What is better than design thinking?!

I was able to facilitate plenty of workshops and test out tons of methods with plenty of different participants, so I got a quite good picture on the world of workshops.

When I started using design thinking I was convinced to be able to solve anything with this type of workshop framework.

So I was working by this standard setup.

1. Define the problem: Start by defining the problem or challenge you want to solve.

2. Assemble a team: Bring together a diverse group of people with different skills, experiences, and perspectives to form a team.

3. Empathize with the users: Understand the users’ needs, preferences, and pain points. Conduct user research through interviews, surveys, and observations to gather insights.

4. Define the problem statement: Use the insights gathered from user research to create a problem statement that defines the problem and the user's needs.

5. Ideate solutions: Generate as many ideas as possible. Encourage wild ideas and defer judgment to ensure all ideas are considered.

6. Prototype: Develop a low-fidelity prototype that represents the proposed solution. The prototype could be a sketch, a storyboard, or a physical model.

7. Test and iterate: Test the prototype with the users and gather feedback. Use this feedback to improve the prototype and iterate the solution until it meets the users’ needs and solves the problem.

When I tried to use it on not customer facing problems and on more technical problems or even on management workshops I faced some challenges in the framework itself. Point 3 was sometimes really hard to work with when you tried to solve infrastructure challenges for example. Point 6. and 7 had their problems also and not even start to talk about the challenge to try bringing infrastructure engineers into a "user first and sketch your solutions" mindset!

So I was thinking what is the core advantage of design thinking and why do I like it so much and what could I use?

I came up with this list of advantages:

• you have a structured way to approach a problem

• it can be learned and is really well applicable when you do it more often as a habit

• you don't spend endless hours and alignment meetings to come to a solution and an alignment

• you are creating a high commitment in the teams which increases the involvement and connection to the product

• you force the team to be visual, with this approach even non tech people can understand and participate in solutions.

• you create a very high transparency on stakeholders and team members

I figured out some of these points are not design thinking special. They are more related to agile which is not surprising because design thinking is a tool within working agile. So I tried to find a way of "how can I make usage of these advantages and increase my possibilities of working like this with teams?"

I discovered https://www.workshopperplaybook.com/ from the one and only Jonathan Courtney and he found exactly what resulted in my biggest breakthrough: There is a framework how EVERY workshop is working well and also increasing the possibilities how to solve any problem!

1. Collect

2. Choose

3. Create

4. Commit

Thinking about it: The collect phase already starts before the workshop. You gather information, data, insights, user needs about the problem you need to solve. You will continue the collect phase within the workshop and everyone participating can give more insights to the team. Goal is to bring everyone on the same page in this dedicated timeframe, so you are not only focusing on user needs anymore, you are free which information you need to bring to solve the problem. (of course it doesn't harm to keep the Design Thinking spirit and try to start everything from the users perspective first)

Then you move on to choose because in most problems there are so many other problems within, you need to focus on one part or the most important one. The create part stays as you know it - you will come up with solutions!

In the end you have the commit part, here you will already lay out next steps and responsibilities so everyone can start right away on the next steps.

What is the advantage?

If you follow this framework your possibilities will increase because you are not stuck anymore to design thinking specific methods, you will think much broader and you can use nearly each method from the agile workshop toolbox and set up own workshop types. When you set up a workshop and stick to this framework it is quite easy because you only need to think about which methods will help you the best in moving on in each of the 4 steps.

Let's have an example:

You figured out a problem you like to tackle.

Collect:

You start collecting what you know about the users, which data you have, which questions your team has, anything connected to the topic. So align your team on the knowledge needed so they have the full picture. Then you start coming up with problems the teams identifies in all this information which needs to be solved regards the challenge. You might cluster and let the team present and exchange on the pains each participant brought up. So the goal is to align and set the stage to move on into the next step of choose

Choose:

Now you will set the direction and the scope of the workshop. Just remind its not possible to solve everything at once and you want to start iterative to learn and adapt agile. To solve the choose step you might use dotvoting or other deciding methods from the agile toolbox.

Create:

In this step you will solve the problem you picked. If you can create wireframes of the actual interface you might pick methods which have more visual outcomes. If you need a concept you might choose methods which have more concept outcomes like the "concept poster" or "round robin" - you can also have first a concept part and then a wireframing part this depends on the time you want/need to spend. You just need to know what is your needed outcome and which methods will serve you the best to get the needed results.

Commit:

As said, this is the final wrap up: You agree with everyone on the solution and what are needed next steps. You might come up with written down next steps and defining responsibilities.

Here is a workshop framework I use quite often to solve a lot of different problems, mostly I start with the template of mine and exchange sessions to achieve my needed goal. Here I added a session called "lightning demo" in the create phase to broaden the horizon of the participants on competition or solutions which solve the problem in other products. To prepare the commit phase I use an effort/impact matrix so people can have an informed and aligned decision how to commit. The outcome of this workshop is a mapped list of ideas the team will tackle next, prioritised on impact and effort. It is a great session for aligning next topics with the team and stakeholders.

Here the same framwork optimised on a wireframe outcome to move on with prototyping afterwards.

My conclusion:

If you stop thinking in boxes of design thinking or other workshop types you will unlock a huge world of possibilities and a modular world of building blocks to create your very own workshop formats.

Design Thinking is a marketing term which has advantages to use in expectation management but can also be harmful when people had bad experience with design thinking.

Try to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of methods to you can handle them on point and create all the time your very own Collect, Choose, Create, Commit workshop. If one method is not working, replace it with another one and try it out again.