You and I may simply call them field trips.
Researchers often call them learning journeys.
Scientists give it the formal name of anthropology.
Whatever you want to call them, research, questioning, listening and analysing are all critical elements of the creative process.
If you can take these skills, and apply them by talking and engaging with people directly through an organised visit (aka field trip), you’ll have a sure-fire way to super-charge both your strategic and creative thinking.
The Goal of a Field Trip: To Understand People Better
Ranging from casual to formal, the basic objective of a field trip remains the same: to get a better understanding of human nature through observation and discovery.
That ‘understanding’ might be very specific. You are trying to understand an end users’ perspective on a specific issue. (Me, when I was asked to help sell black hair dye to Chinese women.)
It may also be general and open-ended, simply to stimulate people’s imagination and creativity. (Me, visiting our Asia offices to teach the value and process of creativity to our client leaders.)
Regardless of which type you prefer, field trips are great exercises to get both the body moving and the ideas flowing, if not help the participants (re-)connect to their own natural creative thinking.
Understand the Present to Predict the Future
In one of my first out-of-office excursions for a Design Thinking project, the facilitator said something I’ve always remembered about field trips.
If we can understand the present, we can help predict the future.
By going out into the world, we want to see the world as it is, not as we imagine it after reading reports and spreadsheets.
The best field trips involve people meeting other people. We can observe, ask and respond to what’s happening, in the moment, in their world, not ours. By tapping into our empathy, we can better understand …
Their behaviour, motivations and routines at a day-to-day level, and perhaps more so,
Their environment, situation and culture in which they live and interact with others (such as family, co-workers, etc.)
Both aspects uncover insights that we wouldn’t have learnt through second- or third-hand research. It also has a direct influence on busting our bias and assumptions.
That’s not to say that inter-connecting people with creative artwork can’t be just as inspiring.
As I mentioned a moment ago teaching creativity to my Asian colleagues, most had never considered how they generated creative ideas before I wandered nearby. In fact, some of the words used in creative philosophy weren’t even well-known words in Mandarian for example. By taking them out of the office and engaging them directly with art (thank you Shanghai Art Museum!) we were able to compare the work behaviours and office environment with the lives of living artists to realise how and when creativity flourishes.
At the same time, you can’t fully predict how a field trip will go. I’ve had several that started as a simple creative “refresher,” but then the participants began to spontaneously and unexpectedly brainstorm ideas. So, you also need to plan for flexibility.
What You Need for a Good Field Trip
You can set up field trips in a variety of ways, but the essentials are the same for all.
An Objective – What’s its specific purpose? What do you want at the end of the day or event? How do you want the participants to behave? What insights do you want them to extract from the excursion?
Here are three prior objectives for you to adapt to your own situation:
- Understand the priorities and purchase decisions people use – for and against – to buy a big-screen television for their home
- Learn first-hand what mothers choose in terms of baby powders, if not to break our assumptions on how and why they use it
- Witness for ourselves how mothers decide which drive-thru lanes to choose when approaching several fast-food restaurants on one intersection corner
An Organiser, who may also play Guide if not Facilitator – this person helps determine the visits, coordinate activities or logistics (such as meals, bio-breaks, transportation, sometimes accommodation). To save costs, one person could do all, but consider too the complexity of your field trip.
Depending upon the sites you visit, you may also need a wayfinder, docent or chaperone.
Participants – team members might range anywhere on the learning curve from highly educated to uninitiated. Again, because so many field trips quickly turn into brainstorms, I suggest you give some thought to Inviting the Right People to the Brainstorm.
Also, you will need to remind people this time is specific to the field trip. They are not there to check emails, schedule other work, etc.
An Agenda – I recommend one specific agenda to one specific situation, theme or hypothesis. The events of the trip might combine a variety of ideas, such as …
- Meetings with the target audiences, end users or their influencers (such as focus groups to at-home/in-office conversations).
- Site visits to locations where the audiences live, work or play (for instance, with baby powder, we visited playgrounds to meet and talk with moms)
- Short panel discussions with end users, experts, spokespeople, or professional ‘stimulators’
- Events, workshops, prototypes and best practices which educate and inform about the target audience and related topics.
- Reflection/Incubation time
- Brainstorm time
A quick note about locations. Remember, some places may need advanced warning you are coming (museums for instance), or even approvals (grocery stores by and large do not allow groups to wander the floor).
Supplies – these could be items the organiser brings (clipboards to write notes when standing), or a list of things for the participants to bring (their mobile phone to take photographs). More often than not, you may need to consider share drives for people to upload photos or notes, or even visual collaboration tools to help map and organise information and insights.
Some Added Thoughts on the Agenda
In addition to the points above, here’s some other thoughts as you plan or facilitate your agenda.
Make sure the items on your agenda are provocative. Don’t just go to places to confirm or justify your/the teams’ hypotheses. You are there as much to prove yourself right as you are to prove yourself wrong.
Get the agenda out a few days in advance. You aren’t going to read it to them, but you might explain the overall purpose – if not, to stimulate their subconscious mind, or prepare them to tap into and trust their intuition.
Go with an open mind. I start the day with this, to them, to myself. You will only be creative in the Open Mind.
Allow time for flexibility in your schedule. Running a field trip with rigor is a Closed Mind activity. Every moment doesn’t need to be a deep-dive creative debate. Leave some breathing space in your agenda. More so, I try to schedule ‘surprise events’ to keep participants on their toes.
Include time for reflection, discussion and debate. Moreover, you should plan for reflection as soon as possible to keep the learnings and knowledge fresh.
If well-organised, you’ll find a good field trip has residual effects beyond the tangible outcomes of quality information and a productive brainstorm. Your team can be transformed by the group experience, not to mention that field trips are fun, positive, stimulating and refreshing.
Here’s another good post on the importance of field trips for inspiring creativity: Field Trips: Get Your Creative Juices Flowing.
What other suggestions do you have to create a good, challenging field trip? Please add your thoughts and comments below.
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