How to turn inspiration into stronger ideas

Before you ask people to create ideas, show them what's already been done.

It can be looking at existing products, services, and solutions that already solve the problem you're trying to solve. This not only stimulates creativity, it's also a smart creative habit, because it helps avoid the blank page syndrome.

And here's something I've noticed: people actually enjoy that moment. Taking a step back before creating, looking at what already exists, letting it spark something. The inspiration phase lands well. People appreciate it.

But then comes the gap. When the moment arrives to create their own solution, most participants don't go back to what they just saw. They look at the wall, nod, and create solutions without leveraging some of the smart ideas from the inspiration. It's one of the biggest missed opportunities in a creative session. All that inspiration, sitting there unused.

The Remix Sketch is built to close that gap. It forces participants to return to the inspiration and actively translate it into their own solution. Which means the ideas that come out are stronger, more grounded, and more likely to actually fit the problem.

When Dee Scarano shared this activity with me, it clicked immediately. Such a smart way to make sure a good inspiration phase doesn't go to waste.

The goal is to translate, not copy. Remix it for your own solution.

Dee invented this to replace some of the steps of the traditional Design Sprint, the note taking, the doodling, and the Crazy 8s, that she felt were getting in the way. She tried it once, it worked, and she never went back.

Dee Scarano is Vol. 04.

Most Create activities fail for the same reason: they ask people to generate ideas from a blank page. You run the inspiration phase, you build the reference wall, and then you hand everyone a blank piece of paper and tell them to be creative. The result is that most participants sketch whatever was already in their head, and the inspiration wall becomes wallpaper.

The Remix Sketch fixes that. It doesn't ask people to be creative from nothing. It asks them to look at something that already works and translate it into their own context.

Let's take an example to illustrate how it works. Imagine you're working on a food delivery service. During the Lightning Demos, someone picked Airbnb because they loved how it handles inspiration and discovery.

Ask participants to take a Lightning Demo, analyze it, and figure out the various ideas that make it interesting in addressing the problem they're working on.

Now ask participants to sketch how those ideas could apply to their own product or service. The question to answer: how might our food delivery service look if we applied Airbnb's approach? Think beautiful food photography, a favorites button so users can save dishes they love, a clean layout that makes browsing feel like exploring. Same principles, different context. That's the remix.

When they're done, ask them to pick a second Lightning Demo and repeat the exercise with a fresh sketch. Do that twice and something shifts. Participants stop staring at the blank page. They stop falling back on what they already know. They start building on ideas that already work, and the solutions that come out are stronger because of it.

Dee really created a brilliant activity. What I love about it is that it also solves a facilitation problem: you stop wondering whether participants actually do something with the inspiration phase, because the activity forces them to. The blank page stops being a threat. It becomes a remix canvas.

The Remix Sketch is a Create activity, the fourth phase of the 6C framework. But a workshop is six phases, and each one needs to land.

Designing a workshop means wrestling with three questions: where do I start, does the flow make sense, will it actually deliver?

The Workshop Deck guides you through all six phases of the 6C framework so your agenda has real structure from opening to close. And if the Remix Sketch isn't the right fit for your next workshop, there are more Create activities inside the app waiting for you, alongside battle-tested activities for every other phase, all proven by hundreds of facilitators in the room.