Corporate Employees Training in Innovation
Deliverables
Design Thinking for Change Management
On this project, we brought into a large organization to help train upper management in Design Thinking Facilitation, and the team in Design Thinking. The main goal was to use these tools as part of change management, introducing new ways of collaborating across teams.
A Multi-Prong Approach
Working with leaders and teams allowed us to attain several objectives simultaneously.
Although our team was brought in to teach Design Thinking skills, we were met with several challenges when preparing the workshops.
We used experiential learning as a framework for teaching the competencies. Our team outlined a few themes for upper management to select from. Once the challenge was selected, team participants experienced Design Thinking principles through hands-on practice. While solving the challenge, they directly applied the theory we had just introduced and they were able to reflect on their learnings. After the activity, we used debriefing to highlight the transferable skills, and trained their management in identifying opportunities for the team to apply these in their daily work. The team was able to pursue their practice through everyday activities after our workshop was over.
Building Playful Slides
The slides we built were simple by design. They relied more on narration, imagery and in-person interaction than on heavy, descriptive text.
Online Facilitation
Due to COVID, the workshop was held remotely. Previously, all the workshops we had held had been in-person. This required some work to translate into a virtual environment.
You can read an article about my reflection on reproducing studios virtually, here.
IDEO’s Inspiration Blitz
This is an example of an Inspiration Blitz we used in workshops. I learned this method from IDEO, while working at C2. They had used inspiration from Burning Man to ideate solutions for Refugee Camps. Similarly, we suggested analogous ideas from unrelated fields and industries to spark inspiration before a Design Sprint.
Building an Ecosystem
Part of the benefit of catering to both pro-bono and corporate projects was that we were able to bring learning across environments. What we learned in agility from grassroots organizations could inspire large, governmental entities such as this one. The structured thought and tools we were exposed to in large organizations could be shared with smaller organizations. In this way, we helped bridge sillos that were often impermeable.
Project (Public)
Repository (Private)
My Role:
Facilitator
Workshop Designer
Project Manager