Serendipity and Learning

 DT really unlocks peoples creative confidence.  When people work in a default manner, creativity is lost - worth noting for people/teams/organizations that are forever in "full speed" mode. When you know a problem too well, you may be actually limited in looking at in a new manner.  Reframing the business challenge is often difficult when seen through the default lens. Brainstorming is limiting. 108% Indian (the tool we used) enables people to see beyond "safe" creativity.  The options teams came up were mindboggling when they were given the cards. While DT is fast paced in a workshop, the time enables them to get comfortable with the process and make it their own.  Notes from a recent Design Thinking workshop I conducted. 

I was lucky to be part of Design Thinking teams in my last two organisations. Design Thinking as popularised by the Stanford D school is an open source methodology and I have seen it being used in a few organisations to good effect. What is wonderful about this methodology is what you can do with it. It is fast, it is fun and it is productive. It is simple, yet - you can go through it many a time and still discover new things. There is fun in designing around it - and seeing the possibilities unfold in so many ways. It is early days yet, but we have seen how this approach has a lot of potential...as we discovered in a recent workshop that we conducted to go after some fairly commonplace 'problems'. But at the end of it, as I have seen in every other workshop before this, the 'insight' is always different. There is always something new that comes up when one uses this framework. As I constructed it, I realised that Interviewing with Empathy is not easy, nor is Ide...

If I were not a trainer, I would have been a designer. Hey, but I am also a training designer. So, when the countries premier design institute announced a Design Thinking workshop, I decided to give it a go. Also, having done a little bit of work on 'Design Thinking' approaches in my work, I thought it was worth exploring further... Design Thinking, Creativity, Insights... And it was an interesting session. With immersive experiences on gathering user insights and so on... Hope to do a longer post on it someday!

I am a huge fan of the Design Thinking Methodology of Stanford dschool. So, I was mighty thrilled to see that their website has kind of made all this information available online as an 'open source cookbook'. Having done this a couple of times before, it was a familiar process, but to have the site as a ready reckoner was useful. So I got all the materials done, printed and it all worked like a dream. The one thing which I faced an 'issue' was the understanding of 'empathy' by my audience. It took me a little while to figure that one out - but I know how I will do it in my next session. So, thanks D School for putting this out for people to use...