Be an Action-Oriented Ally When Leading Your Next Design Thinking Workshop or Design Sprint
As a workshop leader, you gather groups of people together regularly to solve problems, find opportunities, and establish strategic paths forward. You’re a creative, empathetic mind carefully crafting an agenda to achieve the established goals of the sprint, workshop, or session.
Given this creative mindset, rarely do we set out to execute on the same agenda every time. In many ways, existing in our comfort zone is mundane and taps into a facilitator, coach, or teacher’s worst nightmare: rote learning and predictable experiences. If we stay stagnant with how we design and execute our workshops, wouldn’t that be boring?
Design thinking relies on empathy to effectively execute the process. Ethnographic research, an empathy-driven part of the design thinking process, stems from anthropological practices, which rely on stripping away preconceived notions and viewing a situation without prior input or judgment.
Being an active and action-oriented ally can also be done outside of rallies, protests, and fundraising events. Our activism and drive towards equity does not need to be separated from our day jobs. Decisions we make as facilitators, coaches, and leaders of ideation workshops directly tie into opportunities for action and allyship.
Some of the critical components of being an action-oriented ally include:
- Feeling comfortable with mistakes and allowing them to make us better
- Surrounding ourselves with others who look and think differently from us
- Sitting with our discomfort
As session leads, these qualities are at the core of how we operate:
- Always receptive to feedback and improvement
- Inviting diverse subject matter experts and perspectives to our sessions
- Operating in the grey
The overlaps in these lists are clear. How do we level-up our game and create more deliberate efforts towards removing bias in our workshops and cultivating a creative environment that’s inclusive and equitable?
There are two easy steps to reinforcing a bias-free environment in your design thinking workshop or design sprint:
Step 1: Start Inward
Any process is a reflection or reinforcement of our own human bias. Given that, we must start by reflecting inward. Notice your own biases and limitations by reflecting on the following questions:
- Who do you gravitate towards for input in the room? Why might that be?
- Are you comfortable with silence when no one responds to your question or prompt? What new processes can you create to respond to silence in a more equitable way?
- What stories and/or metaphors are you using to illustrate your points? Can you change them to highlight diverse leaders, entrepreneurs, and companies that illustrate your point and diversify who you feature?
There are countless, incredible resources illustrating how to notice our own biases, but applying that to our context of leading workshops might not be as straightforward. Reflecting on these questions, you can come up with new ways to approach silence. For example, if no one is speaking up, rather than filling the silence or calling someone out, give everyone five minutes to write a reflection down on a sticky note and post it on the wall. Then begin reading them out loud and ask participants to “yes, and…”
Thinking critically about the anecdotes we share not only adds diversity to our storytelling, but it also keeps our content interesting. Why do we need to tell people about Amazon, Apple, and Google for the 10 millionth time? There are so many other innovative examples to spark creativity.
Step 2: Engage Participants
It is our duty as a workshop lead to bring out the best of all participants. To do this, we must tap into the variations in the needs and preferences of participants to ensure everyone’s creativity is maximized. Ideally, we cultivate an environment where we not only accept and deeply understand the differences of participants but rather, we know how to adapt and bridge across the differences to reveal every participant’s most creative self.
Notice the current environment you are cultivating by reflecting on these questions:
- What room are you using for the workshop, and how is everything setup? What artwork is on the wall? What does the building you’re in symbolize?
- How are you diversifying the way you engage all participants? Is your presentation accessible? What images are you using in your presentation
- Have you thought deliberately about how to evolve your workshop to a virtual setting while also keeping it accessible?
Start by analyzing the physical or virtual environment from the tactical and tool-based components to the humans participating. For the environment, ensure you’re diversifying your tools by leveraging interactive whiteboards like Miro or Mural to engage more senses. Use tools like Poll Everywhere to solicit a lot of ideas from everyone in a short time.
As for the participants, diversify how you engage them by using a balance of writing and speaking. For multi-day workshops, assign questions for participants to reflect on overnight and bring to the discussion the next day. This allows for quieter folks or individuals that need more time to contribute to the overall output as well.
Take a week to notice your immediate responses and reactions to situations and people in your upcoming workshops. Perhaps take the Harvard Implicit Bias Assessment as a baseline for yourself. Consider talking with someone you trust about implicit biases they’ve noticed you exhibiting.
There’s no one correct approach, rather an ongoing effort of noticing your tendencies, shifting your approach, and changing your habits to build an environment where everyone feels valued and involved.
Three Takeaways
So, in preparation for your next session, carve out time to…
- Start inward by reflecting on your own opportunities for growth
- Diversify how you engage participants
- Analyze the physical or virtual environment in which you’re bringing the group together
About me: I’m a Director of Product Experience on the Fusion team at Optum. I have traveled to, worked, or lived in over 20 countries around the world, which has fueled and guided my passion for understanding human behavior, desire, and motivation. This passion has set me on an entre(intra)preneurial path where I adapt user-oriented design frameworks to translate insights from consumer research into innovative business models, products, and services. Want to know more? You can find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hayaalzaidlopez/
A Fusion publication. We are employees of UHG and these views are our own and not those of the company nor its affiliates.
