Effective Tips to Plan an Awesome Design Thinking Workshop

Design Thinking workshops are an innovative and user-centric approach of problem solving that is being extensively used across businesses. The workshops get together people from different teams to work towards a common goal.

What is a Design Thinking workshop and what are its benefits?

Design thinking workshops are activity-based workshops built around design thinking concepts that may last up to two hours or even a full week depending upon the goals. These workshops focus on developing empathy to understand the user end problems. The participants work together to generate innovative ideas to solve problems in their perspectives. Building prototypes of the ideas generated and testing on real user will be the final step.

These workshops benefit the participants by teaching them various techniques of problem solving, fostering innovations and teamwork. These activities can guarantee the participants to secure a competitive advantage. Besides all these, a design thinking workshop as well as a creativity and innovation workshop is extremely fun and engaging activities.

If you are planning to organize design thinking or a creativity and innovation workshop, continue reading to find out the effective ways to implement the same.
The workshop setting up can be done in two phases. The first phase, the planning and preparation phase involves setting up objectives for your workshop, finding the suitable location, planning the agenda and gathering up all the materials.

The second phase is the execution phase, which details the agenda listed in the phase one with integrated time slots for a one-day workshop.

1. Introduction and briefing (15 minutes)
2. Ice-breaker activity(20 minutes)
3. Introduction to design thinking(20 minutes)
4. Empathy building activity (1 hour)
5. Defining a problem(1 Hour)
6. Ideation phase (2 hours)
7. Prototyping (1 hour)
8. Debrief(15 minutes)

So, if you are planning to set up a workshop, then ponder on the plan given above. And if you have more points to add on, do so and make your workshop more innovative and fun. Connect with your team to know more about what they are expecting from your sessions and how to make it more effective.

Is Creativity and Innovation Training Essential for Millennials?

We are now dealing with millennials and this generation shift is affecting the way consumers behave and their attitude towards everything. Millennials hold a good percentage in the market as both customers and employees. They are difficult to attract because of their knowledge, connectivity, attitude, and perspective. With them being very impatient and moving jobs very often, there are great chances of you losing your employee talent very quickly, if you do not keep up with the changing technology and minds.

What does the market say?

Many millennials are open to the idea of leaving their current job very quickly because they want quick results and growth. They expect more transparency from their employers and their involvement in business decisions. The concept of storytelling workshops works well with them to make them aware of your policies and how they are working for them, and to show that you are listening to them.

Most of the companies have this generation as the face of the company on the frontend levels. They have good knowledge of technology and good sense of innovation. The companies should try to leverage their skills by organizing creativity and innovation training sessions. With great technology and availability of multiple options, many companies are now trying to attract this fresh talent by offering flexible working hours and other such arrangements to make sure their employees stick to them for long tenure.

Why training millennials is important?

They are more familiar with the world of technology improvements, policies, and are personally attached with the brands. They constantly keep moving and re-evaluating their work to ensure they are meeting their goals. It is important for companies to anticipate technology and industry changes through research. They should keep innovating with the help of creativity and innovation training sessions to stay in the market. Since you have millennials as your employees and customers both, you have a tough job to keep yourself prepared for new things ahead of time.

It is important to get in touch with the customers and employees personally. Storytelling workshops can be a best way to collect feedback or experiences to understand the areas of opportunity and improve. This technique would help employees to connect with customers, understand their issues and create amazing experiences with their storytelling skills.

Explore the web to know more about corporate trainings and workshops you can organize at your company.

Does Design Thinking Workshops Really Impact Your Business Processes and Its Performance?

Design thinking workshops set the ground for collaborating innovative minds, encouraging user-centric mindset to generate ideas and prototyping the innovative solutions. These workshops are indeed a platform where each stage of business processes, be it marketing, production or sales, is benefitted.

Why design thinking workshop is needed?

According to author Roger Martin, in his book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the next Competitive Advantage, in traditional organization reliability-oriented managers depend upon reliability based upon historical data. He says that reliability-based thinking is old fashioned and traditional that contributes only to a marginal improvement to the status Quo. Thus, innovative future companies must include design thinking workshops in each of its business processes. Entailing design thinking workshops in your business processes saves your marketing time and retain your customers there by accounting to a major cost saving.

How does design thinking workshops benefit your organization (or your clients)?

Design thinking workshops are arranged to make your employees think how can they do things differently. Pairing these workshops with a creativity and innovation workshop is a perfect idea to encourage innovation in current business processes. How does this improve your overall productivity is what we are going to list out:

• Problem solving. As we all know, the foremost approach for any innovation is to analyze the existing problems. The design thinking workshops set the stage for the participants to come up with different innovative solutions for the problems.

• Out-of-the-box thinking. Different people have different ways of seeing a problem. A design thinking workshops nurture this skill of participants. The participants are encouraged to think above their assumptions. Thus, new ideas seed the innovation and also help in collaborating like-minded people.

• Ground-breaking innovations. The creative and innovation workshops teach the participants to think creatively. Arranging design thinking workshop with creativity and innovation workshop motivates employees to think creatively and its subsequent results add a competitive edge to your business. After all, all you want is your organization to stand apart from others, and innovation is the key to it.

How does the workshops work?

The design thinking workshops involve the following stages:

• Workshops initially involve collaborating innovative ideas and brainstorming the potential ideas.

• User is the king. The workshops analyses the current user experience and think about various ways to improve it.

• The team alignment. Sharing different perspectives and coming to a common understanding is what makes a good team.

• Prototyping. Of course, the next stage involves converting these concepts to code.

• The final stage of workshop involves discussing pros and cons of the supposed solutions. The design thinking tools help in finding out what motivates people.

Explore a range of courses online and prepare your employees for bigger and challenging roles!