Learning by doing at our design thinking workshops

Articles like this one from fastcodesign about the significance of design thinking in business strategy seem to be popping up in my social feeds more and more these days. If you hadn’t realised already, it’s here to stay.

It’s been Pancentric’s methodology for help organisations to design human-centred experiences for some time now. And while it’s great to see more and more people talking about it, it also makes us wonder ‘how many organisations are actually doing it?’.

Why do we run design thinking workshops?

At London Design Festival last year, we realised how many people with strategy, marketing and proposition responsibilities in the businesses we know wanted to do more than just read articles about design thinking. They wanted to learn how they could use it in their own teams to build innovative services.

This was summed up by the response of one of our first attendees, a marketing director from a financial services firm, who said.

“I’m always looking for new ways to work smart and think strategically. Pancentric’s workshop was a great introduction to how design thinking can be used to innovate and create services that people truly value.”

Which got us thinking about our own big question. How might we help these forward thinking individuals to learn more about the power of design thinking and how we use it to solve big strategic problems?

The answer we converged on was a programme of design thinking workshops to run throughout 2016. Four months in and four events done, I wanted to share what goes on at these events and what we’ve learnt.

Who takes part in our workshops?

If you haven’t taken part in a design thinking workshop before, it’s amazing to see how many people are blown away by their first taste. This experience doesn’t come about by accident though. The secret is skilled, knowledgeable and practised facilitators.

Akhil, one of Pancentric’s design thinking facilitators, helps one group as they explore ideas.

At Pancentric, design thinking facilitation is led by our Design team and at our most recent event the facilitators were experience designer Gregor Doverty and visual designer Akhil Morjaria. As well as facilitators, we invite other Pancentric people to take part because learning by doing is such an important part of design thinking. By introducing more and more of the team to the methodology that our strategy team uses, the more value we will add for our clients.

The crucial final ingredient of course is attendees. As a strategic digital agency, we already work with a diverse group of people from a range of different companies. This mix is perfect for design thinking workshops because it provides divergent voices and multi-disciplinary teams. Once we have that, it’s just a matter of making sure there aren’t too many groups and that individual groups aren’t too big for views to be heard.

What goes on at our workshops?

To introduce design thinking, we use the LEARN-CREATE-MAKE process that we use on all our client projects to help them design digital experiences around their customers. It follows the double diamond approach of divergent and convergent thinking that underpins design thinking. However, unlike other consultancies that use design thinking just for workshops, we also use it in our delivery of digital services.

Our focus is helping attendees to learn by doing (but a few hints of what to expect are handy).

LEARN

In the first place, we’re trying to help attendees do two things: firstly, to unshackle themselves from their day-to-day ways of thinking and secondly, to empathise with the most important people for their organisation — their customers.

Design thinking isn’t about doing things in the same way you always have (that’s where divergent thinking can help). To make this happen, our facilitators use a range of techniques that pull out emotions and reactions related to experiences that they really care about. Then everyone can converge on the key insights that they collectively consider to be most valuable. Just like with the larger, strategic projects we undertake, attendees have honed in on a big question that needs to be tackled.

Here are just a few examples that came from our most recent workshops:

• How might we make the experience of travelling at rush hour fairer?
• How might we help people to think differently, rationally about crime?
• How might we enhance the viewing experience of sporting events?

Gregor, who led our April workshop, holds up an example of a ‘how might we…’ question.

CREATE

With their ‘how might we?’ questions established, the groups investigate potential solutions. Using divergent thinking to dream big is once again the order of the day. After all, how will you come up with a truly innovative solution if you don’t stretch the boundaries of what you think is possible?

I mentioned earlier how many people are blown away by their first experiences of design thinking and it’s at about this point in the workshop that we really start to see them ‘get it’. The self-censorship and general wariness that characterises the start of the workshop have been replaced by a hive of activity and a flow of ideas that is inspiring to see. If you’re one of those people that finds thinking differently difficult, I strongly suggest a dose of design thinking.

By the end of the workshop, the groups had established five ‘how might we…’ questions, generated 278 great ideas and co-created five focused solutions.

Our rapid idea generation tool is a great way of driving divergent thinking.

MAKE

The winning solution, as chosen by the entire group, was FOMO. This service for event venues aimed “to make every seat the best one in the house” and a small agile team led by project facilitator James Reeve, set about building out a prototype of the service in the form of an app.

Once again, divergent thinking was used to investigate and then start building out the features and customer journeys that might be included. After converging on those that would impact the experience most, the team started to group these into a timeline of pre-event, during-event and post-event touchpoints in the way that customer journey mapping is used in our larger service design projects.

Finally, as time was short, the team prioritised around some key steps in the experience, to build out a paper prototype and workflow that potential users could test.

Paper prototypes and workflows are a crucial early stage in any digital delivery process.

How we can improve what we do

Just as divergent and convergent thinking helps these sessions to uncover innovation, so reflections help us to understand why these innovations came about and how they can be iterated and improved.

It’s absolutely key to learn what we’re doing right and wrong with these workshops and to consider the views of everyone that attended.

Reflection, a key part of design thinking, is one technique we use to iterate and improve.

With that in mind, here are a few reflections that we’ll be using to improve next time:

• Better signs when people arrive so they know where they are going.
• More detailed intro slides to help attendees understand what is coming.
• Past examples that can act as a catalyst to people’s way of thinking.

And one that makes us know we’re (generally) on the right track:

“The workshop was great. It would be amazing to do with colleagues!”