How to facilitate a design thinking workshop in just 2 hours
This fall DesignMap was invited to a run a design thinking workshop at the Health 2.0 annual fall conference. Participating in the conference was a no-brainer for us — DesignMap has worked in the healthcare space for years for clients ranging from established healthcare giants like Aetna to small startups still in stealth mode. But running a design thinking workshop in just two hours with 40 participants of an unknown background? That was the challenge.
Workshop facilitation is an important skill in any designer’s toolkit. At DesignMap, we often facilitate workshops at the beginning of the design lifecycle. We use them to define and build consensus on product strategy, generate personas, go through rapid product iteration sprints and more. Normally our participants are small groups of 5–10 clients with a shared understanding of the product space and common goals. In this case, the only thing we knew about our participants was that they were interested in digital health technology.
Sounds challenging, right? But with challenge comes opportunity. Here’s our top 5 learnings for how to plan and facilitate a workshop where you don’t know the backgrounds or interests of your participants.
- There’s no such thing as over-planning
Every single activity of this workshop was planned and timed down to the minute. Some activities were allocated 10 minutes, other activities were allocated only 2 minutes. Several activities had contingency plans — our best guess for what might not work as originally expected and a Plan B in case that happened. And we brought 2 large timers to keep us on schedule throughout the session.
A few days before the event, we did a complete run-through of the workshop at the DesignMap offices. This ensured that Audrey (our lead facilitator) and all the other DesignMap facilitators had a shared understanding of the workshop schedule.
2. Establish common ground — quickly!
How could we get a group of 40 strangers to quickly begin working together as a design team? The first step was to establish rapport. Even though we only had 2 hours for the workshop, we dedicated the first 10 minutes to each person introducing themselves to the entire group. This was a critical step to get everybody in the mood of participating, to better understand the backgrounds of individuals, and to establish a common sense of identity in the room.
The workshop design challenge was ‘How can artificial intelligence help elderly people remember to take their medicine?’. We choose this topic because it was a good balance of general (everybody can relate to healthcare for the elderly) and specific: artificial intelligence would be a specific lens that would limit the range of solutions we could consider.
3. Have some cakes baked
One of the most important values typically derived from workshops are unexpected, new ideas generated by the group in real-time based on the workshop activities. However, in this environment, because we prioritized giving participants a taste for the full design thinking process, it made sense to occasionally seed the group with pre-packaged ideas. We used the cooking show metaphor: You know, where the chef pops some raw batter into one oven, but then… voila! Through the magic of television, the cake is magically and instantly finished! So we baked some cakes. For example, in the lightening demo section of the day we handed out paper slips with the names of companies on them. Instead of thinking of and researching a related company (in just 5 minutes!), participants could research one of the companies we suggested instead.
Similarly, while we asked the group to create a journey map from scratch, we also had a back-up, pre-fabricated journey map ready to use just in case. If we ran out of time and needed to cut an activity, we wanted to still benefit from having a journey map without having to make one in real time.
4. Trust the group, trust the process…and make sure you have a dynamic facilitator
Have you ever had that dream where you stand up in front of a crowd, say something, and everybody looks at you like you’re crazy? Worrying about the workshop bombing is a common concern. But our workshop schedule was jam-packed with activities so that there was no time for participants to get bored. If they didn’t like an activity, 5 minutes later we had moved on to the next activity. Moreover, we ask everybody to put their devices away for the duration of the workshop. Removing distractions is a great way to encourage people to be present.
However, the glue that holds the workshop together is the lead facilitator. Our workshop was run by Audrey Crane, a partner at DesignMap who is an expert at generating positive group energy and thinking on her feet.
5. Keep building energy and momentum until the end
The point of a workshop is to create a great outcome. Even in a small conference workshop, we prioritized bringing people’s ideas to life. At the end of the two-hour session, each workshop participant got to share their idea in front of the group in an art museum style share-out. We had one ‘Decider’ pick a winning concept. After that, four DesignMap designers created a real prototype from the winning concept and that prototype was revealed at our booth at the end of the day. These two important milestones helped bring everybody together and create a shared sense of accomplishment for the day.
While you can never predict exactly what will happen in a workshop, having a detailed plan helped us feel confident before the workshop even began. Building rapport amongst our group and picking a relatable topic helped make participants feel comfortable participating. But having some pre-packaged tricks up our sleeves ensured we were ready for success no matter what happened. And because we had confidence in the process — and a great facilitator — all workshop attendees were able to get a taste for the design thinking process in just 2 short hours and see their ideas come to life at the end of the day.
How design thinking workshops transformed a $1.7B company culture
We’d just started as Carta’s ux consultancy, and the team was ecstatic.
Everyone in the valley was talking about them. They’d just raised a $300M Series E from Andreeson Horowitz and things were about to get real.
$1.7B valuation. $447.8M raised in total. Over 100% year-over-year lift in ARR. And now, they were about to take it to a whole new level.
They’d just started working on CartaX — a stock market for private companies. This revolutionary new business line promised to change the way capital markets worked, granting everyday employees access to opportunities that’d previously only been available to the wealthy few.
Carta’s team was 100% rallied behind the vision, but they knew pulling it off wouldn’t be easy.
Over 3 years of extremely fast growth, Carta’s platform had taken on an extraordinary amount of design debt. Understaffed and under-resourced, Carta’s design team struggled to prioritize the user experience as more products and features were added to an increasingly complex platform…
Read the story of how we partnered with Carta to use UX workshops to break down silos and transform their company culture.
