Humanizing Business as a Design Thinking Coach
A summary of the Design at Business Coach Camp
Being a Design Thinking coach
A Design Thinking coach plays a crucial role in doing and implementing Design Thinking within large organizations. He or she is an expert for methods and tools, a motivator and mediator for the involved team, an evangelist positioning Design Thinking inside and outside an organization, a facilitator for all kind of Design Thinking workshop formats, a project manager for a whole design project and last but not least a team coach helping the team and each individual to grow and learn — also on a personal level. Furthermore, the coach often acts as role model for design-led innovation: By actively working with the approach, he or she becomes a change maker, and actively drives the change towards a human-centered organization.
In this blog post, I am sharing some learnings from my journey as Design Thinking coach of more than 7 years, as well as insights from the first Coach Camp we ran together as the Design at Business community.
Based on my own experiences in the last years, a “Design Thinking coach” has to tackle at least two challenges:
1) Looking at the range of potential tasks and jobs-to-be-done mentioned above: What is my definition and interpretation of being a “Design Thinking coach”, that fits best to my personal motivation and skills, and also to the expectations from my team, company or organization?
2) How and where can I continuously practice and improve my skills as Design Thinking coach, knowing how I want to interpret this role?
Despite my original professional background in computer science, I have spent a couple of years now learning what people need to successfully change their habits, their lives and themselves. I have done several trainings and classes, and have also become a certified Gestalt therapist.
Therefore, it may not surprise you that my personal definition of being a “Design Thinking coach” is clearly focused on enabling the team and each member to use Design Thinking not only for the concrete content work on new products or services but also to learn and grow on a personal level.
Of course, excellent expertise in Design Thinking methods is mandatory, but without an even better understanding of the involved people, I would not be able to support them in the best possible way. This becomes even more crucial as soon as Design Thinking is used not only as methodology to work on innovation, but as catalyst for real cultural change towards more creativity and agility.
Learning as a Design Thinking coach
Keeping that in mind, learning as a Design Thinking coach has to be much more than just getting to know another method or tool. This could always be interesting and I do my best to use at least one new method or tool in any new Design Thinking format I run. But in order to learn and grow as someone who enables others to learn and grow, it takes more than that.
As we know from other contexts, like business coaching or even psycho-therapeutic approaches, an ongoing refection and supervision by others about one’s own work as coach or therapist is essential for continuously developing coaching skills and mindset.
This is especially important for current discussions about the “quality assurance” of Design Thinking coaching, and whether or not we need certain certification programs for this (To be honest, I do not think so, because most of these programs are just another “business development” channel for agencies to offer training formats). That’s why I am very happy that I got the chance to set up and run the first cross-company training with the Design and Business community. I wanted to give like-minded Design Thinking coaches, who focus on the context of large enterprises, a platform to exactly do this kind of reflection and sharing.
The Design at Business Coach Camp
The Design at Business Coach Camp was offered to active Design Thinking coaches and facilitators working in big companies. The goal of the training was to actively improve coaching and facilitation skills by practicing and by having enough time to reflect on one’s work with other participants.
In addition to this, there was enough time reserved for networking and learning from each other through best practices, tips and tricks and personal learnings on the topics of coaching and facilitating Design Thinking formats and teams.
Our host
Like all the Design at Business community events, the coach camp was hosted by one of the member companies. In this case, the Telekom Design Academy offered 23 participants from 12 companies like Bosch, Nestlé, Microsoft, Osram, Prezi, Philips or ADAC, a perfect environment for three very productive and inspiring learning days in Bonn.
I had the pleasure to co-moderate the whole training with Sabine Muth, an experienced Design Thinking coach from Erste Bank in Austria. For me it was an absolutely positive experience, as I do not often have a co-moderator during my Design Thinking engagements. Thanks to Sabine for this great teamwork!
The start
We kicked off the day with an inspiring gallery walk through the Telekom Design Gallery, where all participants got many insights into future smart scenarios in both the private home and also in production sites. We then jumped directly into our topic by introducing each other in pairs of two: Based on some guiding questions, everybody created a picture frame for his partner and introduced him or her using this.
After this exercise, everyone was energized and ready to get started in 5 teams to work on the following challenge: “Design an ideal customer on-boarding experience”. Although, in the end, this challenge was only the frame for the coaching exercises and therefore not very important, it was really interesting to see how differently the challenge got reframed by the teams, and what kind of solutions were presented in the end: From improving the onboarding on trains during hot summers day by distributing deodorants at the doors, up to a complete re-design of the classical hotel check-in process by moving most of the steps into the used car or taxi.
The coaching exercises
Building on the challenge mentioned above, all the teams went through the whole Design Thinking process step by step, following the same format: One of the team members took over the role of the lead coach, prepared the slot and moderated it. Afterwards, every team took 15 to 30 minutes to reflect on this and give feedback to the lead coach. The lead coach always started to share his experience by answering the following questions:
· How did the coaching experience feel overall?
· What should have been applied more and why?
· What additional coaching skills did you learn?
After that, all team members shared their perspectives by going through the following questions:
· What was your overall experience while being coached?
· What should the coach keep?
· What should the coach apply more strongly and why?
· What additional coaching skills could the coach look at?
To support the participants, we prepared a small workbook to collect all the feedback and learnings from each session. You can download this for your own usage here.
The inspiration night
As the group was very diverse and full of experienced and inspiring minds, we ran an additional open format to share different kind of best practices, learnings, tips and tricks, project descriptions and anything the participants wanted to share about their work and life.
This “inspiration night” took place in the second evening and we limited each talk to 10 minutes to give as many participants as possible the chance to share their story.
Looking back, it was absolutely worth doing, and the participants shared many stories: About how they recruited the best Design Thinkers in their company, why certain projects went well and others failed, how Design Thinking can be applied to personal challenges like “finding the right job”, how it feels to move from a “Design Thinking team member” to a “Design Thinking coach”, or how Design Thinking helps to educate twins.
Feedback
After the three days, all participants agreed that the Coach Camp had been a great learning experience, a perfect way to connect to Design Thinking coaches from other companies, an inspiring trip and definitely a lot of fun — and worth participating.
“The coach camp was for me …”
“… a three days journey in the wonderful design thinking country, feels like holidays, energizing, inspiring, just great.”
“… a great opportunity to get really inspired and feeling home somehow!”
“… a really great opportunity to pair up and to exchange with like-minded people. Very inspiring!”
“… a great experience to gain confidence in myself and my skills as a DT coach.”
My learnings
It was really great to experience the energy and openness of the participants during the three days, and I was very glad to hear all the positive feedback in the end. But as always, there were also some wishes about how to improve the format in the future.
Especially for very experienced coaches, there seems to be a need for additional formats. They usually have a long list of specific coaching situations from their daily Design Thinking job in mind and want to further reflect or discuss on these scenarios.
Usage of case examples
Such peer-to-peer discussions about specific examples are also a known standard in the mentioned business or personal coaching context or even in psycho-therapeutic situations. Embedding this kind of reflection in a coach camp would definitely add value (especially if you have a lot of experienced coaches).
Role plays
Also role plays, in which a coach has to solve a certain situation on the spot, could be helpful. It could also be tricky if the role plays become “slapstick” but it is definitely worth considering.
Continuous supervision
Last but not least, a continuous supervision with another expert coach sounds very interesting to me and could definitely help in learning and growing as a Design Thinking coach.
Less methods, more personality
One of my key learnings during the Coach Camp was: If you already have some maturity in methods and coaching skills, it becomes less important to learn even more methods. Instead, you should invest into the most important tool you have as a coach and facilitator: Your own personality!
This is definitely a really wide and super-interesting learning field and it would be too much to reflect on in this article. But I will share some of my learning experiences in this areas in another article and would be very keen to hear your stories as well.
Conclusion
I would like to close this blog post with feedback from one of the Design Thinking coaches from Prezi. It perfectly shows my interpretation of being a Design Thinking coach, and also my motivation to invest time in formats like the Design at Business Coach Camp:
“The coach camp was for me mind expanding: coaching is really about people first, meeting THEIR goals. Producing outcomes come second.”
How do YOU interpret YOUR role as a Design Thinking coach? And how do YOU learn as a Design Thinking coach? I’m curious about your thoughts!
