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At the beginning of the project, convene a brain dump (see Figure 2.1). Get what’s in everyone’s heads out on the table. Whether it’s real-time, face-to-face, in front of a whiteboard, or asynchronously across offices on a wiki, talk through assumptions, expectations, closely-held beliefs, perspectives, and hypotheses. Contradictions are inevitable and should even be encouraged. The point is not establishing consensus; it’s to surface what’s implicit. By saying it aloud and writing it down, the issues leave the group specifically and enter an external, neutral space.

FIGURE 2.1 Capture everything that everyone thinks they know so that it’s not stuck in their heads.

It’s also not about being right or wrong; I encourage you to anonymize all the input so that people don’t feel sheepish about expressing themselves. I wouldn’t even go back and validate the brain dump against the resulting data. The objective is to shake up what is in your mind and free you to see new things. Think about it as a transitional ritual of unburdening, like men emptying their pockets of keys, change, and wallet as soon as they return home (Figure 2.2).

FIGURE 2.2 Transitional rituals are actions we take to remind ourselves that we are shifting from one mode of being to another.

TIP WORK IT OUT

Chicago’s DD+D (who bill themselves as “a theater-based design team”) offers a Design Empathy workshop. Using improv and other theater techniques, this workshop “helps designers to check in and acknowledge their own biases and to explore assumptions before going out and doing research.”²