Crazy Eights
“A rapid ideation exercise from Google Ventures' Design Sprint.”
You need concepts fast. The team keeps gravitating to the same safe ideas. Nobody's pushing past their first thought.
Crazy Eights is Google Ventures' rapid sketching exercise from the Design Sprint. You fold paper into eight sections and sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. The severe time constraint prevents overthinking and self-censorship, forcing intuitive responses over polished concepts.
Ideas six through eight are where it gets interesting — they only emerge after the obvious solutions are exhausted, which is the whole point. The technique works for interface concepts, business models, or any challenge requiring creative options. It's the right warm-up when a team needs volume and variety before converging.
Follow it with structured evaluation so good ideas don't vanish in the pile. It fails when the problem is analytical rather than generative, or when nobody commits to doing anything with the output — eight sketches that stay on the table are just doodles.
Your next move: When did you last let yourself sketch something deliberately bad — or has every idea you've put on paper this quarter been pre-edited for plausibility?
“I've been told to 'be more innovative' and I don't know what that means.”