On November 18, 2021, my UCG Small Business Fellowship team members and I gathered at an unmarked warehouse building in Liberty Village. Our purpose? To complete a Team Design Challenge. Specifically, to come up with New Territory’s most irresistible sound-bite narrative for 2022. It was a high calling, but we were equipped to answer it.

We were all trained in the art of design thinking at the beginning of our journey with New Territory back in the summer of 2021. Design thinking is an iterative process that aims to develop innovative strategies and solutions by redefining the problem through understanding the user experience. During orientation we were introduced to design thinking tools, such as the Open Sort Method, which was the method we used to tackle our Team Design Challenge. To briefly explain the Open Sort Method, data is analyzed by laying out each data point onto a board and then grouping related data points to identify themes. The data points go through several rounds of rearrangements and eliminations to distill down to the key insights. These insights then fuel the generation of novel strategies or solutions to address the ‘problem’.

Due to COVID-19, my first-hand experience with the Open Sort Method was through digital post-it notes on a virtual whiteboard platform called Miro. Working on Miro had its benefits of easily copying and pasting coded data into post-its as well as being able to change colors and shapes to arrange data points into themes. But Miro wasn’t perfect. It was difficult to take a step back and see the big picture because the size of the board was limited by screen size and the words became too small to read. Also, working remotely was less conducive to collaboration and majority of my work was carried out independently.

So, while we were all individually capable of carrying out the design challenge, November was the first time we were all meeting face-to-face and working together in real time. On top of that, we were being photographed during our team challenge, which added another element to this unique experience. Understandably, it was a bit of an awkward start of learning to interact with people we’ve only met virtually up until now or for myself, learning to interact with people again. But with the power of snack and drinks, we came together as a team and found our groove soon enough. 

We began the challenge by writing down value propositions and outcomes of services offered by New Territory on (actual!) coloured post-its. Then we wrote down our thoughts on the client’s mindset. After getting our ideas down on paper, we (physically!) organized the post-it notes to parse out prominent themes, which allowed us to draw connections between the offered services and the client’s mindset. Initially, it felt like there was a disconnect between the post-it exercises and brainstorming a sound-bite, but I realized that only by understanding the value of the offered services as well as the client can we design a sound-bite that conveys what New Territory can deliver in a relevant way for clients. After all, what is the purpose of a sound-bite other than to promote and exemplify New Territory to clients?

Challenge completed. (Yay team!)