Remote Design Thinking Tools and Tips to Transform Your Meetings
It’s clear: The most productive meetings start with a clear plan, proper facilitation skills, and the right remote design thinking tools and tips to get the job done. Statistics show that the secret to running exciting virtual meetings is in how the meeting is planned, as 64% of meeting-goers get excited about well-planned meetings.
With the right approach and process, you’ll understand the key to planning and running well-structured meetings.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
- Running Remote Design Thinking Meetings
- The Role of a Remote Facilitator
- Design Thinking Facilitation Tips
- Remote Design Thinking Tools
- Learn to Run Magical Meetings
- What to Expect From a Magical Meeting Workshop
Running Remote Design Thinking Meetings
Remote design thinking meetings use design thinking as a framework for virtual sessions. Running remote design thinking meetings is an innovative way to harness your team’s creative energies, improve processes, and kickstart collaboration, all while running a meeting online.
With the proper remote design thinking tools and processes, you can facilitate meetings that encourage limitless brainstorming and provide you or your team with a way to collect and test their ideas.
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The Role of a Remote Facilitator
Remote facilitators face the unique challenge of hosting engaging sessions online. Whether you’ve facilitated remote sessions before or you’re new to the role, it’s important to fully understand what your job entails to see how you can strengthen your skills. As a facilitator, it’s your responsibility to manage the discussion, encourage ideation from each participant, and find buy-in for your desired outcomes.
When it comes to running remote sessions, facilitators must have a clear understanding of curating, managing, and facilitating “group processes.” This means that you’ll assess how your group functions throughout the meeting, bolster their understanding of design thinking and refine their approach to problem-solving.
Design Thinking Facilitation Tips
As you take on the task of remote facilitation, it’s essential to have a clearly-defined structure. A properly planned design thinking session requires the facilitator to identify the group’s deliverables and the best way to make sure those deliverables are achieved.
When preparing for a remote design thinking session, be sure to:
Plan the Structure
Well-facilitated sessions have a clear and concise structure. Whether you have a small or large group, ironing out a structured process is the best way to ensure everyone participates, generates ideas, and achieves the desired goals.
Create the Agenda
The agenda is the written format of what will occur in the meeting.
As you put your agenda together consider the following:
- The order you’ll present topics
- Icebreakers and activities to encourage discussion and conversation
- Prioritizing issues to reach consensus
- Time allocation
- Organizing break-out groups
- Selecting next action steps
- Closing the meeting
Control the Event
In addition to pinpointing the process and the agenda, the next step in expert facilitation is to understand your direction in guiding and controlling the session.
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It is important to be clear as to why we are having this meeting and what type of meeting it is. This template helps to rename our meetings and consider the value they bring.
Gain more control by:
- Sharing the ground rules
- Setting the scene/environment: make sure everyone understands their roles
- Encouraging the flow of conversation with appropriate icebreakers
- Keep the energy going to keep people focused
- Listen, include, engage, and actively listen to ensure all participants are participating
- Monitor checkpoints to stay on top of the agenda. Tell participants what achievements have been made and summarize to identify the next steps
Record and Take Action
Facilitators are also responsible for recording information from the session, sharing the data, and ensuring they are actioned. Record outputs successfully by understanding what needs to be recorded and delegating the role to someone. Moreover, ensure all participants can see, hear, and understand the information.
A note-taker can be a helpful addition to help keep the group on task. Likewise, take photos and screenshots of your brainstorming notes or use whiteboard apps like Mural.
Reflect and Improve
It’s essential to reflect on your performance following a design thinking session. Consider asking for feedback or enrolling in a Magical Meetings Workshop to improve your skills and process for your future sessions.
Remote Design Thinking Tools
Remote design thinking tools are essential to running a design thinking session. Facilitators use these tools to ensure that meetings are run effectively and productively. With the right tools, facilitators and their teams can refine their processes, generate new ideas, develop user research, and arrive at the most appropriate solutions.
The right remote design thinking tools help to organize the entire process. Whether you need tools to refine the agenda or manage all team members remotely, the right tools will help you do so.
If you’re running a design thinking meeting, consider the following tools for each phase of the session:
1. Empathize: The team must relate to the end-users’ needs.
The best tools:
2. Define: The team must decide how to define and solve the problem.
The best tools:
3. Ideation: The ideation phase involves creative brainstorming where team members sketch their ideas and share their designs.
The best tools:
4. Prototype: The team will work on prototypes to create basic versions of the product.
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5. Test: The testing phase tests the prototypes with your end-user. Ultimately, this phase will lead to a viable product and a launch-ready item.
The best remote design thinking tools for the entire process:
Learn to Run Magical Meetings
If your meetings need more purpose or passion, it’s time to redesign the way you gather. The Voltage Control Magical Meetings Workshop introduces the most essential remote design thinking tools and skills to give you the power to lead a truly magical meeting.
