Design Thinking: Brainstorming vs. Design Sprints

It's easy to confuse design sprints and brainstorming sessions if you're unfamiliar with the nuances that make them unique. Though there is some overlap in purpose and activity, the two approaches are quite different and can provide divergent results. For organizations going through a change process or working to solve major challenges, choosing the right problem-solving rubric can make the difference between a creative breakthrough and a frustrating waste of time. Here are some of the key distinctions that will help your organization collaboratively generate new ideas and achieve your goals. Brainstorming Developed as a means of increasing the output of creative ideas by advertisers, brainstorming was built on four main principles:

• Generate as many ideas as possible
• Prioritize unconventional ideas
• Combine ideas to arrive at the best solution
• Do not criticize ideas during sessions
• Reliance on structure: The regimented structure of design sprints keeps all participants on task to methodically work through the problem, as opposed to brainstorming's unfocused ideation.
• Definition of the problem: The early stages of a design sprint ensure participants are aligned in identifying, understanding, and resolving a singular, solvable problem.
• Focus on feedback-driven refinement : Rapid prototyping allows for a semi-finished solution to be tested with real users at the end of the five-day process, allowing for direct, immediate feedback and iterative improvements earlier in the process.
• Greater time investment: While time intensive, design sprints front-load the effort required to develop solutions, taking a full five days to go from problem-identification to solution-development to user testing.

Design sprints improve upon brainstorming in a number of ways, one of which is by minimizing brainstorming's dependence on combining less-relevant ideas to produce successful ideas. Another is by providing a way to quickly develop and test solutions through rapid prototyping, which has less overall investment than traditional methods. What design sprints do is provide the guidance lacking in brainstorming to advance it towards a more cohesive problem-solving strategy.