Category Archives: EP News
ExperiencePoint news and announcements.
LEAD Tennessee’s Change Management Summit
PARTNER SPOTLIGHT
Dr. Rick Brandt, TalentQuest Consulting Services
In April 2010, TalentQuest began working with the State of Tennessee to support its LEAD Tennessee initiative, a new leadership development program designed to address the challenges of the new millennium. In addition to conducting before- and- after 360 assessments on the program’s participants, we developed content for the program and facilitated much of it. At the year-long program’s core was six day-long summits, each of which was focused on a different leadership topic. Having successfully utilized ExperiencePoint’s ExperienceChange simulation tool with several other clients, I was eager to find a way to incorporate it into the LEAD Tennessee program.
Experiencing Design Thinker: Experience Innovation
FABULOUS FACILITATORS
Drew Marshall, Primed Associates, LLC
Having run the Design Thinker: Experience Innovation simulation a number of times I continue to be both amazed and delighted by the power of design thinking in action in transforming skeptical minds. Coming from a background where rational, left-brain thinking was the order of the day, and the way in which that often hampered creativity, I have witnessed how the framework for innovation revealed through the simulation challenges people to think differently about their own approaches.
Design Thinker wins Gold at Edison Awards!
We’re very excited to share that ExperiencePoint’s Design Thinker, a simulation that builds innovation skills to solve business challenges, received the Gold Award for Best New Product at the 2011 Edison Awards Gala held in New York City on April 5, 2011. Design Thinker was honored in the Living, Working & Learning Environments category.
Got Innovation?
To succeed in a future we cannot yet grasp, we must re-think thinking.
In the past week, my son and I made balloon animals on my phone. I checked in for my Vancouver flight online and, the next day, received a reassuring text message with updated departure and gate information. Thanksgiving was saved when I learned how to make gravy on YouTube. I discovered via a podcast that “Mutually Assured Destruction” kept us safe during the Cold War, and via Facebook that my Cold War era classmate is excited about her new flatware.
We all have similar stories. Yet we’re so immersed in this rapidly evolving modernity that we can lose sight of our time’s singular truth – our worlds have become hyper accessible and interactive in ways that none could have predicted.
When today’s leaders look forward into this complexity to divine the next breakthroughs, they do so with an alarmingly high assumption-to-knowledge ratio, one that effectively undermines traditional analysis and business thinking. To quote Rita McGrath of Columbia Business School, “it is increasingly difficult to plan by extrapolating from a platform of past experience.”
So how do we prepare for a future we cannot yet fully grasp? One approach is to learn “Design Thinking”.
The design profession is focused on creating innovative solutions that are by definition outside of our experience. As a consequence, Design Thinking (and its manifest methods and tools) is optimized for the purposeful discovery of possibilities amidst complexity. Designers don’t predict the future so much as they quickly learn their way into novel solutions that are simultaneously desirable, technically feasible, and financially viable.
Start here.
© 2009 IDEO
Design Thinking has helped deliver safe drinking water in Africa, create category revitalizing products for P&G, improve the quality and accuracy of patient care in hospitals, increase commitment among casual blood donors, and much, much more.
And what’s the best way to learn Design Thinking? One must experience it.
Therefore ExperiencePoint knew we had a role to play in the democratization of Design Thinking. We sought out the leader in the field, IDEO, a global consultancy that “creates impact through design” and over the past year have worked in partnership to create an energizing game that introduces the essentials of Design Thinking.
The result is “Design Thinker”. In this workshop experience, competing teams flex their Design Thinking skills to solve a realistic and complex challenge. In so doing, they engage with the terms, techniques, and thought patterns of designers. Participants leave ready and able to affect meaningful change back on-the-job.
We are excited to share Design Thinker with the world and will be making it available in January 2010. We hope you will be among those who join us in this re-think of thinking. The world will be the better for it.
ExperiencePoint at LEEF conference on June 18
Toronto, Canada – ExperiencePoint is pleased to announce its participation in the 2009 Learning and Entertainment Evolution for Simulations and Performance conference at Harrisburg University on June 18th and 19th.
ExperiencePoint co-founder and Principal, Greg Warman, is scheduled to present “Lakeview: a case in building faster, better, and cheaper simulations”.
The Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum (LEEF) is a cross-industry event designed to inspire innovation and introduce new knowledge and techniques that can improve the results of learning initiatives. LEEF brings together learning leaders, entertainment developers, designers of leading-edge technologies, business decision makers, creative entrepreneurs, and researchers who are focused on using emerging and experimental technologies to improve performance and enhance learning.
Further details can be found at the official conference website.
