Design Thinking
If you are planning to design or improve a product or service, and your organization doesn’t yet have much experience with the Design Thinking method, it might be best to hire a facilitator. The facilitator herself is not involved in the work of the team (e.g., she will not make decisions for you), but their role can be crucial to the speed and quality of the process and to the final results.
Another scenario is training in DT and preparing your team to work with this method. DT is not only a design process but also a mindset and approach to work: a so-called human-centred design. It can be an important factor for accelerating innovation in an organization or creating a customer-centred culture.
As a facilitator in your project, my role is to:
- help you select the right team (Basadur Profile is an option) and develop its creative and communication competencies
- plan the process accordingly to your goals and select useful tools and working methods
- ensure good dynamics and communication during workshops
- help conduct customer/user research; analyze and visualize the results
- help to plan prototype testing and analyze the feedback received
- help to plan market experiments to verify the chances of market success
- advise on how to visualize the results of your work and present them to different stakeholders
- share good practices and experiences from other projects.
The Design Thinking process
A Design Thinking process begins with customer research, which aims at challenge definition (e.g., new product criteria), followed by ideation, prototyping, and testing. Those stages might be iterated if needed. Depending on the problem to be solved and the team involved, the process is planned to allow for the best results under given circumstances. Usually, it consists of several workshops and research, analysis, and visualization work in between. Such a process can last from a few days to several weeks. Another option is a Design Thinking Sprint – a scenario-driven process, usually scheduled over five consecutive days.
In my work as a facilitator, I draw from various methods and approaches, including Design Thinking – IDEO, Simplexity – Min Basadur, DT Sprint – Jake Knapp, CSI LAB – Google, “The Right IT” – Alberto Savoia, Blue Ocean Strategy, and others.
