Great ideas arrive on their own time. The design stroll is an easy framework for capturing them when they do.

Through all the changes I’ve seen in design throughout my career, there has been one constant: Everyone always wants you to go faster. To (maybe) quote Benjamin Franklin, “time is money”. A lot of designers are happy to trot out the old “Good/Fast/Cheap: Choose 2” diagram, bitterly complaining that no one ultimately picks “good” among the options. But failing to keep up is an existential threat. If you can’t design in time, then it’ll be an engineer, or a VP, or an AI agent that will.

As someone who reacts viscerally to bad design, I tend to lean a tad towards stubborn when it comes to quality. This means I spend altogether too much time thinking about ways to do design, at quality, quickly. It’s part of the reason I like design systems so much. And I’m while I’m the first person to raise an eyebrow at the latest productivity/ creativity/ diet/ life-hack, I’ve come to recognize something about how I work, and how I assume others do too. I’ve found that my next great idea has rarely arrived on time, or on theme, or during set “creative” opportunities. Instead, they’ve come when I’m knee deep in the work, inside those fabled flow states people talk about where you can “see the matrix” or whatever.

Being in that state, and having the idea, only to just shrug it off seemed ultimately annoying, and it got me thinking about how it might be possible to pause for a moment, and actually chase that idea down. How would you capture it, and manage your commitments? What steps would you take? Taking a page from Albert Hofmann, I decided to experiment on myself, and ran my very own personal “design stroll”, a playbook for designers to switch gears when the metaphorical lightbulb switched on. In the wake of some success, and a real sense of motivation, I sought to formalize the process, and in doing so I learned about exactly why I found it to be so effective.

It’s occurred to me that inside of every company, there’s probably someone with a great idea, just sitting on it, for lack of time, motivation, or really anything else. They’re the people who understand the problem best, but maybe they’ve never had the chance (or the permission) to solve it.

So if you’re a leader, a designer, or a leader of designers, this is my gift to you. The design stroll is a way to catch those great ideas, when they come, still keep your teams going, and motivate your best minds to keep bringing their best to the table. No need to thank me. Just mail me a cheque for 10%.

Born to… stroll?

The design world already has its go-to go-fast technique, the design sprint. It’s a 5-day, all-in workshop that pulls the best ideas a team has, focuses on one good one, and works to produce an artefact that can be tested with users by the sprint’s end. When done right, design sprints are an effective way to solve or ideate around a big decision, or even a new product.

Design sprints themselves are carefully designed, building on the principles set out by IDEO’s “Design Thinking” process. Significant effort by the architects of the sprint went to mitigating specific drawbacks of open-room brainstorming. Namely, that collective workshops suffer from groupthink, bias consensus, and give preference to the ideas of the most senior person in the room (conspicuously it’s not shocking that leaders like doing them). So the design sprint carves out time for individual ideation, anonymizes voting up ideas, and attempts to put everyone on the same page at the start, something Knapp et al call a “beginner’s mindset”.

But good intentions often suffer from bad practices. In reality, teams aren’t truly afforded the entire time free from commitments, so people drop in and out, often leaving specific team members with the required expertise (designers and or engineers) to manifest and test the artefacts. Success in articulating and defending ideas still hinge on your communication skills, likability, and role in the organization, and since “beginners” lack the nuance inherent in the problems you’re solving, they tend to favour ambitious solutions that an expert would disregard based on a deeper understanding (this is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, where non-experts tend to rate their expertise as greater than the experts rank themselves, ie: you don’t know what you don’t know).

Did your sprint come up with an app that would do everything? That means you’ve failed. This was just a team building exercise. If the design process could operate this quickly, wouldn’t we just sprint all the time?

By contrast the design stroll (a play on design sprint, if that was not abundantly clear) goes all in on two things; individual effort, and expertise. A design stroll is conducted by a single expert, and realizes an idea or solution from a single perspective. No compromises. That idea gets a shot at being fully expressed before the weight of the group comes to bear. The designer/solver gets their chance at being an auteur. What’s your Citizen Kane?

Stroll this way:

You can break the whole process down into a few phases;

1 Business as usual
2. The Lightbulb Moment
3. Making it real|
4. Show n’ Tell

Business as usual
Imagine that you’re a designer*, working on any given product, knocking things off a prioritized roadmap, doing your best to meld business needs with customer wants. You spend your days thinking about that product, and you understand it really well. Inevitably, (and maybe regrettably) you find that those thoughts aren’t confined to the 9–5. Your brain’s still working in the background when you’re on transit, grocery shopping, lying in bed at night.

The Lightbulb Moment
Pablo Picasso once said “Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working”. And so here, in the midst of your work, something will inevitably happen. You’ll have an idea. Maybe it’s a solution to a specific problem you’re facing, but it could also be an approach, enhancement, or even something that’s on the periphery of the work you do. It’s up to you to determine whether that idea’s worth pursuing. The best ideas for strolls are what you might call “inside the box” thinking. That doesn’t mean they’re boring, just that they’re constrained. It’s probably not the way to go about re-imagining fundamental value propositions, or blocking out the chapters for your first novel. The best strolls ideas are “what-if” moments that could actually happen.

Making it Real
Instead of putting this idea into a Notes page you’ll only dig up when you’re trying to think of the name of that restaurant where you had that parmesan ice cream sandwich that one time, you’re going to want to prove out your idea. You might not even know fully how you’ll bring it to life just yet, or all the edge cases that might present themselves, but you won’t know until you try. Herein is the hardest part of the entire design stroll– taking the time needed to flesh out your idea. More on this later.

You shouldn’t attempt anything you can’t bring to life in a few days. Remember that you’re proving the concept, not shipping it. You’re also working from your lone perspective, the director of your own little film. That doesn’t mean you can’t engage a colleague who’s an ace at prototyping, or a copywriting superstar to help you deliver the best version.

Your output could be a prototype, a vibe-coded demo, or even a well-structured storyboard. You’re bringing your idea to life so that others can understand it, and that’s really all that’s important.

Show n’ Tell
By now you’ve created something that does the job of demonstrating the general sense of your idea. Now it’s time to get it out into the world. You’ll have to show people not only how it works, but what value it has. A design crit is a great place to start. If the signals are good, find ways to socialize this with your cross functional partners. Get some feedback. Maybe hold off on emailing it to the CEO. The point of the work you’ve done is to start a conversation.

*really you don’t have to be a designer to do this, just anyone deeply involved and invested in your work.

The Man who Strolled the World

If you’re skeptical, you’re paying attention. Not everyone has the luxury of just stopping their work to chase down an idea. Before you go anywhere, you need permission. Timing’s important. So is managing your workload. It’s important to communicate. A stroll conversation should work like this:

Hey ______, I’ve got a great idea to _________________. Can I spend a few days putting something together to show you what I mean? (Then explain the design stroll, or link them to this article.)

That’s essentially how I pitched my very first “stroll” to my design leader at the time. I’d had a revelation about how we might allow our customers to both perceive and obtain value across our e-commerce platforms. Normally this is an idea I’d just shelve and grumble about, but not this time. Across a span of about four days I put my head down, declined any meetings I could, and put together a demo. I didn’t do it alone. I reviewed it with a skilled visual designer, I conscripted another– a prototyping ace– to help me bring things up to a very narrow, polished expression of my solution. I worked through a few takes of a video walkthrough (one which was going perfectly until the fire alarm went off). I sent the video around to a few sympathetic peers, and then sent it up the chain.

To be clear, it’s not like the business hit the emergency stop and pivoted to action on my idea. Nor did I expect it to. What it did do was frame important conversations about value initiatives for the year ahead, and helped to illustrate some important ideas and considerations so folks across functions could align. A few quarters have passed, and pulling things from my initial stroll concepts into my work. Better yet, I’m seeing the work referenced by other folks in the organization to bring planning documents to life.

Stroll Lotta Love

There are a number of real reasons why I think the design stroll is an effective tool. To explore why, you need to know a little bit about how good ideas form.

It was Thomas Edison who supposedly said “great ideas originate in the muscles”. With 1093 US patents to his name, Edison isn’t some gilded-age Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. He means that good ideas come from doing, and not from passively being struck with inspiration. The mental image of someone deep in thought being struck by inspiration, doesn’t really happen. This is the design stroll’s environment, in the muscles, waist deep in doing. That’s where ideas are found.

In his not-subtly named book, Where good ideas come from, Steven Johnson talks about the concept of the “long hunch”, where a vague idea about something slowly forms in someone’s mind over an extended period of time. Eventually through exposure to the problem itself, or the thoughts of others, those hunches combine into a great idea. For Johnson,

“Sustaining the slow hunch is less a matter of perspiration than of cultivation. You give the hunch enough nourishment to keep it growing, and plant it in fertile soil, where its roots can make new connections. And then you give it time to bloom.”(78)

Long hunches feed the design stroll. On the occasion when one hunch crashes into another and makes a good idea, it’s time for the design stroll to begin.

For Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, there are two (metaphorical) systems of thinking. System 1, which is automatic and intuitive, and System 2, which is more effortful and logical. When it comes to ideation, the two systems interact, taking System 1’s creative “aha” moments and putting them into practice in practical ways with System 2. Kahneman also stresses that System 1 thinking often relies on bias, and that fundamentally humans aren’t very good at being right when it comes to intuitive guesses, because we’re so easily swayed by things around us. Fast thinking (System 1) makes it easy for someone to focus on the wrong thing, with Kahneman suggesting that “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution”. (12)

Here’s where the stroll shines. A stroll lets you wait for the right time to take action. We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve been presented with a problem, and without much thinking, answered it, only to have our response quickly put on the scrap heap. “Yeah. We tried that, and no.” That was your overconfident System 1 talking. The design stroll gives System 1 and 2 time to battle it out, and that means that the solution is much higher quality than the one you’d have if you’d been thrown onto a team during a hackathon, etc.

Even the creators of the sprint, Jake Knapp & co. acknowledge the facts. In contemplating why (pre-sprint) brainstorming sessions weren’t working, they write:

“Individuals were still thinking up ideas the same ways they always had– while sitting at their desks, or waiting at a coffee shop, or taking a shower. Those individual ideas were better.” (Sprint, 2)

The stroll is centred around individual contribution, and it puts individual perspectives to the test before they get shot down. How many times have you had an idea that you just couldn’t communicate well enough to show folks the bigger picture? The stroll is laser-focused on cultivating these ideas so they aren’t lost, missed, or ignored.

Stroll with it

If you’re a design leader, or really anyone with any influence on process, you’d do well to carve out time for your experts to pounce on an idea when they have it. Someone on your team or in your organization probably has an amazing, well-thought out, money-making/saving, feasible idea that you haven’t heard about. Maybe because you haven’t asked. Make the time and space for ideas to be developed when they strike, and never let another good idea go unspoken again. Not every stroll will be the next big idea. Some might be small good ones.

Implementing strolls in your practice is really about making space in two ways, granting permission, and providing a forum to socialize what gets produced. Designers need to know that they can take time to explore solutions that aren’t on a roadmap. They need trust in the use of the time, and their teams need to make space to enable them, or even assist them if they need it. A good idea no one sees is about as loud as a tree falling in the forest with no one around. It’s important to create forums for stroll ideas to be both heard and understood, by those who can facilitate bringing them to life.

In the absolute worst case, you’ve lost a few productive hours and energized your team creatively. Giving permission to ideate outside of the confines of work, and listening –if nothing else–provides motivation and a sense of meaning in one’s work (in case you haven’t heard, there’s a bit of a crisis of meaning in design at the moment). Better motivation, better satisfaction, better productivity. It’s a win-win-win. So If you want to find good ideas, find those who are in the work, and when solutions come, let them out for a stroll.

Thanks for reading. Find me on LinkedIn.

Sources

Baker, D., Knapp, J., Zeratsky, J., Kowitz, B., & Pitts, S. (2021). Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. Penguin Books.

IDEO design thinking: IDEO: Design thinking. IDEO. (n.d.). https://designthinking.ideo.com/

Johnson, Steven. (2010). Where good ideas come from. Penguin Random House.

Kahneman, D. (2024). Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin Books.

Introducing the Design Stroll was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.