A threefold increase in the popularity of the term “Design Thinking” (DT) in the past five years.
Why? You may ask?
By the advent of Design Thinking, a philosophical upheaval occurred in ways we solved problems. You can deem Design Thinking as Problem-Solving 2.0.
To illustrate my point, let me use a more sensical analogy. You can compare DT vs prior methods to the difference between the first iPhone and the prior mobile phones.
In case you want to know about the differences between the two, we talk extensively about them here in this article. To summarize,
Design thinking is a philosophy to internalize and a mindset to adopt. It is about structuring our thought process to understand and define the problem, conceptualize, actualize and test solutions. In contrast, ‘design sprint’ is a methodological process, based on design thinking, which tackles and solves the problems in the most efficient way within a specific time range.
This year we’ve had this chance to work with over 10 organizations of different sizes and run Design Sprint (DS) workshops for them. This is an introspective article which we’ve reflected on our experiences.
The Design Sprint Workshop we run for Redi School Berlin
It’s a missed opportunity to start a Design Sprint Workshop where its goal hasn’t be defined precisely. This is especially a bottleneck for sprints involving multi departments /organizations where it’s difficult to align on goals with decision-makers prior to the actual workshop.
Let me unpack it. Bear with me.
Design Sprint is all about getting works done together, INDIVIDUALLY. It’s based on time-bounded sessions, thinking by yourself, taking notes, sketching and voting. There’s no space for extensive discussion. And if there’s, at some point during the discussion, you’d get the frowning look from the facilitator who wants to cut the cord.
An ideal frowning look for a facilitator. Cute and expressive!
If there’s a discussion, you miss deadlines. You get behind the timeline of the day and you cannot follow the process. No one’s happy here.
Therefore, if you enter the workshop having few directions in your mind to pursue, then this is an alarming signal.
Before committing to a Design Sprint workshop, it shall be clear to you the aim of the workshop. If your client has already done the discovery phase, then they’re down with few directions. Then you’d require a 2 to 4-hour workshop to break down each direction and prioritize them. The top candidate would grant permission to the DS workshop. In the worst-case scenario, you can bring the top 2 candidates and let the DS participants vote on them.
If no discovery phase was executed, you’re facing decision-makers having fuzzy ideas in their mind, then that’d call for a Design Thinking workshop.
“Why do we prefer to run a Design Thinking workshop versus Design Sprint in this case?”
Design Thinking workshop tends to be less strict when it comes to discussions and time-bounded activities, and that’s what we love about it. It’s great for the discovery phase of a design project in which we want to understand the nature of our ideas. If you want us to write on how we conduct such workshops, highlight this note.
We’ve seen our colleagues run Design Sprint with 3, 5, 9, and 10 participants. For us, the golden number for the participants is 7. That’s the number we’re comfortable to work with. Some prefer 5. Find your number. Unfortunately, you don’t have so many options; it’s either 5 or 7. Any other number of participants per facilitator is proven to be ineffective.
We used to run Design Sprint within a few days after signing the contract. Over time we learned this is not the wisest act. You want to lay that intentional buffer to have enough time to hash out all the details. As a facilitator, here are some of the things you have to think before the workshop
D.1 Booking the location and catering
D.2 Making sure everyone dietary preferences included
This is crucial. we’ve been in workshops that we thought it was fantastic but it turned out to be sub-optimal based on the feedback and we were in workshops thinking it has gone south but it turned out to be great as to the feedback.
Have a feedback slide only for that. Make the feedback anonymous. This feedback is priceless to improve your work.
We hope these key points gave you an out-of-body experience. If you like what you read, contact us and share your feedback.
☎️ Talk to us in case you want to know how you can run a workshop for your organization. We’re here to help.
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