When life gives you Corona — make an infectious Design Thinking workshop online

I have chosen to take a positive view on the challenging Corona lock-down times we are in.

This will be the first of (hopefully) a number of blogs on the topic
Virtual Design Thinking workshops — how to make them infectious.

Pro’s and cons of digital workshops made after the workshop.

This is a huge learning opportunity. For years we have talked about digital solutions to global and distributed teams, but we have not actually really tested it to the limits. Now is our chance.

I have participated in a huge number of Skype meetings, and each and every one of them have confirmed to me, that it is difficult to get the a good feeling of working together, and achieving the results that we strive for when we are not in the same room.

However, digital tools are maturing fast, and in a time where we, at least here in Denmark, have closed the borders and sent as many people as possible home, we need to find ways to keep up the good work, and also find ways to socialize from home to reduce feelings of loneliness.

This first blog will be on learnings from my first full day workshop. Where we deemed that MS whiteboard, even though it has come far, would not be enough to take us through the day, and chose to use Miro.com instead.

Hopefully we can share experiences and views, and together learn how to make infectious virtual co-creation and innovation workshops.

A screen shot of our final board

First of all — feedback from the participants:

• As a participant from another location “this has been the most inclusive online experience ever”
• “The warm-up exercises were great fun — I could start every day like this :D”
• “It was a fun and engaging way to work together, and It exceeded my expectations”
• “It was exhausting to work at the pc’s for so many hours, but it was very productive”
• “The navigation on a big board is not easy”
• “Make sure you ask people to bring a mouse — it is difficult to draw using the mouse pad”

First hand thoughts from the facilitators:

My set-up as facilitator for the day

• Success! The participants talked to each-other and included the people who were not in the room, all in all a fun and engaging experience.
• We will have to work a little slower, but the results we achieved were just as good as they would have been if we were together.
• Prepare the board and agenda in even more details than you would normally do.
• Working visually supports the process.
• Show a Miro intro video before you start working or set up a separate interface introduction meeting to reduce the focus on how to use the tool
• Documentation and hand-over was taken care of by Miro — Yeah!

Our learnings

1) If possible, be two facilitators. One main facilitator, and one handling any technical issues and comments in chat etc. If that is not possible set aside time to handle technical issues and allow for breaks in which you can handle questions in the chat or prepare for the next exercise. And remember to set time aside to introduce the participants to Miro interface.

2) Use Microsoft teams to run sound and video we ran a full day with no interruptions, and only a few minutes here and there with non-intrusive sound interruptions.

3) Write a practical mail to all participants with information needed to make sure they understand how the workshop will be running.

4) Miro works best in chrome. We tried with Edge, but the participants experienced that the image froze several times. As soon as they switched to chrome it worked.

5) Prepare your board in advance with:

· Agenda

· A check in area with a post-it note where they can draw or write hi when they have successfully joined the board.

· All the exercises you plan to complete

· A brainstorm area for each participant

· A practical area for you as facilitator, where you prepare dot votes and headings for affinity diagrams etc.

6) Take into consideration that each exercise will takes more time that they would normally, people do not work as fast with the digital post-it notes as they do in person.

7) Set time aside to have plenty of breaks

8) Set time aside to do icebreakers both digital ones and physical ones, I will make a blog with links for digital icebreakers, over the next days.

Things we did in our workshop:

- Expectations for the day
Each participant fills in a post-it note with expectations for the day, great way to have a simple introduction to the interface.

- Inspiration
Integrating video and documents, the integration of medias of different kinds worked perfectly.

- Visual Summarising discussions
Worked OK — as a Graphic facilitator I still wish Miro would mature their drawing tools. To include different types of pens and opacity, but I drew in-app from my iPad with my apple pencil at it worked fine.

- Brainstorm
We did silent brainstorm each participant wrote or drew on post-it notes in a brainstorm area on the board. Worked like a charm.

- Affinity diagram
Each participant dragged the post-it notes on to an empty space on the board, and grouped, decided on themes and used the built-in voting system. Worked great, however, next time I as a facilitator would add a header that they could vote on, we spent too much time calculating because people voted on individual post-it notes.

- Visual warmup — Storytelling on one post-it
Worked very well. However, the participants found it difficult to draw on mousepads.

- Four-step-sketch from the Google Sprint book
People doodled and sketched on paper, wherever they were. Took a photo and uploaded them to the Miro board. Worked very well.

All in all! I feel ready for the next couple of weeks. Let’s keep as many appointments as we can and turn them into fun and engaging digital experiences. In this way we hurt the economy the least possible.

Let me know what your thoughts and learnings are, from running co-creation workshops online.