WORKSHOP FACILITATOR: DESIGN THINKING

design thinking workshop

My first encounter with the concept of Design Thinking was in my undergraduate New Product Development class. Many years into the workforce, design thinking is still a prominent framework that guide me throughout many complex and cross-functional projects.

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.

—TIM BROWN, EXECUTIVE CHAIR OF IDEO

In reality, not all projects embrace or set aside enough time for the design thinking process. When urgent timeline presses, team members tend to scramble without trying to understand the needs of the users. Therefore I proposed to facilitate a design thinking workshop for my team to refresh everyone’s memories about design thinking, and introduce new tools for their daily tasks.

WORKSHOP preperation

• Big tables where team member can huddle in groups

• Whiteboard, paper and sharpies

• Sticky notes for brainstorming

• Sticky dots for voting

• Coffee and light refreshments

WORKSHOP activities

The workshop was scheduled right before the holiday season, so I planned all of workshop activities around the “gift giving” experience, so that my team can leverage the take aways right after the workshop. Throughout the workshop, we covered the framework of design thinking with multiple examples and explored the following toolkits with fun activities:

• Journey Map (Actions and emotions throughout the gift giving journey), to explore the emotional roller coaster of gift giving

• 5 whys, to discover the reasons behind emotional low points of gift giving

• Diverge thinking with Brainstorm, to explore ideas to address the ultimate why

• Converge thinking with Vote, to identify the top ideas to work on

• Paper prototyping, to experiment rapid prototyping using simple sketches on paper, to get instant feedback for the next iteration

some interesting take-aways

Throughout the workshop activities, the team reached consensus that the most unpleasant part of the gift giving experience were not about the gift, but more about time management and misaligned expectation. So instead of focusing on giving the perfect gift, we came up with some creative solutions to improve the experience at root:

• Post-dated gift giving subscription services

• Giving “experiences” as a gift etc

The workshop was well received by the team. It provided a space for us to jump outside of our old thinking routine and exercise the insight muscles in the process of opportunity identification using practical hands-on approaches.