IDEO.org Senior Editor Aaron Britt and the Rockefeller team take a brief pause from their fieldwork in Senegal for a synthesis session.

It’s been incredible so far embedding with the Waste Watchers here in Senegal and pitching in to understand how post-harvest losses affect both farmers and other key players in the value chain. 

1. Let’s Stay Together

After several days in a row in the field, it had been a while since the team had done the serious work of sitting down together in the same room and downloading all of our findings and insights. In the span of just two hours, the Post-its flew and I watched the team reconnect and come to some pretty exciting insights. It’s tempting to spend as much of your field visit as possible in the actual field. What I saw today, though, was the power of regrouping, sharing what you’ve learned, and exploring how a group of minds can make connections and devise hypotheses that a single one simply can’t on its own.

2. If You Build on It, They Will Come

I saw real teamwork today, each member of the squad building on what another had said. Stacy has a pretty staggering knack for getting visual and is one of the finer Post-it sketchers I’ve come across. But quickly enough Rafa was in there sketching on top of Stacy’s picture, with Shalu pushing the idea further still. It sounds pretty obvious, but one team member building on the work of another can be really powerful. And to foster that kind of exchange you need to check your ego at the door. No one on the team needed to have the right idea, and as soon as a better one came along, each was quick to build on that instead of clinging to the previous one. I walked away terrifically impressed at my team’s agility in brainstorming, capacity to follow its intuition, and readiness to abandon an idea as soon as a better, more compelling one came along.

3. Off the Walls

Spend a few weeks at IDEO.org and you’ll quickly acclimatize to Post-its cascading about hither and yon. But never had their great value hit home like today. Covering all walls in H.P.’s room as well as both sides of his bathroom’s door, our cache of ideas was suddenly very visual and very moveable. I think it’s this last point that really clarified the value of a million sticky notes. I watched my teammates undertake a highly energetic brand of synthesis that involved moving notes here and there; filling in user profiles with quotes and insights; building out matrixes of need and capacity; zipping between large Post-its and small. I think part of what impressed me was just how physical this brand of brainstorming and connection-making is. It certainly woke me up to how passive I have occasionally been during group sessions. I hereby resolve to be on the edge of my seat, and better yet, entirely out of it.