're gonna do the Crazy Eights exercise. This is how I introduce the exercise, I talk about the what, the why, and how. So what are we going to do?

We're gonna do rapid iterations of the ideas that you have, we're going to add some time pressure, and don't worry if your sketches don't look perfect, they are just for yourself and you won't show them to anyone else. And why are we doing this? We want you to visualize the ideas that you have in your head, and we're gonna add some time pressure because then you can't make it perfect and it's also a great warm-up exercise for the next steps in our workshop.

And how does it work? With pen paper and together alone we're going to do this exercise in silence but with a group so together alone. And to do that we need a piece of paper, so grab a piece of paper and then fold it once, twice, three times like this. And when you unfold it, then you got eight squares or actually they are rectangles.

I will start this timer and then once it's started, you have 60 seconds per rectangle and the idea is that you focus on one part of your solution and ideally you start with the most important parts first. So if you are working on a digital product then you usually start with the main screen of the app and when the time is up, so the first 60 seconds is up then you move to the next cell.

What you can do, you can make a different version of the idea you're already working on or you could move to another part which you think is important for your solution. And that's it, remember quality over quantity, we want to generate lots of ideas because then it's easier to pick the best ones and to move forward with those.

Okay, let's start with a real example and for that we need a challenge to solve. And remember last week's video the how might we questions are a great way to frame your question in such a way that it becomes easier to come up with solutions. For the sake of the example let's write our how might we note.

How might we help Scrum Masters run the best possible workshops online? If you are running a design sprint then you already have a room full of ideas so you can take inspiration of that. If you use it as a stand-alone exercise, that's also okay then you just start from here. Okay, so let's start and see how it works.

(bright upbeat music) Okay, so time's up, eight minutes, goes by fast and as you can see, there is a lot of texts on my sketches. There are some drawings over here like a video or a small person, or here you can see some smileys and kind of a chart or some numbers over here, but most of it is text and that's actually because when creating products, then one of the most important parts in that is the text actually.

So as you can see here I already created maybe an a outline of a course which could be around mural, mural or maybe here what could be on a checklist if you want people to help prepare for the workshop. So that's a quick breakdown of how you could do that and as a next step you could now focus on the ideas that you like most and do another iteration on that or like I said you could start to make a small prototype, it could be a simple, maybe in this case a simple outline in Google Docs of what this checklist could look like and then start testing it with users because then you get feedback and then you know if it's actually a problem that or a solution actually that will help them, so that could be a next step.

Okay and then three bonus tips and tricks to get the most out of your Crazy Eights exercise. You already saw this timer it's an timer that I created, you can find a link down below and then you can use it yourself. There's 60 seconds per round. And this helps to keep the time box as a facilitator and still be able to participate yourself because you don't have to press play and pause every time now.

But of course auto timers will work as well but it's really important to have the timer. The one minute time constraint is the most important part of this exercise. By showing the timer visible, this can be with seconds, or it can also be something like a time timer clock where you see the arrows move, but it needs to be some kind of pressure in a comfortable way where they just keep moving and start drawing things on paper.

And the second tip is to use music and I'm part of a design sprint Slack Community, where there are some great tips about which song to use. So for example, here is a "Move On Up" Curtis Mayfield the extended edition version, so that's more than eight minutes, which is great. I personally like this Spotify playlist from FKJ which has some nice songs where you can relax on and then get into creative mode.

It's important to pick a song which the group likes, so you can also ask the group to make sure you're not playing something that gets them out of their creative mode. And the last tip is to make use of prompts, when you feel that people are getting stuck you can help the group by asking questions when moving to a next box or help them remind that the idea is to create quality over quantity and that is not the idea to be perfect.

There's a link in the description below for some prompts and questions which you can use to help people get unstuck. So they don't get into a creative block. That's it for now, if you like this video then please give it a thumbs up because then other people like you will find this video as well. Thank you for watching and see you in the next one.

Peace! (bright upbeat music)