Building Creative Confidence: How we used Design Thinking to improve....... our Design Thinking Workshops!
Back in April 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, I got together with colleague Dr. Gill Stevens to discuss what we could do together to support small businesses facing dramatic Covid-19 restrictions to their usual business operation.
We came up with a series of online offerings, ranging from 75-minute introductory sessions to Design Thinking, through to 3-day virtual Sprints, taking participants from customer empathy and problem definition to prototyping and testing. We raced to get these events to market, repurposing content that we normally used in a face-to-face environment, storyboarding the flow and timings, and practicing our routines together on Zoom.
Within a few weeks, the prototype sessions we had built were being tested and conducted (also on Zoom of course!) to make them accessible, collaborative and mostly free to attend.
After a month, we had already had some great feedback, and some harsh lessons too:
Attendees found our free sessions on Zoom super easy to join and learn from, but an equal number who signed up in advance never showed on the day. We learned that, for lots of design thinking newbies, the process actually started with overcoming the shock and even paralysis that being closed down as a business was having on them as a person. That could make it hard just to follow through on accepting help – something I had often seen and heard in healthcare, but not so much in commerce.
‘Zoom fatigue’ – yes, it’s a real thing! As the weeks rolled by, and more and more business meetings, events and social get-togethers happened online, people began to realise how exhausting Zoom meetings can be. All that intense eye-contact, coupled with seeing yourself on-screen all the time can feel stressful and make us feel self-critical. In addition, being seated and not moving around as much as usual adds to a feeling of confinement and a yearning to stretch and loosen up. (We’ve since adapted to encourage attendees to have “cameras-off” breaks to counteract this).
Shorter sessions on narrow topics win out – as Design Thinking enthusiasts, we were keen to convey as much of the end-to-end process to attendees as possible. Our rationale was that by providing sight of all the tools-in-the-box, we would give them better clarity of what’s involved. But in practice, we got better feedback when we focused on a single process step, such as Ideation, and gave participants interactive time to get hands-on with trying it out (something that Design Thinking innovator Dr. Pavan Soni describes as an “act of disciplined play.”)
Working with strangers can be liberating – the majority of our 2020 workshops were public events, bringing together people who had never met before. We were a little apprehensive about this initially, fearing that different levels of experience and knowledge might make the interactive breakouts intimidating for some. Yet, feedback suggested the opposite – that our Zoom environment and playful atmosphere felt like a safe space to explore ones’ own ‘creative confidence’.
In January 2021, Gill and I took a step back to review what we’d created, the feedback we had received and where we saw the need for future Design Thinking support.
We defined our central ‘How Might We’ statement as:
“How might we use the Design Thinking approach to help organisations progress from crisis innovation to more everyday creative confidence?”
We launched an updated series of public workshops, to coincide with World Creativity & Innovation Week in April 2021. These discrete, 1-hour creative sessions were aimed at teaching problem-solving techniques that could inspire potential solutions. The goal of the sessions was to build creative confidence amongst participants and introduce people to ways of thinking that stretched their creative capacity. We chose problem statements that anyone attending a session could relate to, e.g. How might we encourage children to read more? or How might we encourage people to use public transport more? Happily, we found that by using these broad, abstract problems, people were able to participate and contribute, and not feel disadvantaged because they lacked contextual knowledge.
Our creative techniques in the sessions includes the totally freewheeling ‘creative storytelling’ where each person took on the persona of a character (often extravagantly interpreted by attendees!) producing much hilarity and interesting ideas. Alongside this, we used the more structured SCAMPER approach - an acronym that guides participants to challenge existing solutions, recombining and adapting its elements along the way.
By running such workshops dedicated solely to the middle step of Ideation in the design thinking process, we also shifted our own practice beliefs in how the overall approach could be applied more flexibly than the traditional linear design we had ourselves been schooled in.
We encouraged participants to be more inquisitive about their work and home environments, perhaps starting with an idea, or an existing solution to a known problem, and looping backwards and forwards to other steps in design thinking often more than once.
In doing so, we were able to free attendees from seeing design thinking as a highly structured process, that required a formal programme to achieve end-results. It opened the door for more routine evaluation of ‘the way we do things here’ and of seeking out places and spaces to try some creative confidence work with colleagues.
We also began running these workshops for clients, in one case delivering two sessions in a single day for an organisation where the end-of-session reflective review again highlighted how much they valued an atmosphere of openness - where ideas are welcomed instead of feared.
Indeed, some of the ideas from that client session included suggestions for adapting the Ideation techniques themselves! Our own key takeaway was to trust the process from which ideas will flow, whilst still not being afraid to experiment in the moment; to pivot and adapt – the very essence of a creative mindset.
Perhaps the most heartening feedback from our client session was the enthusiasm and intent to take the latent creative confidence that attendees had awoken within themselves back to their workplace and keep it alive! They felt that such a mindset would be a positive change in their workplace culture, and something that others could embrace 😇.
If you would like to build more creative confidence in your colleagues and organisation, as well as how creative thinking can be integrated into your business culture, then please get in touch at info@customerfaithful.com - we’d love to share our ideas and continue the conversation.
Design Thinking for Creative Confidence is a collaborative programme by Customer Faithful and Level7.
Gill Stevens, Founding Director of Level7 focuses on merging coaching with design thinking methodology to support innovation and team productivity.
Rick Harris is Founder of Customer Faithful - a research-led consultancy, specialising in customer research, proposition design and employee engagement.