signups, completions, reviews), The Brand (ex. When introducing design thinking to beginners, it can be helpful to start with a simple, small-scale problem. Encourage Wild Ideas: Embrace the most out-of-the-box notions. By the end of this session, you and your team need to have settled on one solution. 2. That means all decision makers, technical leads, and even users (or their personas) must be represented. Understanding your end users needs is the first step towards innovationand thats the first message youll deliver in your Design Thinking workshop. As creative and exciting as our rapid-fire exercises are, they can leave our group with too many options, feeling swamped with potential solutions. It includes detailed logistics and clearly outline the intentions of the workshop and its desired outcomes. Who are we designing for? Based on what they observed in the previous activity, theyll fill in each quadrant with hypothetical (or direct) quotes and observations. Now well go through all the necessary steps for running a Design Thinking workshop. Third Rule of Design Thinking By the end, youll be ready to take your colleagues (or clients) through the entire Design Thinking process, equipping them with the tools they need to come up with innovative strategies and ideas. Through the idea vault process, we are narrowing our ideas down by asking a series of questions that relate to the feasibility of the design, and if it truly meets our Personas needs. Whiteboards help teams work through complex problems quickly. We're here to help with this collection of simple and effective team building activities! If teaching design thinking online, you may wish to. With general preparation out of the way, lets move on to phase two of our guide. Then lets go! Display the ground rules so that they're visible to everyone. Next, you need to create the optimal space for your workshop. In fact, there are plenty of free online workshop tools and meeting facilitation software you can, Team building activities can make all the difference when it comes to job satisfaction and organizational success. We focus on quantity, not quality and even half-baked ideas can be contributed to the discussion. We help businesses and brands succeed in the digital age. The cake will be eaten by several people with different tastes and so the challenge is, how do we ensure that everyone enjoys the birthday cake?. The current landscape is living research document that helps teams understand the feasibility and viability of their ideas by answering three critical questions: The information required to address these questions must be identified and collected prior to the workshop, as it will be discussed early in the day and referenced repeatedly throughout. Its worth suggesting to the team to use one piece of paper to represent each screen so that mistakes can be easily rectified and the journey is easy for everyone to follow.. If you are new to the world of workshop facilitation, you can apply some Design Thinking principles to the process itself. Ready to run a great workshop? Given the cross-functional nature of workshops, its often best to bring both executive summaries and raw data to workshops. Workshops can deliver on one or more of these objectives, depending on how long they run (and how well you prepare). With your objectives in mind, you can begin the planning process. In phase one, we went through some general pointers to consider when devising the workshop agenda. The five phases of Design Thinking, together with a quick explanation of each: Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Activityadding goals and pain-points (15 minutes): Ask participants to come up with goals and pain-points that relate to each step in the user journey. A good workshop facilitator must know how to get the word out within the company about. Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to make your life easier when you need to facilitate a meeting and lead workshops. 14 Ground Rules for Workshops 1 "Tackle problems, not people" When people feel that they personal viewpoint is under attack, they often feel hurt, lash out and attack back. Well yes, you must: Okay, but then "how can I be all of this at once?" When designing a workshop, or series of workshops for participants- you might suggest that their empathize stage involves designing a cake for someone outside of the workshop group. These five stages of design thinking form an effective process for problem-solving that is useful for any team wanting to create better solutions and products. A Design Thinking workshop should be largely activity-based; your participants need to be hands-on and engaged. If you only do one thing, be over-prepared! Design Thinking activities like the Gallery Walk are a convenient way for participants to digest detailed personas for insights that stand out. Another common error is to focus too heavily on presentations. Has everybody identified similar user needs, or is there lots of variety? It could be that you need to come up with a drastic strategy for regaining consumer trust after a PR disaster! A Design Thinking workshop is a collaborative session that is focused on the five phases of Design Thinking. All these benefits aside, Design Thinking workshops are incredibly fun and engaging. To give you a helping hand, weve put together a handy list of tools and best practices you can follow to make sure you and your workshop group are well prepared for your remote workshop session.. There are different types of ground rules. Design thinking is mostly celebrated as a set of step-by-step framework with tools incorporated within each step. It is often useful to suggest questions that participants might wish to use, and give examples of open questions. Weve divided this guide into two phases: how to plan and prepare for your Design Thinking workshop, followed by how to actually conduct the workshop. Chances are you have. We'll get into what these look like in practice a little later on, but first let's take a look at what they mean in theory and why they're important to the Design Thinking process . To conclude, I wanted to give you one last little tip as a bonus. No, the great thing about design thinking is its accessibility! Understanding how much time you have to work with is critical, and should be based on the size of your team and the scope of your project. This email is also your opportunity to assign any relevant pre-work, such as an ask to bring specific design inspirations. Well look at what to include in your workshop agenda in phase two of this guide a little further down. After reviewing decisions, end with a project roadmap to place the workshop in context. 1 day, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM) Add time for introductions, lunch and breaks (15 to 60 min) Identify Design Thinking steps for each block (ex. We have already mentioned that the people eating the cake would be called our end users. Important workshop ground rules require that everyone is engaged and on the same page. Heres a list of some of our favorites. Other members of the team have to guess which is the lie, Everyone has to say who they would invite onto their very own late-night talk show (Optional: What their first question to them would be, and why. If you are in charge of delivering a summary of the work done, start it immediately after the workshop, while the information is still fresh in your mind. As a group, youll now decide on a winning approach. This role can be filled by an in-house facilitator or an external or freelance facilitator who seeks to guide team members towards a common objective via the Design Thinking process., There are pros and cons to both internal and external facilitation., While an internal facilitator benefits from knowledge of the product and company and has established relationships with the team, they might struggle with objectivity, find it hard to build trust with the team, and avoid asking pointed questions., An external facilitator, on the other hand, is likely to remain detached from internal power struggles and find it easier to remain uninfluenced by existing relationships with the team. These might include: This phase can also include a brief retrospective. A Design Thinking workshop is a hands-on, activity-based session built around the Design Thinking process. Design thinking is a great methodology for bringing human-centered thinking to your team. Activityconduct user research (10 minutes): Normally, the empathise phase consists of conducting research with actual users. Make sure to include lots of activities, be realistic with your time planning, and allow plenty of time for breaks, spontaneity, free-flowing discussion, and creativity., Youll probably want to allow approximately one hour for each section of the workshop, with a generous slot dedicated to reflection and debriefing when the activities are over., To ensure maximum creativity, youll be going back to basics for your Design Thinking workshop. In our presentation at the beginning of the workshop, we outline some ways in which we might prototype our cake; As we are going for the simplest options in our workshop, we have suggested that the teams draw visual representations, adding possible recipe ingredients and flavors which they will then present to the end-user for testing. The facilitator is there to guide the process of deriving and checking the group's ground rules. Card sorting and mapping activities help teams prioritize the large quantities of competing goals common for human centered design. Prioritize actors and scenarios: Decide whose journey (the actor) and what journey (the scenario) you'll be mapping ahead of time. Select those that are appropriate to your group's needs. 9 Ground Rules for Mediation. Rich user personas are the hallmark of Design Thinking, and an excellent way to articulate detailed behavioral information about whom youre designing for. It might be helpful to write it out as a question or statement that can be easily referred back to. You may not teach the steps in a linear manner. With your agenda in place, you should now have a good idea of what youll need for the workshop. Doing this early can help ease tension between group members, increase contributions, and avoid groupthink. Someone might say, Lets bake a chocolate sponge cake, everyone likes chocolate, and a few other people nod and murmur in agreement. Join the 100,000+ facilitators using SessionLab. Take the time to be well prepared. Bake two small cupcake versions to taste-test with our end-user. But how can we make it easier for newbies to grasp the five stages of the design thinking process and see how they can apply them in their day-to-day work? In this article, we want to take the fear out of running Design Thinking workshops for those new to the methodology, and give you the knowledge, concrete steps, and tools youll need to run your first Design Thinking workshop, wowing your company or clients in the process. Whatever the challenge is that youre hoping to solve with the workshop, have it defined well in advance so that everyone is on the same page from the start. Safety is also an important factor., Activityreframe the problem as a how might we question (10 minutes): Now, participants will turn the users needs into a how might we question. Have you ever started a workshop where the participants are a little overwhelmed at what the buzzword design thinking means? Our cake design process seeks to provide the answer in an engaging, experiential format. Its important that the group understand the mindset and that they can reflect on real-life scenarios they could apply Design Thinking to. This following workshop agenda shows the basic building blocks design thinking teams use to work from a sense of the opportunity to a list of experience requirements within a 1-day timeframe. The introduction should consist of three main parts: Use a fun icebreaker to warm up the team and help them get to know each other a little better. Creating a solid agenda will ensure your team stays focused on the challenge and energy levels stay high throughout the day.. 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