Using Design Thinking to innovate my way out of our crisis, and blogging to keep me consistent

Design Thinking Participants Creating Screens for their Storyboards

This is the first of what will be a series of articles that will aIttempt to document our journey out of the crisis brought about the COVID19 pandemic

The Crisis

I’m one of the many people that have lost their livelihood due to the COVID19 pandemic.

All my workshops (classroom base) have been cancelled and I only have a month worth of moolah to survive.

I need to find a new source of income within a month! Also, I suck at doing my own content.

Positive feedback and key learning given by the participant as part of our “Retrospective” activity at the end of each workshop (we also ask for what can be improved)

My Background

7 years as a Training Coordinator in HSBC. 2 years as a venture funded startup founder (raised and lost Php 9M with zero return).

I’ve taken that experience and use it to teach classroom based, highly interactive, output driven innovation workshops.

I want to approach this crisis like a startup founder. By approaching it as a problem that needs to be solved. By not jumping to solutions but instead begin with empathy.

The Big Problem I Hope to Solve

Too many founders are failing because they jump immediately to building solutions and not taking time to think about the people and their problems.

My vision is that through our efforts, less founders and innovators will make the same mistakes that I and so many other first time founders and innovators made and continue to make.

I hope to increase startup success rates and generally make the world (straight back, hold hands and modulate voice), a beter place

The Initial Idea

Pivot Startup PH Training into running remote workshops themed around helping people transition into the “new normal” using Design Thinking

There would be an all free webinar, “pay as you can” brainstorming sessions for the public, and a paid private workshop version.

The Strategy

Use only frameworks that we teach — Design, UX, Agile, Lean to ensure success. Document your progress consistently and transparently using the following documents

• Personas
• Experiment Trackers
• Customer Journeys
• Sales Pipeline
• Lean Canvas

The Design Challenges

If we’re using Design Thinking then we start with a Design Challenge. This will give us a general area to play in — or a problem area we want to solve without prescribing a specific solution.

How Might We

• Convert our workshops into a remote format while keeping the highly interactive, output drive nature of the classroom version.
• Help people transition themselves and their organizations into a more digital, remote enabled working environment
• Transition SPHT into a post COVID19 world and develop products that help people do the same.

How We’re Going To Take on the Design Challenge

1. Organize our Google Drive folders using DT’s 5 stages
2. Do empathy and problem interviews
3. Use Dsign Sprint for the public webinar and all other products
4. Presell and produce the free public webinar
5. Upsell the paid private remote workshop
6. Review and iterate
7. Transition to full agile — with product vision, roadmap, backlogs, etc

How We’re Going To Document

1. Write a series of blog articles — 1 per stage at least but hopefully 1 per activity.
2. Shoot some video and take photos for future editing — learn how to edit or find an editor.
3. Share blog articles
4. Start Facebook Group

What We’ve Done So Far

1. Geeked out on virtual whiteboards Miro and Mural
2. Started learning how to run Remote Workshops
3. Figured out how to setup my video conferencing, screensharing setup
4. Cofacilitated a 2 hour public DT workshop with Joie, watched a few and attended a few more
5. Scheduled a set of empathy interviews
6. Making this announcement

Way Forward

1. Really produce the documents — and keep them updated — Lean Canvas,
2. Start producing the workshops — Perhaps the reason we haven’t been able to force ourselves to create a workshop is because we don’t have enough information. Perhaps what we should do is do a lightning demo or really go through several 1 or 1.5 hour web workshops and learn what works and doesnt work.
3. Start writing and keep wrtting the content — The hope is that because the topic is interesting and there is a format and framework we’re following, add to the fact that you told the whole world you’re going to do it, then I would be encouraged to keep writing about it.

Hope this helps you

Hope that this little article helps you and your efforts in transitioning to the new normal — whatever that might end up being.

I’m hoping this can serve as a guide or at least inspiration for overcoming your challenges as a result of the COVID19 Pandemic so…

Like our workshops, we hope to make these articles engaging, helpful and inspirational to others that are going through a similar crisis so please do provide us comments below on how we can make this better.

if you think I can help you as a coach, facilitator or just need someone to talk to about your transition and get my 2 cents, feel free to reach out via carlo@startupphtraining.com

Tell me about you

If you’re going through something similar, I’d love to hear about it.

• How are you and your business affected and adopting to the crisis?
• What’s working and what isn’t working for you these days?
• What are your top issues and challenges around this pandemic?

About Me

I teach founders and corporate innovators to test their ideas in days and weeks rather than months.

I got into running workshops as a startup founder. I’ve made most of the common mistakes founders make and I now teach people how to not make. Corporate training is my bread and butter while startup training is my advocacy.

You can check me out my Linkedin profile or our website www.startupphtraining.com

Here’s a persona of myself for your review.

Till next time!