Distributed Scenario Brainstorm

What it is

A Distributed Scenario Brainstorm (DSB) is designed to generate creative opportunities for service innovation. This tool is particularly helpful to develop new ideas for services that are situation-specific, such as roadside recovery or holiday packages. These services are usually experienced at different moments and locations and as a result the experiences customers have are usually very dynamic, complex and subjective.

Coming up with innovative ideas for every possible situation and every possible customer can be extremely challenging. That’s when the DSB tool can help. During a DSB session participants use a set of cards depicting a wide range of service moments and personas. By randomly picking and combining different personas and service moments, we can focus on specific issues to generate lots of ideas.

A typical brainstorming session involves several rounds of mini-brainstorms around a set of moments and personas. Once participants come up with a good number of ideas (usually ten to fifteen), they select a new set of cards and start a new discussion. This helps to keep the creative momentum while exploring different scenarios within a service.

What you get

We always end up with a big pile of ideas! We also like to have multidisciplinary groups with people from different areas and backgrounds. We usually have sessions with a mix of service designers, end users and clients. This helps to increase the richness of the ideas and to get buy in from team members - after all, they came up with the ideas themselves!

Writing down the ideas

When you use it

As a divergent thinking tool, the DSB generates ideas in a rather unstructured way. For this reason, we usually use a DSB during the Discover and Generate phases of a project, where the main objective is to challenge existing paradigms and explore new ideas.