I was tasked with turning some 80s office space, mahogany boardroom and all, into a collaborative hub for our project team. Volunteers from across the teams showed up ready to redesign it, assigning spaces to groups based on their own fixed notions of who should work where, no user-centered thinking in sight; they carried unexamined assumptions about layouts and usage, blind to actual work patterns. That preconceived certainty risked locking the design into place before we even started, so I needed a way to surface and set aside those mental models right away.
The Purge Masquerading as Brainstorm
I started with a brainstorming activity: dump every idea they had on the board, no holding back; I timed them to keep the pace brisk. They scribbled fast, laying out their visions for layouts and team assignments. Then I told them the truth: forget everything you just wrote down, because we're starting fresh with a user-centered process. It took a second to land, but they laughed it off and got to work.
The Turn to How Work Actually Happens
From there, we toured the space together; we mapped the daily tasks across project teams, probed how people flow through their activities, what setups enable real output, even how external partners fit when they join. Questions started crossing silos, one team asking another about their rhythms, how to configure for maximum use. In the end, no one revisited those original stickies; those preconceived ideas just vanished.
The Trust That Made It Work
I’ll be honest, getting them to brainstorm and then purging their ideas was a risk; I was nervous. But the participants were colleagues we had been working with for months, and that trust made the radical move possible.
Here’s what I learned:
If you know people are coming in with preconceptions, plan an activity that lets them externalize those ideas early, before they start defending them or holding them too closely.
Make the “purge” an explicit step. Tell them why you’re setting those ideas aside, and what process you’ll follow instead.
Only do this when there is enough trust in the room for people to feel safe letting go of their darlings.
When preconceptions fill the room before you even start, no amount of activities will shift the group into real user-centered work; those fixed ideas linger unless you give them a deliberate way out. The explicit dump and reset created that space here, turning individual assumptions into shared evidence and flow. Next time you sense the air thick with unexamined certainty, try surfacing it early so the actual design can breathe.
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