Design Thinking in Vietnamese — tips & tricks and how would you handle?
What is your best approach to understand your clients needs? Active listening and asking open-ended questions, maybe more questions based on research you did and filling the gaps with your knowledge and assumptions?
According to ChatGPT, this would be a great approach for consultants who are assigned on a several weeks engagement.
Just what would you do in the case you don’t speak the client’s language and they don’t speak English? And you deal with a different culture which values respect, politeness, and hierarchy and building relationships and personal connections, all of which is important but will take some time?
As we only had a few days in our Social Sabbatical assignment to rework the scope of work with our host client organization, we did the following to analyse the current situation and get people’s insights on what matters.
Here is my personal tips & tricks list which we experienced in Vietnam:
1. Pre-work matters: Research about the country’s cultural behaviours and set up a pre-alignment with the key stakeholders
2. Build up a personal relationship basis: Take some time to get to know people better and build up a personal connection. We used to take the first 2 days to connect with over lunch and breaks, shared some private stories about our lives and home countries, and asked them questions and mainly listened to them!
3. Share your ideas and discuss together how to get there: Explain your typical successful engagement model and possible outcomes, discuss together what is the best way in the current scenario, and how to get there.
4. Overcome hierarchies: Hierarchies and showing respect are important in every culture, nevertheless the level might vary. Following the cultural rules is a must do and aligning with the key persons but also advertise for the approach that talking to all stakeholder and different levels in the organization will be key for an insightful outcome. Explain that as external consultants we have outside-in opportunity to identify unspoken issues and potentials in anonymous interviews with staff members.
5. Bring everyone together in one room: Whenever possible invite all relevant persons in one room and form mixed teams with people from different departments.
6. Use creative methods like Design Thinking: Whatever method you will select, find a method to active include all members in an engaging form.
7. Open your session with small gifts: We brought some sweets from our home countries and people were curious to try them all. Maybe fortunate that our session started at 2pm after their lunch time might helped it a bit. 😉
Getting theory into practice we asked our management team to invite 15+ people from all departments like HR, Communications, Finance, Program Leads as well as teachers of the programs to join our 3h session for sharing their current insights and ideas about the organization and training courses.
Design Thinking in Vietnamese | Workshop Tư duy Thiết kế bằng tiếng Việt
A few minutes after 2pm until everyone arrived in the room, we started our Design Thinking Session where everyone was curious what is going to happen as the COO was requesting for a 3h meeting with the whole team and having three foreigners with our nice translator Hoa on stage. We opened the session with some sweets as described before and an active ice-breaker game to make everyone come on stage.
The idea is simple but still challenging: Building up a line sorted by day & months of birth but without considering the year someone is born. To make this as an intercultural experience of course verbal communication is not allowed. After a short while people started to group up and using their hands and fingers and try to point out their days of birth. As I am born late in the year for me it’s easy to group somewhere in the end of the line and I could enjoy seeing active collaboration between all different people trying to find the right position on the line. Once everyone was settled, we opened the count from January all the way the end of December and it was joy to see how surprised some people where to find out more about their current colleagues which are born quite closely on day wise basis to each other even if age wise the difference was huge. After this fun exercise also with some laughs and rearrangements of positions (sometimes even 10 fingers are not enough) we opened up our session with some intro words in English which Hoa translated into Vietnamese (of course the reaction on jokes will take a while once being translated :D) and also gave the word to Dung, the local COO, to share some intro and explain the current in place 6-steps approach of the organization that everyone has the right understand of the as-is model.
The Design Thinking session was structured into two parts:
First part — identifying the major issues in the view of the employees and teachers and as a second part — sharing ideas on what can be improved in the future and aligning it with REACH’s 8 step model.
Seeing everyone being really engaged and discussing, we felt that we have hit the right need. People got an option to share about their daily challenges and needs which they might not have addressed for a while. In order not to lose time for translation into English, we only gave short guidelines on focussing on time and grouping post its into bigger clusters. For everyone’s surprise, in the first group that presented the results, the youngest person from the team stood up and explained in detail all their team outcome whereas everyone else has put their mobile away and was listening. As we later heard from Hoa that most people who commented agreed to the major pain points and proposals. We also thought in the beginning that up to 3h might be quite a long time and what to do if no one will open up, but this thought went away quite fast and even a small break we planned was skipped as we did not want to interrupt their discussion flow.
Respecting everyone’s time we started to close the session before 5pm by thanking the team for their active participation and giving the conclusion words back to the local COO. With a smile in his face and slightly happy about the great teamwork he closed the session receiving many new insights and recommendations to get better and seeing all team members being very passionate about their work. After documenting the outcomes and cleaning up the room, we also left the building slightly tired but mostly happy at 5:30pm after a long day.
Learnings about Design Thinking in Vietnamese:
· Vietnamese language is descriptive and take more words like English, only 1–3 words per post it doesn’t work → better take long-handed post it’s instead of square format
· Use dual language for major parts like the agenda and universal icons: it will help both sides to understand where in the process we are right now.
· Give major outlook on the main parts but be flexible: As we didn’t really strictly want to interrupt some discussions or the COO we planned buffer times ahead and cut our own talking parts (which all needed to be translated) in order to save some time.
· Give time to think and exchange: Do not push too hard the first 10–15mins if people need to settle the basic discussions and setup in the group even doing this exercise the first time. We gave the first group a hint to start document their thoughts on post its and slightly reminded the others to follow their example.
What was the major difference between doing this back home and here? In the end even if we could not follow the discussion flow due to the language barrier we still could feel their engagement and emotions when the spoke up. In my opinion with having a flexible structure and timing, one person helping with translating major parts and cultural background, methods like Design Thinking can be operated intercultural and interlanguage. What do you think? Did you every try it outside your home country? Or outside your local language?
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