Crazy 8s: unleashing eight ideas in eight minutes

In innovation seminars or design workshops, teams often face a problem: how to break through inertia and generate a large number of different ideas within a limited time. Crazy 8s is a simple yet extremely efficient solution. Originating from Google Ventures' Design Sprint process, it gets its name from the goal of "sketching eight different ideas in eight minutes." The method is simple: each participant needs only a sheet of paper folded into eight sections. Under the pressure of a countdown, they must quickly sketch one idea per minute, totaling eight. This compact rhythm forces the brain to shed perfectionism and stimulate intuition and subconscious inspiration, thereby producing more diverse ideas than usual.

Executing Crazy 8s is very straightforward. First, define a clear challenge question, summarized in one sentence, such as "How can we make the customer's waiting experience more pleasant?" Second, everyone prepares a sheet of paper folded into eight grids or a corresponding template. Then, start an eight-minute timer, sketching one idea every minute. These can be sketches or simple text. During the process, pausing to modify is not allowed; the emphasis is on speed rather than quality. After the eight minutes are up, everyone presents their ideas, and the team then collects, categorizes, discusses, and filters them.

The reason Crazy 8s is effective is that it uses time pressure and quantity requirements to break the team's common cognitive inertia. People usually tend to linger on the first few seemingly safe ideas, which are often the most mediocre ones. As the minutes tick by, participants are forced to push further and explore possibilities they wouldn't usually think of. Psychological research shows that when thinking is forced to operate at high speed, association networks are more broadly activated, generating unexpected combinations and novel connections. This method is particularly suitable for the early stages of innovation where a large amount of divergent creativity is needed.

In actual work, Crazy 8s is widely used for product concept development, service innovation, customer journey optimization, and the rapid generation of marketing ideas. For instance, when helping a manufacturing client design a digital customer portal, we set the challenge as "How to enable customers to find the information they need within 10 seconds of logging in" and asked every innovation participant to complete Crazy 8s independently. In just eight minutes, the table was piled with hundreds of ideas, including personalized dashboards, smart search suggestions, automatic recommendations based on customer identity, voice command queries, and more. Subsequently, the team categorized and evaluated these ideas, quickly screening out the most potential solutions to enter the prototyping phase. In this process, Crazy 8s did not provide the final answer, but it significantly increased the quantity and diversity of ideas, providing rich raw material for subsequent innovation.

Crazy 8s proves that innovation does not always require long deliberation. Many good ideas often burst forth in the first few minutes. Through this rapid divergent exercise, teams can collect a massive and diverse range of thoughts, which can then be screened and polished in later stages. For any team looking to break a mental deadlock and quickly explore multiple possibilities, Crazy 8s is a tool worth using at any time.