Design Thinking Applied to the Company
Background
All great innovators and creatives have their own recipe for achieving inspiration. Geniuses such as Einstein, Dalí, Edison, Jobs or Bezos approach the creative process more as a routine than as a moment of sudden inspiration.
Design Thinking is a methodology for generating collective thinking that originated at Stanford University (California, USA) in the 1970s from the studies of David Kelley. This methodology grew in the shadow of Silicon Valley, developing innovations as unique as the first Apple mouse, designed from a roll-on deodorant concept (David and Jobs would later become close friends and promoters of innovation).
The boom of Design Thinking is not based on being fashionable, but on the fact that… it really works! Major companies such as IBM, Salesforce, Capital One, Cisco, Panasonic, and many others train their innovation departments in these types of techniques that generate real innovation.
Method
The Design Thinking methodology brings together multidisciplinary profiles to generate innovation as a group. As a result, the team becomes more cohesive and learns to solve new problems in a creative and structured way.
The team learns to face and solve new challenges together, whether related to corporate communication or the development of a new production line.
Objectives
The fundamental objective is to improve the company’s innovation processes by applying Design Thinking techniques. At the same time, we will also achieve the following:
- Encourage teamwork.
- Create company culture.
- Enjoy learning and applying innovation.
Who is it for?
This course is extremely practical. There is no sitting and listening to theoretical lectures. Here you learn by doing, and there will be no place where you can avoid actively participating in your team’s conclusions.
However, in order to ensure high-quality results, it is recommended to include one of the following profiles in each group:
Executive profiles:
They will provide the resources and authority required for the group to implement the measures resulting from the course. They are often surprised by how creative their teams can be when they step back (the facilitators will ensure this).
Technical profiles (for example, engineers):
They will ensure that the design is feasible and meets the necessary technical requirements.
User profiles:
These are the operational staff at the end of the process for whom the measures are intended and on whom the implementation of these measures will directly depend.
Deliverables
Each team taking the course will work on a real problem from the company.
| Day | Description | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| I | Session I: Empathy | 2 h |
| II | Session II: Ideation + Session III: Prototyping | 4 h |
| III | Session IV: Presentation of Results + Session V: Iteration and Evaluation | 2 h |
Conclusion
This is an innovative course without precedent in in-company training. It is aimed at teams using Design Thinking methodologies and based on real challenges within the company.
On the final day, teams will present their work in order to receive feedback and improve their prototypes.
Practical Manual – TeamSchool
What is Design Thinking?
TeamSCHOOL has its own methodology for teams, based on how Design Thinking is taught at the Stanford D-School. It is a creative discipline in which a multidisciplinary group of specialists solves challenges together.
Principles of teamSCHOOL (learning by doing)
- Designed and created for teams: based on collective and constructive thinking.
- Less theory and more practice: only the essential theory, practising with real situations.
- Personalised structure: the final objective is for your team to learn to face its day-to-day challenges independently.
- Activation manual: a personalised implementation guide so that by the end of the exercise the procedure is already implemented and documented.
Programme Objectives
- Apply Design Thinking to improve company processes.
- Understand the concepts of Creativity and Innovation.
- Reflect on the need to integrate creativity and innovation with efficient management.
- Learn and develop skills related to these concepts and apply them to the corporate culture, acting as agents of change.
- Encourage group thinking based on respect and collaborative work.
- Learn and practice with the tools and methodologies used throughout the training sessions to generate ideas.
Results
The facilitators of the workshops are specialists in the field, consultants and lecturers at universities and business schools. In this way we achieve:
- 3x more results than an external consultant, since the insights come from your own team, not from someone hired to evaluate their performance, whom they may perceive as a threat.
- 1/10 of the implementation time, since the team designs procedures while simultaneously implementing them.
How will we do it?
This training programme consists of three sessions, leaving one week of work for the team between each session to carry out fieldwork.
The basic Design Thinking Sprint consists of five stages:
Day 1:
Introduction to group creativity. We will learn how to interview end users and how to search for innovation outside our sector (Empathise).
Day 2:
We will analyse all the information collected during fieldwork and organise it according to what is useful or irrelevant (Define).
We will propose a way to solve the identified needs (Ideate) and quickly present it to the end user to check whether we are on the right path (Prototype).
Day 3:
Time to share the prototypes with the company and the other teams, measure how our proposals work (acting) and ask for suggestions for improvement (Test).
All sessions are structured with a brief theoretical introduction, followed by challenges and group dynamics.
It is important to emphasise that the main objective is to ensure that participants generate new ideas and make meaningful contributions to the innovation processes in which they are currently involved.
An Example
Have you ever worked in a company where each team worked individually and thought that to do the job properly everyone should work as a team?
What do you think would happen if this team participated in one of our teamSCHOOL training programmes?
Below is a practical example of a facade rehabilitation company before and after participating in one of our online marketing training programmes for teams.
Profile | Before | After
Amparo
Community Manager
Before:
Amparo is the community manager and has no idea how a facade rehabilitation project is carried out.
She would like to have images of smiling customers, but she spends her day in the office struggling with the Office software package.
After:
Amparo receives photos of smiling customers via WhatsApp (after signing an authorisation to appear on social media).
The director has provided her with subscriptions to easy-to-use design software that makes her work much easier.
She also now knows that customers choose first based on price and then on quality, so she includes the economic savings clients obtain when hiring the company in every post.
Juan
Facade rehabilitation technician
Before:
He works all day on site, has access to customers and uses his mobile phone in an amateur way to take photos.
He is not aware that he is the face of the company, nor does he know what type of photos the graphic designer needs for publications.
After:
He has learned to take photos suitable for social media and sends them immediately via WhatsApp to Amparo so she can publish them.
During the course he met Don Antonio, took photos with him and posted them on Facebook saying he was “proud to work for a great entrepreneur”.
Don Antonio
CEO
Before:
Founder of the company based on the values of customer savings and satisfaction.
He does not know what tools the community manager needs to do her job or how to connect her with those working directly with clients.
After:
The CEO has gained peace of mind. He knows he has an efficient team to deal with this new information society and fully trusts them.
Since the course, he visits construction sites more often, understanding that it is beneficial for everyone.
His visibility has increased thanks to social media, he has more clients and more motivation to face new challenges.
Conclusion
A team that solves a challenge together gains confidence and becomes capable of tackling any new challenge.
Unlike individual training courses, the knowledge acquired by the group becomes company culture, which is the number one objective of HR departments.
How to Identify Real Challenges Within the Company
Think about a project in your work.
Within this project, what specific difficulties are you encountering?
Choose difficulties that:
- Involve other people.
- Need to be addressed in the coming weeks.
- Can be solved with a product or service (nothing overly technical or complex).
Write at least 3 challenges.
What can we design for _____________________________________
______________________________ (specific group of people)
that helps them / that makes them (choose one) ____________________
______________________________ (physical action or mindset change)
