No Party without a cake!

A common challenge when facilitating Design Thinking workshops is getting participants out of their comfort zones in order co-create a prototype. If you fail at this it’s like having a party without a cake.

Design Thinking — a party without cake is just a meeting…

Imagine: you arrive at a birthday party — full of joyful anticipation. Great people, inspiring talks, nice space, but: NO CAKE! What went wrong? No chance to lite candles on the cake, blow them out and let the smoke carry the wishes to the sky. A cake creates a magical, memorable experience and is a strong symbol for hope and wishes — and it’s best enjoyed together with others.

The same counts for workshop settings: Playful discovery, exploration, stepping into the user’s shoes, being creative and analytical, and creating unconventional ideas. And the outcome? How can you transfer the ideas back to your organization? How can you spark excitement and become an ambassador for the solution? It will be hard to bring all those post-its back ;) …and the simple answer to this challenge is Prototyping.

They want to create

Walking in a room full of business people with plenty of post-its and colored pens takes courage — but the moment you bring in the scissors, tape, glue sticks and Lego will require a lot of confidence! Handcrafting a solution is miles apart from their general way of operating in day to day business and it pulls them out of their comfort zone — it definitely looks like too much fun. The great surprise to me is that once they get started, it seems they have been waiting for this moment for quite some time and once they get started, they have a hard time to stop building. (Excepting, of course, the ones who escape with the mobile and some others who profess that they are not the creative types).

Why is this happening? In my experience, when the team makes an idea tangible by creating an artefact, this is the moment in a workshop where the magic happens. This is when ideas come to life and materialize in a physical way. This is like the birth of a child. As humans, we are natural problem solvers — and an artefact is a model of a solution, made with our hands — something we can be proud of and take home as a trophy.

Artefacts are powerful

Artefacts are important for many different reasons. They manifest the solution and can be used to communicate the workshop outcome to spark excitement and gain advocates. They are the visible proof of a joint collaborative work process. Be aware that different audiences might need different deliverables: The onepager with business benefits for the decision maker and sponsor, the viusal documentation to communicate the process, and finally, tada! the artefakt.

The biggest challenge for the prototyping phase is to set stage and activate the doubtful ‘not-so-creative-types’.

For many, it was age ago that they last touched a handicraft set. It is therefore crucial to first restore faith in their creative capacity, (Like with visualization) so they can see the value it delivers and use it in their work.

Always be aware that the quality of the artefact impact the quality of the solution — so, spend some time planning and working on it, and make the audience wanna look at it! But please don’t overengineer. Focus on the crucial elements of your idea. Turn your prototype into a scenario the potential user can interact with and into an opportunity for yourself to gain precious feedback.

To sum it up: a real successful Design Thinking Workshop encourages participants to use their creative potential together with analytical thinking to solve problems. The participants leave with a smile on their faces and an artefact in their hands — a tangible solution to the challenge they came to address — and are prepared to take the next steps in their project.

And remember: a party without a cake is just a meeting ;)

This article is part of a series under the title “10 out of 100 — Learnings I wish I had known years before”. Get an overview here.