The Design Sprint is a staple structure in the world of facilitation for solving big challenges. It’s a five-day process, initially developed at Google Ventures, used for validating ideas and tackling a business problem. The process guides teams through a design-based thinking process to uncover insights, prototype an idea, and test it with users. 

Whether you are preparing to run your own sprint or are going to partake in one as a participant, it is important to know the ins and outs of Design Sprints to get the most out of them. Let’s take a look.

Why Run a Design Sprint?

Design Sprints have multiple functions and benefits. Here are some of the top reasons to run a sprint:

• Align a team around a shared vision.
• Answer critical business questions.
• Discover the essence of a creative challenge or problem.

Cut through endless internal debate by building a prototype on which your customers can give feedback.

When to Run a Design Sprint

Design Sprints are beneficial at various project or product life cycle stages. The following are some excellent times to turn to a sprint:

• When kicking off a new initiative.
• When looking for new breakthrough features for a product.
• When you need to switch gears or iterate on a current product.
• When you haven’t talked to your users enough.

How to Find the Magic

The Design Sprint is a platform/tooling agnostic. It helps companies find the magic and deep value for their end-user before building anything. The sprint helps teams identify their core “jobs to be done,”; what’s most important to focus on, and how to get there.

Think of the Design Sprint process and prototyping as the evolution of Mario in the image below:

The Design Sprint is a process to begin iterating toward your customers’ ideal version of fire-spitting Mario. The end-users experience with your product is the focus–the magic you want to create! Follow-on activities are how you actually build the product and what you build it with. After sprinting, your team will have more confidence in the core value and needs of the end-user before the heavy work of actually building the product.  

The Design Sprint helps us make sure we are building the right thing rather than obsessing on getting the thing exactly right.

Ready to get started? Let our expert facilitators guide you through a design sprint to spark a change in your organization and drive new ideas. Please reach out to hello@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

Focus on Desire

The Design Sprint is targeted at testing desirability–keep this at the forefront of your mind. When you create a simulation of your concept and use it to test your ideal vision, you gain deeper insights into the ideal state and desirability from the end-user. You can then take those insights to the table when you build out the final solution. While it is efficient and a big win when your prototype becomes the initial spec for what you end up building, its primary goal is to answer your questions and gain insights.

While the main focus of a Design Sprint is testing desirability, we certainly don’t want to waste time testing completely infeasible things. At Voltage Control, we recommend including someone in the Design Sprint who understands the logistics (ex: engineer, operations, hardware, software, materials, etc.). A person with relevant insight on logistics can lend a perspective that might inspire others with the confidence they need to explore certain ideas they may have been afraid to approach. This person also serves as a built-in filter to keep the group from wasting time on outlandish, impractical ideas. That said, the facilitator must ensure that the logistics and status quo aren’t stifling innovation but rather informing and directing it. 

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Where to Run a Design Sprint

The five-day sprint was originally developed as an in-person workshop. People come together for an engaging, interactive experience and participate in hands-on, visual, and deep work collaboration. Sticky notes are aplenty, and whiteboards are used to write and sketch out ideas. However, you don’t need to wait to be IRL to undergo a sprint. Remote Design Sprints are also an increasingly popular option due to The Great Pause. With adjustments to cater to the virtual landscape, your team can still experience effective and productive remote collaboration. There are even virtual whiteboards (yes, digital stickies!) and other remote tools to promote visual collaboration just as you would in-person.  

Who Participates in a Design Sprint

Everyone involved in a Design Sprint plays a vital role.

The sponsor is the person with the big idea; they have the vision. They seek to answer: What is the problem you are addressing, and what is your desired outcome? The sprint is designed to build and leverage something that comes closest to the “right thing.” On some occasions, multiple sponsors in an organization champion the Design Sprint to help solve their shared problem. When they have opposing opinions on how best to solve it, it’s super exciting too if one or neither of them is right!

The sprint team is a curation of 7 people who you feel will provide diverse and critical perspectives on the project. Who’s opinion and insight do you value? Who’s voice and input do you need most to get you from point A to point B? Think about who understands the problem deeply. Who has to deal with it on a regular basis? Who will have to implement and support the solution? Who understands the needs of the customers? Who will build your prototype? Who can represent operations and logistics? Who understands the voice of the brand and how to position the solution?  Who understands the finances? Who always figures out how to break things? Who is really creative about breaking the rules? 

Finally, you’ll need to consider a few special roles when planning a Sprint:

The Decider is one of your sprint team members who will make all the critical decisions. Perhaps it is the CEO or a stakeholder; they have the final say. It is their approval you seek to take the generated idea to the next level of integration. Ideally, they will be in the entire Design Sprint. If they can’t make it to the entire sprint, they should proxy to someone else or make sure to attend at key moments when decisions are made. Pro Tip: Good Deciders listen carefully, ask questions of the team, and make swift and concrete decisions.

The Prototyper is one or more of your sprint team members with the skills needed to build your prototype. Depending on the opportunity or challenge you seek to solve, your prototype may take different forms. If you know you are building a mobile app, then you’d want to select a prototyper with UX & UI design skills who is familiar with app prototyping tools like Figma or Invision. If you aren’t quite sure, you’ll want to use a prototyper with deep design skills and diverse prototyping experience to ensure they are ready for anything. 

The Experts are 3-4 people that we invite to join us on Monday so that we can ask them curious questions while we write How Might Statement to unlock potential solution ideas. Curating experts is a great way to include people whose input is crucial but just don’t have enough time to attend the entire sprint. 

The Facilitator is a non-biased and neutral leader who is an expert in facilitation and the Design Sprint process. This person can be internal or external to your organization.

Pro tip: Hire an outside facilitator when dealing with big or sensitive decisions.

They are removed from office politics, making enforcing good behavior from the group easier and protecting the leadership from including a specific agenda. A workshop facilitator increases engagement and positivity in the group, and an outside facilitator is a fresh new face and personality who can help to break old patterns and create new ones for optimum productivity. 

Now that you know the “who, what, when, where, and why’s” of Design Sprints, you are more prepared to utilize the 5-day workshop to tackle your big challenges and ideations. Happy exploration! 

Want to learn more about Design Sprints?

We are here to help you succeed from expert facilitation to in-house training. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com.

We also host regular meetups, boot camps, summits, and virtual workshops–from Professional Virtual Facilitation Training to our annual Control the Room Facilitator Summit. To sign up or learn more.

The post What is a Design Sprint For? appeared first on Voltage Control.

Design thinking workshops are becoming increasingly popular in corporate environments because they force businesses to humanize their approach to solving design-related problems. By leading a design thinking workshop, brands are better able to empathize with user experience and can focus on making innovation part of a human-centered design process. 

What Are Design Thinking Workshops?

Design-centric thinking is leading the way for ground-breaking brands, while those that do not embrace design thinking struggle to find innovative solutions. Too often, brands take an analytic approach to solving their internal or external issues. With a design-centric focus, brands encourage their team members to collaborate with each other to find innovative ideas and unique solutions. 

Despite its moniker, design thinking workshops are for far more than just design teams, as the design thinking process can be employed to overcome business challenges and develop design-based solutions in all departments. Most commonly, though, design thinking principles will be used in workshops for designers as they seek out potential solutions for design projects.

By putting design first in their approach to problem-solving, brands are able to center empathy and put the needs of real users first. If your business isn’t already on board with design thinking, leading a design thinking workshop can serve as a first step, giving your team the opportunity to learn to foster a user-centric mindset and think with design in mind. 

Goals of Your Design Thinking Workshop

The main goal of a design thinking workshop is for teams to create user-focused solutions for design-related problems. As you consider leading your own design thinking workshop, identify a series of goals and keep those central to your planning process.

Consider workshop goals such as:

• Producing groundbreaking ideas
• Cultivating a community in your workplace through collaboration
• Strengthening problem-solving skills
• Generating innovative ideas
• Empowering creative thinking
• Engaging your team

How to Become a Design Thinking Expert

Leading a design thinking workshop takes an expert in design thinking methodology. By taking the time to study and understand design thinking methodology, you can guide your team to creative solutions and make them into design thinkers in their own right. 

Want to make sure your design thinking workshop is led by an experienced facilitator? Work with the experts at Voltage Control. Our team of professional design thinking facilitators will give your team the tools you need to hold design thinking workshops of your own, or they’ll run them for you.

When learning how to facilitate a design thinking workshop, facilitators should understand these six steps to design thinking:

1. Observing and engaging in behavior: Begin by studying your users’ behavior to understand their needs 
2. Ideation: Next, brainstorm on how to meet user needs via divergent thinking
3. Prototype: Rapid prototyping focuses on testing ideas with real people in real-time to get instantaneous feedback
4. Feedback: With your prototype in the hands of the end-user, assess how and why the product meets or fails to meet their needs.
5. Integration: Implement the feedback to improve the design
6. Application: With your newly improved design, it’s time to move forward with the improved product

4 Secrets to Leading a Successful Design Thinking Workshop

If you’re heading up a design thinking workshop for the first time, it can be overwhelming to navigate all the available resources and design thinking tools while keeping the principles of design thinking top of mind. As a facilitator, your job starts with curating and collecting a series of activities to help stimulate the creativity and problem-solving superpowers of your workshop participants.

Pro Tip: We specifically created the Workshop Design Canvas Control Room App to help anyone planning any kind of workshop ease into the art of preparing to facilitate design thinking meetings. This canvas includes learning science, cognition, and facilitation best practice guardrails to help you ensure your design with objectives and participant needs in mind. 

With the right resources to practice leading a design thinking workshop and ample prep time, you can properly prepare your facilitator toolkit.

As you get ready to lead a design thinking workshop, be sure to prepare by:

1. Identifying workshop objectives 

Your objectives are the clear goals you hope to achieve in your design thinking workshop. Whether you’re trying to troubleshoot your existing design or come up with something entirely new, outlining your aims in the objective is the first step. Center your understanding of your target users and their user experience.

2. Choosing a location 

Your design thinking workshop can take place anywhere, whether it’s held virtually or in a physical location like a conference room. If you’re meeting in person, be sure there is enough physical space for the whole team as well as any equipment you may need.

Since this is a workshop for designers, also consider their needs and preferences when it comes to designing together.

3. Creating a workshop agenda

Your agenda should include all the workshop activities that you plan to use. Be sure to leave adequate time in between each activity for your team to engage with each other without burnout from an activity-heavy schedule, as well as clear opportunities for discussion and questions. The design team should be given plenty of time to work through each stage of the design project, as well as break time to regroup and rebuild energy levels.

4. Gathering workshop materials

If you plan to meet physically, gather all the necessary materials for your design thinking workshop, like whiteboards, paper, pens, and anything else you’ll need to complete the activities. 

Design Thinking Facilitator Frameworks

Leading a design thinking workshop begins with using the right facilitator framework. The correct framework will make it easier for you to visually present your ideas to your team as you keep them engaged with easy-to-follow presentations, visually stimulating graphics, and well-executed design that will encourage your team to produce their best work. 

Templates can be utilized to save time and outline design processes like journey mapping and user testing. For example, using MURAL templates for your facilitation framework will help your team remain productive and engaged throughout the collaborative process.

How to Facilitate a Design Thinking Workshop in 4 Steps

As the facilitator, you will be leading the charge into the design thinking workshop. With all your prep in place, it’s time to lead a masterful session that will set the tone of the workshop, encourage creative problem-solving, and ultimately reach your goals for the product. 

Begin your workshop with the right questions to spark thoughtful dialogue. The art of facilitation lies in having the right facilitator questions in your arsenal that will keep your team focused, energized, and ready to brainstorm. The right questions can get your team excited to be active participants who are more likely to contribute creative ideas.

Pro Tip: Asking questions like, “How are we feeling?” and “Why are we here today?” sets a conversational tone and helps to loosen your team up before the work begins. With the creative juices flowing, your team will be ready to collaborate.

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Step One: Diving Into Design Thinking

While your design team is likely already familiar with the concept of design thinking, some may need a refresher course on the subject, especially if you’re working with a cross-functional team. At the start of the workshop, give a brief discussion about what design thinking is, its various phases, and its benefits. With a crash course in the concept of design thinking, everyone on your team will be on the right page. 

Step Two: Empathize With the Audience

As you lead your team headfirst into design thinking, prioritize the empathize stage of the process. This is the best way to humanize the design process and helps your team focus on what the user needs and how to best achieve that. This step is where design thinking tools and activities come into play. 

If you haven’t already developed user personas, this may be a great opportunity to do so. Rich user personas represent the traits and behavioral patterns of the users of your product.

With popular activities like empathy maps and roleplaying, you can help your team identify with the language, feelings, wants, and needs of the audience. Following each activity, be sure to allow your team to ask questions, connect their work with previous stages, and share their findings. 

Step Three: Zeroing In on the Problem and Identifying Solutions

In this step, it’s time to tighten the focus on the problems in user experience. Participants can create problem statements to help guide them through the rest of the workshop. As your team brainstorms possible solutions, lead them through design thinking activities to help them stoke the fire of creativity and arrive at the most innovative solutions. 

Throughout the discussion, push your team towards collaborating for a single refined solution. Ultimately, they should be able to talk about the journey each user will take to solve the same problem on their own. 

Step Four: Closing the Design Thinking Workshop

After a successful workshop following the design thinking methodology, be sure to thoughtfully close the session by describing the next steps and asking follow-up questions. See how the design team feels about the workshop as well as what they learned, and clearly outline any necessary next steps.

Design thinking workshops are powerful and transformative when facilitated well. With a facilitator well-versed in design thinking, the correct facilitation frameworks, engaging activities, and a team filled with passionate collaborators, you’ll be well on your way to leading a successful design thinking workshop at your company. 

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The post The Ultimate Guide to Leading a Design Thinking Workshop appeared first on Voltage Control.

If your team is considering a Design Sprint, you’re probably also considering if the cost is worth it. It’s not just a small, simple 30-minute status meeting after all. A Design Sprint is a five-day process, initially developed at Google Ventures, used for validating ideas and tackling a business problem. Teams are guided through a design thinking process to uncover insights, prototype an idea, and test it with users. Design Sprints help answer important business questions and solve big challenges through design, prototyping, and testing ideas directly with users. Benefits include team alignment (creating a shortcut to the debate cycle), less risk, and the ability to compress months of time into a single week. 

If you are wondering if your team could benefit from a Design Sprint, first check out our article on 5 times you should run a Design Sprint. If and when you decide this is right for you and your team, you’ll need to consider the overall investment cost. In this post, we outline the considerations to take into account and the factors that contribute to the cost of a Design Sprint.

5 Considerations For Investing:

1) Time

This five-day process that requires careful planning. Note: we believe in giving your Design Sprint the full five days and not taking shortcuts. The activities and workshops take up the full five days, not including the pre-planning time, so you’ll want to factor that in. Consider what that means for your team – the participants will need to focus all of their time and attention on the Design Sprint, so their other projects and tasks will either need to be covered by someone else or put on hold for the week. The good news is what happens in a week can be equal to three or even six months of “regular” work.

“Design thinking research can lead to a 75% reduction in design and delivery time, often reducing an 8-month project to 3 or 4 months.” – IBM

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2) Resources

A Design Sprint team is typically made up of seven people who will provide diverse and critical perspectives on the project (including a Facilitator, Decider, Sponsor, some mix of Experts, Prototypers, Designers, Product and Tech leads). As mentioned above, this Sprint team will be fully focused on the Design Sprint over the five days, therefore their time and salary are factors to consider. In addition to time and salary, any other projects they are working on should also be factored into consideration.

3) Complexity

The complexity and impact of the project will also be a factor in the overall cost. For example, redesigning an existing piece of product functionality will likely be more straightforward than conceptualizing net new functionality from the ground up, and therefore requires less planning, time and resources. First decide on what the overarching challenge or question is that you hope to solve by utilizing a Design Sprint. Then you will have a more informed way to determine cost based upon the complexity of that challenge.

4) Expert Facilitators

Another consideration that will factor into the overall cost will be deciding to hire an expert facilitator or using someone internally. Consider bringing in an expert facilitator when dealing with big or sensitive topics. They offer a non-biased opinion, are removed from office politics, and take care of logistics while making sure everyone stays on track. The facilitator’s role is to increase engagement and positivity in the group, and an outside facilitator is a fresh face who can help to break patterns and promote productivity. Alternatively teams can run Design Sprints on their own, if there’s a neutral leader in the group who is well-versed in the process and facilitation.

Looking for someone to run a Design Sprint for you? We can help!

5) In-Person vs. Virtual

A final consideration and cost variable, especially relevant in today’s environment, is if the Design Sprint will be in-person or virtual. Traditionally, they have been held with all participants attending in-person, but they don’t have to be. Virtual Design Sprints can be just as effective but must be treated differently, as they are in a completely different landscape. If you decide to hold the Design Sprint in-person, you’ll need to consider travel, lodging and event costs if everyone is not located in the same place.

If you decide to go the virtual route, we recommend moving at a slower pace and scheduling a series of mini-workshops as opposed to five full days of activities. These mini workshop sessions are built chronologically one after the other. This sequence could happen over the course of four days, or even eight if needed. Combined, they create the complete virtual Design Sprint calendar. Designing around the in-between times is powerful and an opportunity that in-person doesn’t support. Between each mini-workshop, we assign homework and set the expectation that they will present their work at the next group session. Setting the expectation that the participant will present creates social pressure to encourage participation and ensure the work gets done. It’s easier for participants to get distracted during a virtual gathering, therefore it’s even more important for the Facilitator to pay attention to participant engagement and be proactive in including everyone in each activity.

We Think It Is Worth It!

Design Sprints can seem daunting, especially when thinking of all the immediate investment costs. But you also are getting a positive return on investment – lots of ideas and experiments in a relatively short period of time. Think about the long term – what you could be risking by continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done.

Consider these reasons why a Design Sprint is a sound investment:

1. Accomplish a month’s worth of work in 1 week
2. Get user feedback before it’s too late
3. Improve visibility & alignment for your team 
4. Gain speed & momentum for your project
5. Foster a culture of innovation

Learn how we helped IDB Invest’s Technology team improve its customer engagement and experience with a Design Sprint.

The true financial benefit of a Design Sprint is the upfront decision-making and alignment, resulting in a more efficient and simplified future process and product. By helping your company or team find the deep value for the end-user before building anything, and removing potentially useless or time-consuming features, you can save your team months of design, engineering, and development work and costs. You will be able to get your product or idea to market more quickly. Considering that Design Sprints minimize risk, reduce time to market, and accelerate innovation, we believe it’s worth the time and money when done correctly.

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You Don’t Have to Design Sprint Alone

If you want to run a Design Sprint at your company but are overwhelmed by the idea of planning and facilitating it, we can help you. Voltage Control designs and leads sprints for companies large and small. Having a professional facilitator run your Design Sprint ensures that you can focus on the ideas and the work, not the logistics or “doing it right.” Reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com or get in touch with us here if you want to talk about running a Design Sprint at your company.

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Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific Magical Meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings people thrive in. 

Today’s story is with Eric Morrow, a well established facilitator, instructor, and author. He has worked with several Fortune 100 companies such as Capital One, Walmart, and Google, and taught with General Assembly, the University of Oklahoma and CU Boulder. At IBM he led design thinking projects that aligned executive teams and engaged essential customers. He also started Staircase Strategy to partner with fellow leaders eager to use Design Thinking to solve complex problems. 

I spoke with Eric about his User Story Mapping meetings, what prompted him to implement them, what they help accomplish, and his advice for those looking to leverage user story mapping in their organizations.

“For me, you know a good workshop or a good meeting is hitting the mark when resistance to having that meeting disappears…where all the sudden people are asking for it, versus saying “Why do I have to do another meeting?” -Eric Morrow

Removing Obstacles 

Eric first implemented User Story Mapping meetings while doing design thinking workshops at IBM. The idea of user story mapping, from Jeff Patton’s book of the same name, is to “talk about the user’s journey through your product by building a simple model that tells your user’s story as you do.” Eric explained there would be a point in the workshops that everyone felt comfortable about the outcome, but fast forward a few months, and the engineering team hadn’t built what was discussed. “There seemed to be trouble with the transition between what the design and product folks were thinking, and then what the engineering team was actually building,” he says. Eric identified a need to make the design thinking workshops useful for the entire team, not just the design and product managers. After doing research on how to bridge that gap more effectively, User Story Mapping was the solution he decided on as a way to bring engineers and agile teams more closely into a design thinking and research-based process. 

The main purpose of the meeting is to bring the design, product, and engineering teams closer together and to be more in sync with each other: “Rather than this ‘throw it over the wall’ type of experience, it allowed the design leads, engineering leads, product leads to come together and really agree on what needs to be developed and designed and built, in a way that will really meet the end user’s needs,” he explains. 

When I asked if he received any pushback when he first came up with these meetings, he said it was actually the opposite and the pushback came before the meeting was implemented. Engineering teams didn’t want to waste their time doing design thinking activities, they told him, because it didn’t actually help them, and didn’t give them anything tangible to work on (which is what they really need, as they’re often evaluated based on how much code they push): “So I think the pushback was on design thinking workshops before I started using User Story Mapping. And then after that, design teams were really excited to come because they knew that what they were going to be working on was going to be relevant for the engineers. The product managers were happy to come, because by understanding what the engineers would be working on, they could validate those ideas with their end users/customers, and give them a better sense of what would become available. And then engineers liked it – if engineers build something that’s not ultimately used, they have to go back and redo it. That’s a big waste of time. And so the engineers were really happy to say ‘well, this has already been validated, this is good to go, that means we only will have to write that code once. We’re not going to have to write it then throw it away then write it then throw it away.’ For me, you know a good workshop or a good meeting is hitting the mark when resistance to having that meeting disappears…where all the sudden people are asking for it, versus saying ‘Why do I have to do another meeting?’”

Let’s take a closer look at Eric’s process to learn what makes his User Story Mapping meetings magical.

The Meeting 

Pre-Meeting Prep 

Eric recommends going into the meeting with two things (which is usually the design team’s responsibility to prepare): the personas and “as is” scenarios. The persona is who it is you’re building a feature for – it could be the end user or key stakeholders. Especially in B2B solutions, the person buying software may be very different from the person using the software, for example, so having personas for different people is important. The “as is” scenarios are understandings of how those people get their work done or go about their life today, as is. 

Exercise

These User Story Mapping meetings, which Eric recommends holding quarterly depending on the pace of the team, should include design leads, product leads, and engineering or technical leads. This meeting can be done with various sizes, but doing it with 6-8 people will likely take 2-3 hours in a remote setting (slightly faster if not remote). The main question the teams are trying to answer should be some form of a big idea: “What are we building? What ideas do we want to implement? What could we do to improve someone’s experience or help solve some of their problems?” Since each team will likely want a different version of an answer from that question, the purpose of the meeting is to get everyone on the same page and understand needs from the other disciplines. 

Mission Statement:

Eric explains the next step is to merge those three key pieces (the persona, “as is” scenario, and big idea) together into a mission statement, or as IBM calls it, Hills. “It should be some version of: A user wants to accomplish this goal, for whatever the reason is. For example, if we’re talking about a taxi hailing app, it would be: An airport traveler wants to press a button on their phone to summon a taxi to see where the taxi is and how much it’s going to cost to get them home after a trip.” 

The “to be” experience and user stories:

From there, the goal is to map out the “to be” experience for your persona, or what their life will be like after the solution or feature is available,(compared to the “as is” experience, which is what their life is like currently. The “to be” experience is full of steps, and the teams should break down each step or feature into user stories. Working closely with the technical team here is key, Eric says, to outline each individual piece that will enable the experience at a very granular level. The individual pieces are everything it would take to implement the experience. Going back to the taxi hail app, examples would include needing to get a user’s GPS location, ability to show where all the different taxis are located, ability to quickly determine a price based on a database, etc.

Revisit the big picture:

After getting granular, the next step is to zoom back out to the bigger picture and determine if the overarching “to be” experience still makes sense once all the details have been outlined. And usually, what happens when everyone looks at the granular details of the user stories, he says, is the team will want to change features around or revise the mission statement, and go up and down this chain quite a bit. “So after you’ve refined your mission statement, maybe you go back and revise your ‘to be’ experience and you revise your user stories. But this is really the magic – rather than spending too much energy at any one stage, I recommend teams move quickly through the back and forth of all these steps.” 

The tools:

After the “to be” experience and all the user stories are mapped out, it’s time to put them into an agile backlog in order to plan and prioritize them. Common tools for this include JIRA, Asana, or Github to keep track of all the tickets.

The golden thread:

The final step, according to Eric, is to make sure incremental value is being driven for the end-users. Using a golden thread approach, identify the key or essential experience, and build that first. “Generally speaking, folks are going to start building from left to right, and you don’t want to do that, you want to say: What’s the experience that will provide value to the end-user? So you can put it in front of them, get feedback, and then keep building with feedback from your end-user. That’s about 2-3 hours for all that work, for one very specific feature.”

Roles and Responsibilities 

Typically in a User Story Mapping meeting, Eric recommends having at least engineering, product, and design leads. Other teams could also benefit, such as sales and marketing or legal, even just as observers to see what’s coming down the pike.

“The way I think about it, the most amount of work ahead of time is done by Design at the beginning. Preparing the personas, the ‘as is’ scenarios, and then during the meeting, everyone participates in the big idea creation, the ‘to be’ scenarios. And then the engineers are much more involved when you get to writing the user stories. And then once again, the product person is going to be tasked with setting up the backlog, to ensure the engineers are working on the things most important to the customer, at the top. One nuance is if you have a lot of folks, you may want to split up or work individually for some of these story mapping bits, so that the team can make a lot of progress in concert, rather than working on everything one thing at one time. Especially if you’re time sensitive, you want to hammer everything out as quickly as possible. But other than that, usually it’s a whole group activity.”

The Deliverables

The primary deliverable is developing the user stories and curating a backlog for the engineering team, so they can immediately start work on any software development processes, Eric explains. A secondary deliverable is helping with the entire validation cycle, or according to Eric, the best part of design thinking. 

Potential Pitfalls

I asked Eric about any potential pitfalls to this meeting. He says the biggest potential pitfall is if teams try to do too much, too fast at once: “I think a facilitator who wants to run this sort of meeting needs to understand how all the different organizations work, especially if they’re working mostly independently with a ‘throw over the fence’ type mentality. Often folks aren’t used to working together in this really productive way, so starting out small with one feature, not trying to bite off everything at once. So do a couple features at the beginning, to get folks used to working in this way. So that’s probably the biggest pitfall, biting off more than you can chew if the team is not prepared to work this way and then ramping them up as you go along.”

Advice

Eric and I also discussed advice and recommendations he has for those looking to implement User Story Mapping meetings and workshops but maybe haven’t done them before. His recommendation is to keep it simple at first – start with just three people: the design lead, product lead, and engineering lead. Then, choose one small thing that’s important, but fairly far in the future. If possible, keep it to a one hour rapid fire session. “To do that, you really have to narrow down the scope so choose one feature that needs to get released. That’s what I recommend,” he says.

Other Resources

There are a few resources Eric recommends reviewing for those that want to learn more about user story mapping:

• Build Experiences not Features
• Connecting Design Thinking to Agile
• User Story Mapping

Looking Ahead

I asked Eric what he wants to do next, and how he might take User Story Mapping to the next level. He said he’d like to connect the specific, granular details back to the strategic aim: “Usually, your senior leadership leaves those technical details alone. But if you can show them – here’s how you take an idea, a strategic initiative, and here’s how we map it out so it aligns with all the initiatives of your entire product team, from the product owners to the product designers to the engineers. And moves all in concert. Through having sufficient upfront design research where you’re vetting all the features with your customers or with your users before shipping and building, we’re going to really improve the velocity of your engineering team and your ability to go to market. So I think if you’re really bold, you can use user story mapping to help show senior leadership how to achieve strategic initiatives faster and more effectively.”

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When it comes to exploring and creating new ideas, collaboration is much mightier than the brainpower of any one individual. That is the idea behind room intelligence: the collective intellect of an entire room is more clever and innovative than a solo thinker. This is in fact why we have meetings. Synergistic intelligence leads to more creativity, which produces more possible ideas and solutions. As a result, companies have better meetings and greater overall success.

“None of us is as smart as all of us.” ––Ken Blanchard 

Cultivate Room Intelligence 

It is important to obtain room intelligence in order to have effective meetings. That is why capturing room intelligence of one of the ten meeting mantras we follow at Voltage Control. These mantras are the bread and butter of our meeting etiquette, both in-house and during client facilitation. Bringing minds together in an environment that is both productive and focused is a key ingredient in the effective meeting secret sauce, and doing so successfully requires a facilitator. 

A great facilitator helps to foster room intelligence in order to align and direct the room to efficiently and constructively progress on the project at hand. At the same time, they elevate and maintain team enthusiasm and connectivity. A facilitator has the ability to help teams produce better outcomes by acting as an unbiased third party mediator and guide. They have the unique skill set required to successfully bring a team together and capture its collective intelligence by increasing positivity and engagement and cultivating creativity. 

Foster Creativity to Find Solutions

“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” –Phil Jackson 

An important aspect to enhance room intelligence is to nurture overall creativity in each individual team member and the group as a whole. A conscious, active effort to do so is crucial. The majority of jobs today do not require the application of creative thinking in daily work. 

In a study by Richard Florida’s Creative Class, jobs were categorized to identify which required decision making, idea generation, and independent judgment. Almost 60% of U.S. jobs, and 77% worldwide, were found to require little or no inclusion of these three skills. This essentially means that 60% of Americans’ creativity is not being tapped in their jobs. That’s a great deal of unused innovative potential.

Creativity is an ability that we all possess and are capable of expressing. When you encourage and allow creativity, it can come from unexpected places. Oftentimes, those are the best, “winning” ideas. So how do we accomplish this? Follow a process in meetings to get the most out of them.

A common myth about creativity is that a process kills it. According to the Harvard Business Review, this is only true if a process is broken:

“A good process can serve as guardrails to clarify goals (timeline, resources available, and desired outcomes) yet leave the ‘how’ open. The capacity to direct one’s own work enables teams to share responsibility, self-organize, generate ideas, and collaborate.”

A sound process stimulates creative thinking and in turn, more productive meetings. 

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Implement the Design Thinking Process for Better Meetings

The design thinking process is a proven method to encourage creative thought and promote room intelligence. It can be applied in meetings or in dedicated design thinking workshops, which help businesses solve problems and develop a competitive advantage. The process is centered around cultivating creativity and exploring it as a team, including engaging in divergent thinking in beginning stages for idea generation, prototyping, and testing ideas in later stages. As a whole, the process helps teams address and solve the challenges and changes they face. 

Let’s take a look at some examples of the role room intelligence plays in the five stages of the design thinking process:

Phase 1: Empathize

The beginning of the design thinking process starts with understanding the end-users. Who are they? What are their wants and needs and how can you best meet them? The goal in this phase is to identify and empathize with this group to sufficiently understand and serve them. This typically includes taking and gathering observations, interviews, and immersions, which is best accomplished with a collective team effort. The more perspectives and angles you obtain, the more information you have to work within the following stages. Put your heads together!

Phase 2: Define

Once all of the information is acquired, the team hones in on what exactly they want to focus on; which ideas to move forward with. Gathering ideas and input from the entire room is beneficial in this phase, as the objective is to gain clarity about the actual problem you are trying to solve. Sharing and comparing ideas will help the team arrive at the best answer(s) to continue exploring. 

Phase 3: Ideate

With your identified focus, this next ideation phase is centered on all of the potential solutions to resolve the problem. Commence a massive brainstorm session; commence collecting room intelligence. The goal is to generate as many ideas as possible. Unleash creativity! Think broadly and consider things that haven’t been done before. 

Phase 4: Prototype

It’s now time to create a physical or digital simulation of your decided upon design so you can show it to people and get feedback. This critical step moves you from ideation into tangible reality. Prototypes give people something to react to, which helps move conversations and the process along. Again, combining the brainpower of everyone in the room to create a prototype is imperative.  

Phase 5: Test

The final step of the design process is to test your prototype on users to collect their feedback and input. Testing allows you to get back to a human-centered focus and ensure you are providing end-users with exactly what they want and need. Once you have the feedback, the team collectively decides if the concept has potential to launch or if refinements and improvements need to be made. 

The entire design thinking process is a collaborative effort, and that’s why it produces such incredible results.  In a Harvard Business Review article, Jeanne Liedtka wrote:

“In a recent seven-year study in which I looked in depth at 50 projects from a range of sectors, including business, health care, and social services, I have seen that another social technology, design thinking, has the potential to do for innovation exactly what TQM did for manufacturing: unleash people’s full creative energies, win their commitment, and radically improve processes.”

Design thinking is not just for designers. More and more companies are being trained in design thinking and hiring facilitators to guide workshops and consult their meeting processes to maximize room intelligence and team efforts and experience more business success. Sales, customer success, engineering, and even procurement teams can work more playfully and intelligently by redesigning the way they meet.

Need help building a better meeting? Bring in a professional facilitator from Voltage Control.

Voltage Control designs and facilitates innovation training, Design Sprints, and design thinking workshops. Please reach out to us at info@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk.

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A Design Sprint is a tried-and-true method that can help you jumpstart a project at work. It is a five-day process where you dissect a business challenge through a set of powerful activities. Design Sprint activities are carefully planned and executed to lead the group to their end result: a rapid prototype that has been vetted with real customers. The implementation of each design sprint activity helps you accomplish a month’s worth of work in a week.

The Design Sprint was initially developed at Google Ventures as a process for “answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.” It’s an excellent way to push through confusion and inertia to come up with new ideas and find out quickly if your customers might respond positively to them.

Why do we need Design Sprints?

Most teams and organizations probably have a challenge that would benefit from a Design Sprint. But, if you’re wondering if it’s a good thing to consider, here are some scenarios that point to a strong need for a Sprint:

• You’re about to kick off a project or a new product, and you want momentum, excitement, alignment, and focus from the start.
• You’re in the middle of an initiative, and you don’t know where to go next.
• You haven’t talked to your customers enough, and your team feels stuck in an internal feedback loop.
• You think you need to pivot in your business or product model and want to explore the right way to go next.

Any of these scenarios are good reasons to hold a design sprint. Consider setting aside five days for a cross-disciplinary team to complete a Sprint. (Please don’t try to run your first Sprint in less than five days.)

Design Sprint Activities

One of the beautiful things about the Design Sprint is that it is a prescriptive (in the best meaning of the word!) week of events. You don’t need to wonder what to do. You don’t need to struggle to come up with an agenda.

This doesn’t mean a Design Sprint is “easy”; it does mean that the activities for each day are clearly defined so any team can jump in and run a Sprint if they take the time to read up on the process.

Do you need a professional Design Sprint facilitator?

Here at Voltage Control, we are professional Design Sprint facilitators, so it’s difficult to be unbiased when it comes to this question. We think teams can certainly run a design sprint on their own if they have one person on the team who wants to take the lead, do the prep and lead the group through all the activities. However, if you can make the investment, you might want to consider a professional facilitator. They can take care of logistics and making sure the team stays on track.

Preparation & Planning

Preparation and planning for your Design Sprint is the first step. Don’t underestimate the time that needs to be put into a Sprint before it even starts. It could take one to two weeks of someone’s time to get ready for a sprint. Here are some of the things you’ll do during this phase:

• Read the book Sprint.
• Secure a spot for your Sprint — on-site, or, even better, off-site.
• Buy Design Sprint supplies.
• Make your participant list. (Spoiler: more people isn’t better.)
• Plan for how you’re going to find research participants.
• Prepare the Sprint participants.
• (If needed) Engage a professional facilitator.
• Gather background research and data that might inform your Sprint.

Day 1 | Design Sprint Activities

The first day of your Design Sprint charts the course for the rest of the week and creates the focus.

Here are the activities:

• Create a long-term goal.
• Map the business challenge you’re tackling.
• Talk to internal experts on your team to get their perspectives on the challenge.
• Identify a target: agree on the specific part of your problem that you will focus on during the week

Day 2 | Design Sprint Activities

If day 1 of a Design Sprint is getting laser-focused on the problem or issue you face, the second day is when you begin to think bout how you might solve your problem.

Here’s an overview of activities for day 2:

• Gather inspiration: the team shares outside inspiration that might inform your solution (i.e., what are other companies doing that we love or might want to “copy”/remix?)
• Sketch: The group sketches ideas for answers using the Four-Step Sketch method. Drawing ability is NOT necessary! It’s more about the thought.
• Plan for customer testing: On Friday, you’ll be interviewing customers, so you also start work on that recruitment on this day (if you haven’t already.)

Day 3 | Design Sprint Activities

On the third day of your Sprint, you look at all of the solutions you’ve come up with and start to hone in on what you might prototype and test.

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Here’s an overview of what happens on this day:

• Critique each solution: keeping an eye on which ones are best for achieving the goal you set on day one.
• Create a storyboard: mix and match your favorite ideas from all of the sketches and piece together a storyboard that will be turned into a prototype that you’ll show to customers.

Day 4 | Design Sprint Activities

The fourth day of a design sprint is when things get very exciting, and depending on your experience with prototyping — a bit scary or daunting. You’ll be making your storyboard into your prototype.

• Prototyping is the main activity for the day!
• Prepping for your user interviews. Make sure you have a user interview script as well as a method for taking notes.

Day 5 | Design Sprint Activities

The last day of your Design Sprint is the moment of truth. It’s when you show users your prototype and get their feedback. This is when you’ll learn if your idea has legs and you should run with it, or if you need to rethink things.

After the Sprint Activities

A Design Sprint might be a week-long, but the activities should spread into the week after — at the very least.

Some of the essential things to do after your Sprint are:

• Hold a debrief or retrospective with the group to define what you learned.
• Communicate to your larger org or team what you learned.
• Align on your next steps.
• Read Beyond the Prototype: We saw companies struggle in the post-Sprint world, so we wrote a whole book about it. Check it out for more details about what to do after a Sprint.

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“In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.” -Warren G. Bennis

If there’s one sure thing in life, it’s that change is constant and inescapable. And when it comes to business, change is the crucial, center pillar. It is the gateway to explore new opportunities, exercise creativity, learn new skills, and discover inventive solutions to problems. Ultimately, change, and navigating it well, leads to success in business and innovation. That’s why a change management plan is crucial.

So, how do you “control” change in the workplace? In essence, incorporating a change management process to a project or an organizational transformation provides a structure to adapt to change, rather than blindly react to it.  

A sound change management plan can be the difference between a successful and failed project.

It serves as a roadmap to manage and control change during pivotal phases of a project’s life cycle. Let’s take a look at what a change management plan is and to construct one.

The five steps of a change management plan

What are we really talking about when we talk about a change management plan? In regards to the project you are pursuing, it answers the questions: “Who?” “What?” “When?” “Where?” “Why?” And, “how?” of change. Follow the steps below to create your own change management plan:

1. Identify “who”

First, clearly define who all is involved in the project, across all levels. Who is responsible for what in the change management plan? What role do they play in managing, reviewing, and authorizing change requests? 

2. Select a change control board

Secondly, staff a change control board. This group of carefully selected individuals is solely responsible for making decisions about whether or not proposed changes should be implemented. They help guide the change process for optimal success. 

3. Develop a process

In order to effectively conduct change management, you must identify a process to do so. This process will allow people to efficiently submit change requests that will then be evaluated, authorized, managed, and controlled by the change control board. Change management is unmanageable without a structured process and training in project management. 

4. Change request materials

Once your change management structure is organized, you need a way for people to submit change requests. A change request form is one way to receive ideas and data. Having a consistent procedure to gather information throughout the process is important for the project’s fluency and ultimate success. 

A change log serves as a central location to collect and track all proposed changes. It is here that change can be identified and requests can be made and approved. It’s purpose is to hold all matters of change so you can then manage and track it.

5. Manage and Track Change

Measuring and tracking change allows you to successfully monitor progress throughout the project process. In order to track change, you must have something to measure it against. That is the project baseline, or the defined scope of the project. It includes the desired results, expectations, and restraints of the problem you are addressing, as well as the fundamental details of the project like time, cost, and quality. The project baseline is backed by the change control board and used as the reference to identify and track the “how”, “what”, “when”, “where”, and “why” of change. 

So where does a change management plan come in to play in a project’s life cycle? Big change occurs in the prototyping and testing phases of the designing thinking process. Below, we take a closer look at the project life cycle process, through the eyes of design thinking methodology, to better understand how and when change plays a role. 

Design Thinking Project Life Cycle

1. Empathize

The first step of any project is to clearly identify the objective and need you want to address. In design thinking, this starts with empathizing with your target audience to thoroughly understand their desires and needs in order to best meet them. This stage is focused on gathering as much information as possible about the target audience to prepare you for the next step of the process. 

2. Define

Using the information gathered in the first phase, it is now time to put it all together to define the problem you want to address. This step’s objective is to convert the identified problem into a human-centered statement to keep the audience as the focus, rather than focusing on technology, monetary returns, or specifics of a product. The insights and perspectives defined will guide you throughout the rest of the process; they serve as the backbone of the project. 

3. Ideate

Now that you have identified the objective/problem, the third phase is where you generate as many possible creative solutions as possible to solve it. Nothing is off limits here: think outside of the box, get creative, and say “yes” to all ideas. By the end of this brainstorm session, your team will have possible ideas to then test. 

4. Prototype & Test

It’s time to test all of your creative ideas! Through a process of trial and error, your team identifies which of the proposed solutions would best address the identified problem. Once those are decided on, you then create collaborative, rapid prototypes–a simulation of your ideas and designs–to properly investigate their effectiveness in generating solutions. This is a phase where change happens.

It’s only natural that after you have defined the problem and start executing possible solutions that change will occur. You will likely find through prototyping that there are unanswered questions or holes in the project that need to be filled in order to successfully address the audience’s needs moving forward. Your team may need to go back to the drawing board to adapt to these changes. Therefore, it’s imperative to be able to manage and track the changes with a change management plan to keep the project’s momentum going.

Once you arrive at the core solution to solve the identified problem, you tangibly test it by showing people in your target audience a prototype and collect their feedback. Change also occurs here. User feedback will likely alter your original prototype, in a good way. You use the feedback to refine the product and fine-tune it so that it optimally serves the user. Even after you identify the “winning” version of your product, you will continue to adapt to environmental and systematic changes that influence and alter the users’ needs. Therefore, you will return to the design thinking process and your change management plan to refine the product and adapt to the evolving needs.

Preparing for the inevitable change that you will be faced with during the design thinking process will equip you with the tools you need to gracefully navigate it.  With a solid and reliable plan in place, you will be able to work with the flow of change, rather than against it.

Need a facilitator?

Voltage Control facilitates design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out at info@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

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I’m sure many of you have fallen prey to the “Stickie Storm,” a half-baked workshop that involved a tornado of stickies but didn’t result in any action. Ideas are flowing, and there is lots of excitement, but afterward, we revert to our business as usual. 

In 2019, I released my first book Beyond the Prototype, about how to move from exploration to execution. I was recently thinking about Stickie Storms and how this phenomenon is the micro equivalent to the macro phenomenon that Beyond the Prototype explored. As I considered this further, I decided to share some of the tips from the book to offer guidance to those of you who want to get the most out of your work.

5 Tips For Successful Workshops

1. Clarify the purpose

It is crucial to start with a clear goal to optimize success in a workshop. Doing so is rooted in answering the question, “why?” What is it that you are setting out to accomplish, and why is it important? Very rarely do people take the time to make the “why” explicit. Often when they do, they are merely repeating jargon and company euphemism or the project charter. Can you reach a layer deeper and pinpoint personal goals that ladder into the broader organizational goals? Once the project’s purpose is identified, take a step back and ask yourself why you want to call people to a meeting to discuss it. Is it truly worth having a meeting about? Be deliberate in your use of other people’s time.

2. Design the arc

I write and speak a lot about the importance of crafting a robust agenda. Narrative structures can inspire your planning process. Following the “open, explore, close” model, the building blocks of design thinking, can help you identify different ways to approach complex problems and form an agenda to accomplish them accordingly.

Phase one: Open

This is a mode of divergent thinking with a focus on the production of as many creative ideas as possible. There are no wrong answers; instead, there is a push to generate diverse possibilities without jumping to any conclusions. The collective group builds on one another’s ideas without shutting any of them down. This is a highly creative, collaborative think tank.

Phase two: Explore

With a plethora of freshly curated ideas, the explore phase is centered around organizing, combining, and building on the possibilities found. The collective begins to connect the dots to identify themes or patterns to then develop and expand upon insights. Teams can use maps, Venn diagrams, anything that can help make sense of the brainstormed information. This phase also helps to identify any gaps where further information is needed to continue the innovation process most effectively.

Phase three: Close

Once you’ve explored your ideas and started to articulate them, the close phase helps you to prioritize by introducing convergent thinking–a problem-solving technique that allows you to synthesize information to identify a single problem clearly and how to optimally solve it. You analyze your information to narrow down options and determine which one to pursue to continue the process. A standard closing technique to do so is voting to find the popular consensus.

3. Decide

Once a solution is identified, pay special attention to solidify a concrete decision while still in the meeting. Often, action items are assigned as addon work to the session, which can prolong the process. Do the work in the meeting, not after.

When the consensus is reached, it is essential to honor the decision and the decider. The reality is that not every single person is going to agree. Instead, it’s about the power of the collective to create and converse ideas, flush them out, and come as close as possible to the best solution. Disregard the notion that any one person or idea can be exactly right. Respect the process, which includes the varying opinions and perspectives in the room, and focus on the goal.

4. Accountability buddies

The most successful meetings end with a debriefing of what was discussed and decided upon and how to continue onward. This often includes assigning specific, qualified people tangible tasks to be completed by a set due date to keep the process moving forward and on schedule. Find a buddy and hold each other accountable for the personal commitments you were allocated. Doing so will ensure you stay on track and contribute your part to the team innovation effort to reach desired results efficiently.

5. Craft the narrative

Your action plan is in place, now what? Creating a shared story among team members is an essential step to communicate your idea to others effectively. The art of storytelling is a powerful method to share the outcomes of your workshop. It can be the deciding force that shows other people, like shareholders or investors, why it’s worth their time and consideration and get them on board. The entire team should have a collective, coherent narrative that is the same across the board so that the message is accurate and precise no matter who is talking about your idea –you were all in the same meeting, make sure it sounds like it!

These tips can help you turn the chaos of a Stickie Storm into productive and structured workshops with real action, which means you will get the most out of them. 

Happy innovating!

Looking for a facilitator for your next important meeting?

Voltage Control offers a range of options for innovation training, design sprints, and design thinking facilitation. Please reach out to us at info@voltagecontrol.co if you want to talk.

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Design Thinking workshops are growing in popularity across industries due to their effectiveness in business innovation and problem-solving. The term “design thinking” itself has tripled in popularity in the past five years, according to Google Trend. Despite the name, Design Thinking workshops are not just for those in design. Any business can benefit from a design thinking workshop, from marketing to product and sales. Does your company have a problem, want to understand its target audience better, expand, or get a leg up on its competition? A Design Thinking workshop can help you grow.

Design Thinking origins

While the methods and processes of innovation have been the focus of scientists, engineers, creative individuals, and analysts for decades, the modern idea of design as a way of thinking or science was first coined by cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon in his book The Sciences of the Artificial in 1969. Many of Simon’s ideas are regarded as the founding principles of which Design Thinking workshops were created, including swift testing and prototyping through observation: “To understand them, the systems had to be constructed, and their behaviour observed,” Simon said in his book.

A few years later, Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering Robert H. McKim spoke to how visual thinking impacted our ability to understand and solve problems in his book Experiences in Visual Thinking, namely how combining left and right brain thinking creates a more holistic form of problem-solving. The Design Thinking methodology as we know it and apply it to problem-solving today stemmed from a hybrid of their ideologies and continues to evolve in innovation settings.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a philosophy based on a designer’s approach to design or solve challenges. Rather than a one-shoe-fits-all mindset, it encourages a holistic view where uncertainty and ambiguity are welcomed and embraced as to consider all sides of a problem. A single-minded approach, on the other hand, can isolate a problem, neglect the people affected by it, and limit the resolutions needed to move forward successfully. (This lack of awareness can tremendously cost businesses.)

Once a problem is defined and understood from all angles, it is then convergently conceptualized and actualized through testing. A design mindset can be applied to any life situation, and it aides in considering the bigger picture and informatively acting accordingly. So how can design thinking benefit business? A Design Thinking workshop is structured to do just that.

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Design Thinking Workshops

Simply put, a Design Thinking workshop is an engaging, interactive, hands-on approach to problem-solving. The workshops offer training on a design thinking process, which prioritizes creative collaboration to find solutions in action. This is a non-linear approach that considers all sides of a problem. It seeks to understand the audience/consumer/client better and rethink and redefine assumptions and issues to constructively identify innovative solutions. Those solutions are then tested, and reworked if needed, to reach an optimal outcome. The use of this model leads to the creation of a business’s innovation process.

The phases of a Design Thinking Workshop focus on:

1. Empathy: Understand the perspective of the target audience/customer/consumer to clearly identify and address the problem at hand; clearly understand and work with team members to strengthen team dynamics and overall performance to meet a common goal.
2. Innovation: Clear and concise direction for ideation and problem-solving, the production of as many possible ideas and solutions to the problem as possible.
3. Testing: Whether through prototypes or real testing, applying the generated ideas in a real-world setting to assess their effectiveness.

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” Steve Jobs said to The New York Times Magazine about the role of design in Apple’s success. “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Design Sprint

The 5-Day Design Sprint is our bread and butter at Voltage Control. At its core, it is a Design Thinking workshop that efficiently explores and solves problems within a specific amount of time. We help you get clear about your goals, long-term vision, knowing your target audience, and carefully evaluate the value and usability of your project/product. The accelerated product strategy accomplishes a month’s worth of work in less than one week, sparks creative momentum for new projects and transformation, significantly improves team dynamics and functionality, and helps to create a long-standing company culture of innovation. We use the Design Sprint method first created at Google Ventures and continue to add our flare to create the most optimal experience.

Surpass the Competition

Applying design thinking principles to strategy and innovation dramatically improves the success rate of transformation. According to the Design Management Institute and Motiv Strategies’ 2015 Design Value Index, companies that are now led by design such as Apple, Nike, Pepsi, Proctor & Gamble, and IBM have exceeded the performance of the S&P 500 by over 200%. This is evidence that design is not only crucial to creating successful products and services, but it can transform the way companies create value when applied to systems, procedures, and customer experience.

Design thinking allows the exploration of what is possible using imagination, logic, comprehensive reasoning, and instinct to create an outcome that best serves the customer; therefore, the business.

“Design-thinking firms stand apart in their willingness to engage in the task of continuously redesigning their business… to create advances in both innovation and efficiency — the combination that produces the most powerful competitive edge,” Roger Martin, author of The Design of Business, said.

Looking for a Design Thinking Workshop Facilitator or Design Thinking Training? Get in touch.

Voltage Control facilitates design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out at hello@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

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