How ConsenSys is thinking about hiring design thinking facilitators
I recently took on a new role as the director of Design Thinking and Strategy as ConsenSys. One of my first responsibilities is hiring 3 Design Thinking facilitators (now maybe 7!) These individuals will be responsible for facilitating design thinking across a 600 person (and growing quickly) company that is spread out around the planet.
Thought process for getting started
I think the candidates should be able to do four main things.
1) Run workshops — a facilitator needs to have a comprehensive grasp of design thinking at a sophisticated level, including methods and mindsets. She needs to be able to guide a team of people through the design thinking framework.
2) Advocate, inspire, reflect— we’re going to be building the airplane as we fly it. The facilitator also needs to be a content creator and think about how to better apply design thinking in the venture accelerator model.
3) Client facing — for ConsenSys to succeed, we will need to get in front of potential customers and users and try to understand their worlds, needs, and aspirations. Some of this will be done by design researchers on the research team led by TJ. Many others will be done in live client engagements. The facilitator needs to be comfortable working with people outside the organization.
4) Teaching and modeling — helping teams get better at design thinking so they can apply it on their own inbetween facilitator-led workshops.
What a hiring process might look like
The first task will be a sample scenario that I’ll ask the facilitator to respond to. I want the facilitator to think about the scenario and then create a piece of content (blog, video, pitch deck, etc) that can be shared to help people understand the problem and the proposed solution. I intend to draw these scenarios from real world ConsenSys problems. I expect this to take between five and ten hours of work.
The second task will be an interview to discuss the content created in the first task and to discuss some prepared questions. I’ll share those questions ahead of time and their purpose will be to seek stories. For example:
1) Tell me about a time you felt most proud of being a facilitator.
2) Tell me about a time as a facilitator that really sucked. It doesn’t have to have a happy ending.
3) Tell me about a time you went through a full “loop” of Design Thinking — meaning observe, reflect, make.
The third part of the hiring process will be to run a 1 or 2 hour remote workshop with a ConsenSys team on mural and zoom. As a distributed and decentralized company much of the day to day work of a facilitator will happen remotely.
The fourth part of the process, if needed, will be an in-person workshop.
Test and learn
Quick sidebar: as someone who has no prior management or hiring experience, I need to learn quickly! And in a Design Thinking fashion, I want to test, learn, and iterate in public. So my plan is to write about what I’m trying to do on Medium. And I’ll update with my learnings.
I plan to beta test this process with Naveen, who will be my first hire and will cover the Americas. I intend to also hire a facilitator in Europe and in Asia. The four of us will cover all ConsenSys facilitation needs for the first six month of 2018.
Marketing
I will start looking for candidates by publishing a job posting (now live! https://new.consensys.net/careers/?gh_jid=1082261) on LinkedIn. I intend to make it as clear as possible that I’m looking to hire a diverse team. That will start with the job posting itself. I believe a diverse team will bring many valuable perspectives to design thinking and facilitation at ConsenSys. Central to design thinking at IBM was the idea of diverse and empowered teams — I hope to start with mine!
