DESIGN THINKING

How can Design Workshops make things worse?

And what you can do about it

“Design thinking is bullshit,” said Pentagram’s Natasha Jen. And you know what? Quite often it is. We use frameworks and advice from respectable people, but occasionally everything goes to hell. So, let’s talk about the 3 painful problems and possible solutions.

1. “We organized an empathy mapping workshop with developers, but they wrote their own tech-focused assumptions.”

Unfortunately, some of my workshops ended up like this. But, folks, you cannot get from participants what they don’t have.

If developers have never seen users, how the hell are they gonna create an empathy map? Based on what, I wonder? The only solid thing they have at their disposal is tech expertise. If you want to make those developers more user-centered, you don’t need workshops.

Try the following instead:

• Start streaming usability testing and user interviews for the team (let them be observers; they shouldn’t intrude or be visible to users).
• Make sure they attend UX research presentations where they can hear first-hand user feedback and accurate insights.
• Invite them to ideation sessions involving customer support, operations, and marketing teams.

Effective workshops result from a good seed (relevant methodology) planted into fertile ground (team preparedness). Workshops aren’t magic that creates value out of nothing, but they structure, prioritize, enrich, align, and combine what people already have on their minds. So, let this be your mantra as it is mine:

You cannot get something out of a person’s mind that isn’t there.

In a nutshell:

• Don’t invite participants who have nothing to contribute.
• Don’t organize a workshop on a topic far from the team’s expertise.
• Create an environment that will enable sensible contributions.

2. “My boss asked me to organize a workshop. Later I realized that she just wanted to push her own ideas on people.”

Design workshops got so popular that some people learned to utilize them in their own favor. Why struggle to persuade the team if you can disguise your idea in a fun, collaborative format?

It’s like fake user research: “Let’s ask some leading questions and hear sweet praise from users instead of the bitter truth.” The same with workshops: “Here is what I, as a boss, want, so let’s organize one of these amusing activities with bells and whistles and gently push my agenda.”

Of course, this is utter bullshit. Apart from the obviously corrupt nature of such activities, they aren’t even effective! People aren’t that stupid and will stick to their initial opinions even if they don’t dare to oppose the boss during the “workshop.”

So, how can you deal with pseudo-workshops?

• Ask the requestor to describe the ideal workshop result. Check if it’s solving a problem or pushing a preconceived solution.
• Own workshops in your team. Have a strategy for when, why, and what workshops to conduct and who to involve.
• Treat workshops as serious business activities, which they actually are. Gently prevent the team from engaging in pseudo-workshops or calling any meeting or discussion a workshop.

We use workshops for a reason, i.e., when a problem can be solved only by a joint effort of the team, and you need to consider multiple perspectives. If it doesn’t structure the team’s thinking or create common sense, it’s a good reason for suspicion. Remember:

Using colored sticky notes and canvas don’t make a workshop a workshop.

In a nutshell:

• Don’t conduct workshops “on demand.” Check if there is a genuine business need.
• 90% of a workshop’s success depends on your work with stakeholders before you even start drafting the agenda.

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3. “I organized a journey mapping workshop for the team from [country X/company Y], and it all went to shit.”

Let’s face the truth: design workshops aren’t for everyone.

This is not a fully neutral and universal methodology. Yeah, it’s incredibly capable but still has its limits. Workshops are based on a certain level of trust, openness, and equality in the team; it shouldn’t be 100%, but there is an unwritten minimal threshold.

Workshops fail dramatically when placed in a culture with:

• significant hierarchical distance (boss-subordinate) and, consequently team indecisiveness in the boss’s vicinity;
• strong patriarchal traditions;
• prevalence of “saving face” over revealing the truth;
• extreme individualism;
• socioeconomic inequality, etc.

It can be on the mentality level (participants represent a particular country or social group) or the company level (corporate culture).

I don’t want to name particular groups in which workshops don’t work as expected because my analysis will never be as balanced and accurate as “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer. Besides, there are exceptions to the rule, and it’s not always black and white.

As a middle-class European, I got used to how workshops work here, in Europe, and in the U.S. in primarily digitized industries. But as a consultant working globally, I encountered many cases when seemingly universal methods needed a significant adjustment; otherwise, the workshop would either turn into a mess or wouldn’t have any tangible impact. So, in some cases, I chose a different approach without workshops.

In a nutshell:

• Refrain from conducting workshops in a team without a minimum level of transparency, trust, and equality (and adjustment won’t help).
• Mind the culture of your team and adjust accordingly.

Summary

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” says the famous Law of the Instrument. Overreliance on workshops might be very harmful. They aren’t a no-brainer solution with 100% success everywhere. And in some cases, the best workshop is no workshop.

When Design Thinking was on the rise, everyone excitingly attempted to apply it everywhere. But then followed disillusionment. Hopefully, now we are finally on the “slope of enlightenment.” We can clearly see that this methodology is no different from others: it has strong and weak sides — and I wish I had known about the latter earlier.

And what other workshop pitfalls have you experienced in your career? What went wrong in contrast to your expectations? How did you overcome it? Please tell me about them in the comments.

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