Never heard of design thinking? Neither had I until a few weeks ago…
I recently attended Naked Ambition’s one-day bootcamp focusing on the basic principles of this method of thinking and learning how to apply them to business.
In a nutshell, design thinking is:
Human centric and places the customers needs first
Creative and collaborative
About being a curious, experimental and flexible problem solver
Embracing the unknown and even FAILURE (not a scary word!!!)
The workshop was a crash course in the basic framework and process of design thinking. This method can be applied to new product development, improving policies and procedures in the workplace, improving customer experience….where there’s a problem, design thinking can be used to fix it.
We learned the four key steps in design thinking:
Discover: This first stage is all about research. What is working? What isn’t? This can be done through interviews, surveys, or you can gather your team together to workshop the issue.
Define the problem by having each member write down on a post it note what they believe the issue is. Collectively combine everyone’s thoughts into one clear, concise problem to solve. Give everyone the chance to be heard!
Develop potential solutions through tests and prototyping. In our workshop, we made flow charts as a form of paper prototypes and used lego pieces to create mock models of products. Role playing is also a great way to test ideas. It’s all about being hands on, creative and working as a team to deliver the best solution possible.
Deliver the solution! This is where you should accept and WELCOME the idea of failure. You may have to revisit a few phases if your first ideas don’t work.
I seriously had THE BEST day with Naked Ambition and would highly recommend this method and their work with it to anyone looking to shake things up in their work! These guys have an impressive client list including Commonwealth Bank, North Melbourne Football Club, Loreal, CBUS and Uber to name a few. Naked Ambition was also founded by mega-boss lady, Fiona Triaca so you’ll be supporting a woman in business too.
I’m certainly implementing this into my services that I provide with social media consulting.
The great news is that Naked Ambition run workshops on the regular, so do yourself a favour and book your spot!
