How might we...?
HOW MIGHT WE?
What's the most powerful question you can ask? When it comes to innovation and experience design, I think it might just be "How might we...?" (often shortened to HMW). I talked about this at the Supporter Experience Summit and I keep finding more applications for it in my work! I'm going to tell you a little more about what HMWs are and share three ways you can start using them straight away.
HMW questions are used a lot in design-thinking and other related disciplines. Every single word in this short format is playing a role in making it so powerful:
HOW = possible
MIGHT = options
WE = collaborative
When you ask "How might we better share impact to our regular givers?" or "How might we evolve the fundraising culture of our organisation?" you are genuinely opening your team up to exploration and possibility; you are not prescribing a solution before your creative juices have even started flowing.
Here are three ways to put it into practice straight away:
Set a problem statement/goal
When you are working on a problem it is usually necessary to define it, so it can be shared with team members and other stakeholders. You probably know the ultimate consequence of the problem, e.g. retention of regular givers is dropping. But problems that big are overwhelming to deal with and need to be broken down.
It would then be easy to just list all of the contributing factors in a very negative way: "our thank yous aren't sent quickly enough", "our email programme is rubbish", "we don't know enough about our donor's motivations"...
But then you've put everyone in a negative frame of mind from the off. You'll probably just end up with the same circular conversations about things outside of your control: "but the brand isn't strong enough", "well we'll never be able to fix that until we get a new CRM", "the senior leadership don't get fundraising"... is any of this sounding familiar?
If you reframe each of those contributing factors as HMWs though, they are easier to compare. This helps you can work out which would be most impactful to start working on first. And they are positively framed, so you're not starting your project or conversation from the same point of frustration:
How might we thank donors more quickly?
How might we increase click-through rates on our emails?
How might we get to know our supporters better?
Put these problem statements in priority order, then start working through them to unearth solutions. You might want to work in sprint cycles to give you hyper-focus on solving one problem at a time.
Ideation
Once you have a primary problem identified and articulated as "How Might We" you have a fantastic springboard for ideation. Depending on the complexity of the problem you might be able to break it down to create different stimuli for ideation.
In the example above for instance - "How might we thank donors more quickly?" - you might want to separate "how might we thank donors" and "how might we increase speed" into two different rounds of idea generation. That would give you more things to work with and explore in unexpected combinations.
Bonus tips on ideation:
Mix individual and collaborative work - giving everyone time to come up with their own ideas, before sharing and building on each others', accommodates different working styles and stops the most senior or vocal person's ideas from being the only ones that shine through.
Use Post-Its - it's a cliche but it works for a reason; they force us to be concise, they are small so not so hard to discard and they can be moved around and clustered together. Remember, one idea per Post-It!
Plot your ideas against a criteria. A 2x2, ease vs impact matrix is a fav of mine but you can set your own. From our example, for instance, you might plot ideas on a 2x2 impact vs speed matrix instead.
Vote to help narrow them down. Use dots to do this if you've been using post-its.
Take and share notes
This is possibly my favourite way to use HMWs, it can be used in conjunction with the other two or on it’s own... I came across it from Sprint, the blueprint for the design sprint problem-solving format. On the first day of a design sprint you interview a bunch of internal stakeholders who could input to your problem in an exercise called "ask the experts". And rather than traditional notes you capture all the key points on post-it's, as "how might we"s (writing HMW in the top of each post-it).
So imagine we're interviewing Jess from the supporter services team in relation to our example of speeding up thank yous. Typically you might
have written:
CRM functionality limited
Fundraising team draft thank you content last minute
Workload sporadic
Complaints can suck energy
Understaffed
But if you had been taking these notes as HMWs you'd get:
HMW maximise the CRM functionality?
HMW build thank you copy into fundraising team work flows?
HMW mitigate the up and down of workloads?
HMW reduce risk of complaints lowering morale?
HMW increase staff retention in the supporter services team?
Because these are all in the same format it is easier to rank them and see which would be most impactful to work on first. Plus, because they are all positively framed statements you can start ideating on them straight away.
I hope you can see from these examples how these three little words might help you get unstuck. We can train you and your team on this and other problem-solving techniques, or facilitate a design sprint for you to see it in action. Get in touch for a no obligations chat to find out more!