10 out of 100 — Learnings I wish I had known years before
What is the secret sauce? What does it take to make a Design Thinking workshop a success? How can you stay curious and fired up to perform at your best, even if it’s the third workshop that week?
We are designers at the sovanta Design Lab. We both have a background in industrial design (often regarded as the mothership’ of Design Thinking itself) and started out as product designers and problem solvers, always using our methodologies and tools to make the world a better place. Over the past decade, we evolved to the role of design thinkers. Today, we apply our mindset and toolbox to run design thinking workshops at the sovanta Design Lab to solve business problems. sovanta AG is a highly innovative enterprise where software solutions are created to improve people’s working lives.
We have been working at an international level for more than 20 years and strongly believe in the magic of Design Thinking. It’s an incredibly powerful approach to solve pretty much any problem. After conducting more than a couple of hundred Workshops, we try to uncover what’s behind the method. Having experience is one thing, but at the same time, you need to preserve a beginner’s mindset, even if you have done it many times. Every workshop is unique — new people work together to tackle a new challenge. As a facilitator, you truly have to commit yourself anew every time and this is quite energy-consuming, as you need to help synthesise the group’s ideas, pay attention to subtle group dynamics, push groups for clarification, and maintain the energy in the room. For this reason having a background in endurance sports is a real advantage :wink:. It is a contact sport. It can be demanding. It hurts. But if you are willing to embrace it, it is worth every second, and produces impact that greatly exceeds your expectations.
Here are our 10 major learnings from the past 100 workshops we conducted — stay with us as we dig deeper ;)
- Design Thinking is a Design Discipline
- Design Thinking = Visual Thinking
- We are not in Silicon Valley
- Design Thinking is no panacea
- Design Thinking is no democracy
- Design Thinking is an endurance sport
- Poor preparation can kill
- No party without a cake!
- Design Thinking is useless without Design Doing
- It’s the mindset, stupid
Irina Pfenning is design thinking expert with 20+ years of experience as product designer in the fields of sports and mobility. She helps enterprises to strategically unleash the power of UX and Design Thinking in their organizations. Responsible for Design Thinking enablement at sovanta, Irina applies and teaches disruptive and visual thinking to speed up and amplify insights. As a passionate cyclist, she values the freedom and magic of long and steep climbs in the alps.
Sven Marten is Chief Designer at sovanta AG. Coming from core product design he has been working in the field of Human Machine Interaction and User Experience for more than 25 years. As a true users’ advocate, he constantly seeks to improve how people work with business software, and helps corporations to become more design-centered. Sven now builds his physical and mental workshop-stamina by participating in ultra-long distance bicycle races.
