Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Will Scale Your Company

Leading a design thinking workshop is an effective way to start scaling your company. Embrace growth in the workplace by applying design methodology to your daily practices.

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Exponential growth by way of good design is the secret behind every startup’s scaling success story and adopting a design thinking perspective can help you attain or sustain such growth. Leading a design thinking workshop will place human-centered thinking at the heart of your company, resulting in rapid growth and increased customer satisfaction.

With a focus on design methodology, you can respond to changing customer needs through innovation as scalability and design thinking are indelibly connected. By leading a design workshop, you’ll make human-centered thinking part of your company culture. Companies like ours, Voltage Control, offer advice, guidance, training and consulting to companies of all sizes and across verticals.

More than a trend, the power of design thinking for scaling is backed by statistics:

• Every dollar that goes into design methodology and user experience results in a $100 return. (Source: Forbes)
• 50% of design-led businesses report increased customer loyalty as a result of advanced design practices. (Source: Adobe)
• In the last 10 years, design-led businesses have surpassed the S&P Index by 219%. (Source: Design Management Institute)

In this article we’ll explore the basics of design-centric thinking and its effect on your company’s growth with the following topics:

• Growing With Design Methodology
• What is Design Thinking?
• Why Design Thinking is Essential to Success
• The Five-Step Process to Design Thinking
• How to Get Your Team on Board with Design Methodology
• Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Teaches Scalability
• Steps to Leading a Design Thinking Workshop

Growing With Design Methodology

Centering a design-driven mentality will help your business prioritize innovation and creativity, allowing for increased ingenuity, productivity, and efficiency. With a shift to design-centered thinking comes increased creativity and more remarkable growth, allowing companies to scale faster than usual. By leading a design workshop at your company, you can completely transform your company culture and the very essence of how your business works.

What is Design Thinking?

Before leading a design thinking workshop for your team, the first step is to understand the concept for yourself. Design thinking incorporates a human-centered approach to problem-solving via design methodology. Design methodology stems from the idea of design itself. As “good design” is all about finding an elegant solution to the problems at hand, design thinking encourages your team to make the most appropriate plan to meet both your company’s needs and that of the end-user.

Why Design Thinking is Essential to Success

Design thinking is integral to your success as a business. Success and design are linked through the latter’s unique ability to engage clients and build connections with customers. By leading a design thinking workshop, you can center design methodology as a business asset.

Beyond essential aesthetics, “good design” focuses on optimum functionality while providing users with an enjoyable, satisfying experience. By meeting both the company’s needs and that of the user, design thinking has a transformative effect on how companies do business.

The Five-Step Process to Design Thinking

Successfully leading a design thinking workshop starts with understanding the following five steps of design thinking:

1. Empathizing with the Client
   As design thinking focuses on uniting function and form to problem solve, you should focus on examining issues with a human lens. By adopting the end user’s mindset, your team will find the most attractive solutions by taking the client’s motivations, needs, pain points, and experiences into consideration.
2. Defining the Problem
   With design in mind, define the problem by prioritizing the end user’s needs first and thinking about the company’s needs second.
3. Ideating the Solution
   This stage of design thinking is all about innovation and ingenuity, as ideas are the lifeblood of design thinking. By generating as many ideas as possible, your team will arrive at new and creative solutions to the issue defined in the second step.
4. Developing Prototypes
   Taking the best ideas from the ideation phase, have your team create prototypes. Track the prototypes’ performance with your team and note their observations. Prototypes will be refined, sent for further testing, or rejected.
5. Testing the Prototypes
   During this stage, the final refinements are made to the prototypes and tested with the end-user. This process is repeated as necessary.

How to Get Your Team on Board with Design Methodology

Making the shift from being a product-driven business to a design-driven one isn’t easy. If you’d like to shift your company into a design-centric mentality, leading a design thinking workshop is the best way forward. Whether your team is actively thinking with design in mind or is entirely new to the concept, making the change is possible.

As you head into leading a design thinking workshop for your team, be sure to share the benefits of a design-centric approach for scaling. As design thinking aims to create a high-quality product, your team will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what your clients want and use design-centric thinking to meet their needs.

Likewise, design methodology prioritizes understanding the customer journey, learning to meet their needs, and creating a perfect product, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and more significant growth for your company.

Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Teaches Scalability

One of the main deliverables of leading a design thinking workshop is the facilitation framework or template that your team can rely on in future workshops. This consistent methodology and approach to problem-solving will become a way of life for your company. By putting users first through centering design, you’ll be on your way to sustainable scaling.

To get started leading a design thinking workshop with growth in mind, consider hiring an expert facilitator. With the help of the facilitators at Voltage Control, you can teach your team the ropes of design methodology as you learn how to apply it to your standard operations.

Steps to Leading a Design Thinking Workshop

Consider facilitating a workshop yourself if you’re ready to scale your company and have a great handle on design thinking methodology. Teaching elegant problem-solving skills with a people-first approach is at the heart of all design workshops.

Leading a design thinking workshop can take on many forms, but there are vital elements that will help you succeed each time:

Preparation

Each design thinking workshop starts with preparation. Before the workshop begins, make it a point to:

1. Identify challenges
2. Choose the ideal location
3. Plan the agenda
4. Gather necessary materials

Begin with a Briefing

As the focus of a design thinking workshop is to help your team innovate, activities that can stimulate conversation and ideation take center stage. Consider icebreakers and activities that help break down barriers.

Step One: Introducing Design Thinking

It’s always essential to include an intro to the design thinking methodology to make sure all colleagues and clients know what design-centric thinking is. Whether you show a presentation or hire a professional, explaining the fundamentals for design-centric thinking will help set the stage for the rest of the workshop.

Step Two: Empathizing With the User

As empathy is key to design methodology, empathizing with the client is the next part of the design workshop. By understanding the user’s needs, your team will be able to arrive at the most innovative solutions.

Design thinking exercises are a key component of this stage to help all participants identify how the end-user feels and thinks.

Step Three: Identifying Problems and Solutions

As growth results from effective problem solving, step three involves identifying the problem and creating innovative solutions. Through their brainstorming, your team should ultimately arrive at one solution that will provide the greatest user experience.

Step Four: Finalizing the Workshop

After completing the ideation and problem-solving steps, the workshop will come to a close. When leading a design thinking workshop, be sure to check in with all participants to ensure a meaningful experience was shared by all.

Ultimately, the takeaway of a successful design thinking workshop is human-centered problem-solving. As the meeting comes to an end, make sure your team members can confidently apply the skills learned in the workshop to their daily routines.

Growing Through Design-Centric Culture

The key to growing your business lies in your team’s ability to shift into a design-centered mindset. Leading a design thinking workshop will help you and your team adopt a more innovative way of working. With a newfound design-centric approach to growing your company, you’ll be able to meet clients’ needs, connect with the end-user, and scale your company at an impressive rate.

As you learn more about leading a design thinking workshop, consider hiring a professional facilitator from Voltage Control. With an expert in design thinking present, you’ll ensure that your team successfully makes the shift from a results-driven and product-centric mindset to more human-centered and design-focused processes.

Want To Lead A Design Thinking Workshop?

If you are ready to begin shifting your team into a design-centered mindset join one of our innovative trainings, design thinking facilitation, or  design sprints. Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you have any questions about our innovative training!