I remember the moment the insight about gen-z shoppers struck, as if it was yesterday: “She wants a treasure hunt! She enjoys the feeling that perhaps she’s the only one who could find that particular set of earrings.”

I was huddled with a fashionable finance executive in her mid-fifties (high heels and all!) observing customers inside a “hip youth boutique” when, after twenty minutes of silent observation, we realized that one young shopper had a completely different motive in visiting the store. Instantly, our minds went wild with possibilities of what the implications of this insight might mean for potential financial services products the business could bring to market.

The firm had been struggling to break through among gen-z customers, who exhibited low levels of contribution to employer savings funds, and had launched what was known as the “401z” project to reinvent their product offering.

We were seeking inspiration regarding how to appeal to a radically different demographic using a technique we called an inspiration hunt: our assignment was to “look for things that challenge our (the financial services org’s) definition of ‘delightful’” in the customer experience the boutique had crafted. This prompt helped us glean insights from many businesses and shops that already appealed to the demographic, and project meaning onto every part of the experience, specifically those surprising aspects that strike you as “wrong.”

In this case, we watched a young woman with purple hair rifling through a very poorly merchandized bin of products. She was literally on hands and knees, something that we both found almost embarrassing. But when we flipped the definition — when we deliberately challenged our interpretation of that observation — and asked, “Why would the boutique deliberately choose to leverage this merchandizing strategy to attract customers?” the realization popped: she wanted a treasure hunt! She enjoyed the feeling that perhaps she’s the only one who could find that particular set of earrings.

We emphasize looking for surprising elements that challenge one’s own definitions specifically because of the tendency to fail to see anything other than what we are expecting to see (known as “perceptual blindness,” or “inattentional blindness”). By deliberately challenging ourselves to attend to the things we’d otherwise overlook, dismiss, or deride, and entertain the possibility of imbuing them with meaning, we force ourselves to come face to face with unspoken assumptions that drive our thinking. It’s these assumptions — and the “associative barriers” they create — that all too often keep us from breakthroughs.

But it’s hard to identify one’s own assumptions. An Inspiration Hunt is a great way to reveal them.

Related: Explore Analogies (a write up of one of the most popular tools we teach at Stanford)

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