Getting Started With Design Thinking: 4 Reasons Why You Need Immersive Training
May 23, 2019 | Simulations
by ExperiencePoint

Getting Started With Design Thinking: 4 Reasons Why You Need Immersive TrainingYou’ve decided you want to give design thinking a try when tackling your team’s next project. Great. This is your chance to prove how engaging with customers, brainstorming ideas, and building iterative prototypes will lead to better, faster, and most cost effective product designs that your customers will love.

The big question now is how to get started? One way to begin is with an immersive design thinking workshop, guided by a facilitator, who can help lead the team through the design thinking process, and guide the implementation of this new skill set.

Why is a facilitated and experiential workshop key to getting your organization ramped-up and started on its design thinking journey? Here are just 4 reasons:

  1. Order out of chaos. Have you ever had a brainstorming session go off the rails, or worse, come to a standstill? Or maybe you’ve generated a whole lot of big ideas but then you aren’t sure what to do next. These are common problems for new design thinkers, and a facilitator can help with that. He or she will keep the process on track, from empathy to launch, guiding your team along the way to the finish line, and pulling them back on course when their ideas stray, or they lose the creative mojo that keeps this whole operation running.

  2. A new perspective. Many teams are just too close to whatever problem or challenge they’re trying to solve, and run into a wall called “not seeing the forest for the trees.” A guided workshop can ask questions of the team that will lead it out of that forest, opening your team’s eyes to ideas that will provide a fresh take on an old problem. And that’s really at the heart of design thinking — opening yourself up to new possibilities.

  3. A neutral, impartial perspective. Oh, office politics, we wish you would go away. But you won’t. Many team members can get caught up in simmering tensions and hidden agendas when they’re working together, and a design thinking session isn’t immune to that. Jenny doesn’t want to support Joe’s idea because it will look good for Joe; and Joe is going to “yes but” every idea Jenny has for the same reason. A neutral party facilitating the sessions can help diffuse those kinds of tensions.

  4. A guiding hand. If team members stray off into the stratosphere, or inject negativity into the process, it’s great to have a “bad cop” who isn’t part of the team to get things back on track. This is especially important in the ideation phase, where it is critical to give all the team members a safe place to contribute ideas, however wacky they might seem. Many people, introverts especially, hesitate to contribute at first, and naysayers’ constant shooting down of ideas doesn’t help. This is where a facilitator will truly shine.

Introducing your team to design thinking can be challenging at first, but a workshop guided by an expert facilitator who knows the process inside and out can ease those challenges and get your team to on to the business of creative problem solving.

 

Learn how to enable innovation skill-building at scale here or download our free ebook Kickstart Innovation: A Guide for Organizations.