As a Product Strategy Consultant and Design Thinking practitioner, I have shaped and facilitated hundreds of workshop sessions.
Some were innovation sprints, some design, others simpler working sessions or fresco-sized mappings of a service (user journey, business processes, systems) to identify opportunities to create value.
All required empathy, and an adjusting of classic activities to fit the goals of the session. This collection is all about how to be a better facilitator, various workshop activities, and generally using the design thinking approach in real life.
Time to read: 3 minutesToday I had a Miele repairperson visit, and as I was rolling away the rug from in front of the washing machine, I thought… “I should wipe those breakfast crumbs”. My mother’s voice was in my head. 🤦♀️ “If it is clean and orderly, visitors will respect the space. If it is a mess, they […] continue reading »
Time to read: 5 minutesI love travelling. Something about being above the clouds, or the buzz of the airport, or just seeing new things, all make my hippocampus and other bits of my brain happily buzz. And typically, I will sit down, make a list of things to pack, and go off and pack them. In two waves. Night […] continue reading »
Time to read: 9 minutesIn June 2017, I was hired for a few days by a consultancy to help with a design thinking workshop they were running for a client. They needed to run it with 80 participants, and to make it work they’d split them up into cabaret tables of 8, each with a facilitator… who needed to […] continue reading »
Time to read: 4 minutesI’ve just spent six weeks on a completely insane project. The aspect I want to write about is how this insane project had no scope for (or understanding of) user testing, even though we needed to do some. And this article is about three “hacks” I devised to get some user feedback regardless of what […] continue reading »