Design Thinking Workshop Facilitation

This is a case study around planning and executing design thinking sessions to increase collaboration and creative output from a group of individuals with a shared goal.

Planning

Usually people love going to design-thinking workshops or starting a design sprint, and why wouldn’t they? They show up, all the activities and goals are laid out for them and they get to come up with ideas and collaborate with their peers. Overall, the experience is exciting and motivating. What they don’t know is the amount of planning it takes to make a workshop run smoothly. There are a lot of factors you need to consider to pull off an effective session.

1. What’s the problem?
   You need to know what problem you want to focus on during the session. Defining the problem is sometimes difficult and takes multiple iterations. You don’t want it to be too broad and you don’t want it to be too specific. To create a good problem statement you need to answer the 5 W’s. Who is this about? What are the boundaries or obstacles that they face? When do these obstacles usually arrive? Where does the problem exist? Why do these obstacles exist at all?

2. What’s the goal?
   What do you want to get out of the session? Is it 5 ideas you could implement within the next week on a particular problem statement? Is it to gain empathy for a particular persona? Is it to understand stakeholder motivations? In order to get what you want out of a session the goal needs to be clearly defined. Collaborating on the goal should happen before the session and be reiterated throughout the session to remind people what you are working towards. Usually I leave a little bit of time at the beginning of the session to discuss the goal and make sure that everyone is in agreement on what we want to accomplish.

3. What’s not the goal?
   It’s also good practice to state what the goal is not. What are the things that you don’t want to throw off the conversations in the room? Usually, this is good to state upfront to the group so there are fewer chances to go off on tangents.

4. Who needs to be in the room?
   Audience is everything. Who needs to be in the room to make the decisions? Who needs to be in the room to help keep people on task? Who needs to be in the room as a contributor? The key is to get a range of roles in the room. You want a variety of people with different skill sets to increase the number of perspectives. It’s always good to throw in a couple of random people to mix up your results.

   1. If you’re breaking into groups during the session, it usually works out better if you have people grouped from the start

5. What research do you have/need?
   We start sessions with a bit of market research, usability, competitive analysis or whatever research feels relevant to the end goal. Don’t get crazy with research. You want the audience to know just enough about the problem to come up with possible solutions. I always time-box research at 10-15 minutes or less.

6. What activities best fit the goal?
   It’s better to spend more time doing, during the session, than sitting. Find activities that get people up and moving around.

7. Do you need an icebreaker?
   Icebreakers to start are great ways for people to get to know each other at a deeper level and feel more comfortable collaborating. There are a lot of websites with activities to choose from.

8. How much time do you have?
   If you have a week for a design sprint, that’s great. You will be able to take your time, but for most of us that won’t be the case. If you’re lucky you might have a few hours to run a session. That’s why time management is the most important part of ideation. Make sure you time-box everything you plan to do, down to interactions between teams. The more structured you can be with time the better.

9. How do I prepare for the unknown?

   1. Time-boxing also helps to know what you can cut when. Sometimes sessions get interrupted and you need to shave some time. Knowing the timing of every detail will help you pivot.

   2. Always have different activities in your back pocket, especially when you try new ones that you aren’t sure are going to work.

   3. Extra icebreakers are also good to have on hand. You never know when you’ll need to get people out of the mid-day slump

   4. Print out some of the details that you think people will want to reference or use for inspiration, this keeps you from having to jump back and forth within a slide deck for info

   5. Relax - things are going to happen that you didn’t expect and that’s ok

10. What are we going to do with the results of the session?

    1. How will the output of the session be communicated back to the teams that worked on it?

    2. How will we use the output of the session and integrate it back into the daily workflow?

    3. How is everything prioritized?