presentation on design thinking teaching pedgagogy

HI THERE!

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For use in General Assembly Enterprise workshops

MY FACILITATION PHILOSOPHY

• People learn best when they are doing, not just talking

• Coaching works best in the moment, when the facilitator can observe the problem, offer a recommendation, and the participant can try it in real time

• And specifically for design thinking - iteration is your most powerful tool

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF MY BACKGROUND

LEARNING DIGITAL MARKETING

• My design thinking journey started at a software company called Datacap

• I worked in marketing and learned, on the job, how to develop qualified leads for our salesforce. Back in 2008, we were at the forefront of automation, nurture campaigns and lead scoring.

TEACHING DIGITAL MARKETING

• A year later, a friend connected to General Assembly asked if I wanted to teach a digital marketing class there

• I called it Digital Marketing for Everyone, and with student feedback and constant iteration, it became a popular workshop I taught all around the world

DIGITAL MARKETING FOR EVERYONE

• I turned what I taught and learned into a five star rated book, available on Amazon.

http://amzn.to/UXT2aL

DIGITAL MARKETING TO LEAN STARTUP

• An email from a student kept nagging at me. She asked:

What if I’m marketing my product the way you recommend but no one is interested?

• Shortly thereafter, another student asked if I could give a workshop on lean startup. I hadn’t heard about it, so I read the book, and the proverbial light bulb went off — we can use digital marketing tools like split testing subject lines and click-through rates on paid ads to check if a user/customer wants what you’re offering!

LEAN STARTUP ACCELERATOR

• Jim Wheeler, the director for the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Oklahoma sat in on a lean startup workshop I gave and asked if I would develop a 10-week startup accelerator for his students, based on the principles of doing more/talking less and constant iteration based on customer/coach feedback.

The story of how that went is also available in my book.

http://bit.ly/LeanAcceleratorAmazon

LEAN FOR CORPORATE CLIENTS

• General Assembly had also started offering corporate training around this time.

• I began working with our clients on a rapid prototyping workshop called Start Making.

• Clients who take Start Making normally want to test ideas for new products and services faster and to validate user demand before making significant investments in a project.

FEEDBACK FROM A CORPORATE CLIENT

We would not have done that [gotten early customer feedback] if we hadn’t gone through GA… we would have followed our traditional path and taken 6 months.

https://generalassembly.wistia.com/medias/vsx0ei97mc

LEAN TO DESIGN THINKING

• Most recently I’ve been delivering design thinking workshops with Capital One. That’s where I’ve learned more of the terminology, mindsets and tools that make up the design thinking philosophy

CASE STUDY DESIGN CHALLENGE

CASE STUDY DESIGN

• Please design a thorough case study that tells the story (or stories) of your experience as a design thinking facilitator. Share your point of view regarding design thinking facilitation as well as understanding how you prepare, run, and follow-up on collaborative sessions.

• Share real-world examples from sessions you've led in the past. Include agendas, photographs, activity examples, or anything else that you feel accurately tells us the story of your maturity as a design thinking facilitator.

STICKING POINTS… AND HOW I APPROACHED SOLVING THEM

CASE STUDY DESIGN

I want to tell this story by showing how I solved teaching/facilitating problems as they arose in my work. We’ll look at three:

1. Interviewing and Fishbowling

2. Assumption Generation

3. Workshop-to-Workplace transition

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE PROCESS I TEACH

This cycle is the foundation for how I approach rapid prototyping.

EARLY IDEA


RAPID PROTOTYPING CYCLE

Everything starts with an early idea, preferably generated from user research.

Framing the question means choosing the hypothesis to test.

Designing and creating an experiment is the experience you’ll create for a user to get feedback to validate your hypothesis.

After running the experiment, you would evaluate the results and start the cycle over again, equipped with new information.

EARL


RAPID PROTOTYPING CYCLE

TALKING TO HUMANS (INTERVIEWING)

START MAKING 20

INTERVIEWING AND FISHBOWLING

• The first sticking point I want to share is around interviewing a customer or user. The next few slides show how I normally introduce the skill of asking open-ended questions and the photo shows the general physical configuration of a workshop.

• The first slide leads to a general conversation about why interviewing users is a good place to start developing an idea. The second slide lets me introduce the skill. And the third slide gives the instructions for the exercise (my standard format).

TALKING TO HUMANS 22

VS.Brainstorming

Talking to your users or customers


TALKING TO HUMANS

Questions that elicit a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer provide less info. Open-ended questions help avoid your own personal bias.

Let’s translate these questions to be open-ended… ‣ Is green your favorite color? ‣ Do you like ponies? ‣ Would you like the product more if it did your laundry, too?

TIP 1: ASK OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS23


TALKING TO HUMANS

TALKING TO HUMANS: PART 124

1. Say hello to your customer (someone who currently drives and/or owns a car)

2. Learn more about their life as a driver (or a passenger) by asking open-ended questions


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• The challenge in this format was that most teams didn’t ask open-ended questions. Instead, they would fall back to questions like “Would you like this feature to be included” or “Do you prefer doing X or Y”.

• I would go from table to table helping each team understand what an open-ended question was and giving examples, rather than focusing on the specific content of the questions they were asking and helping them find opportunities for further questioning.


• My solution to this challenge was to first have the entire class question one user (that user is in the “fishbowl”) before splitting into teams.

• By having participants pose questions that everyone could hear, I could provide immediate feedback about the quality of the question.

• If a participant asked a close-ended question, I would request they change it into an open-ended one and to re-ask it. We could all see how the quality of the response changed based on the type of question.

• When we moved into small group interviews after this exercise, everyone was able to effectively use the skill.

FISHBOWLING

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START MAKING

fFROM IDEA TO TEST31

ASSUMPTION GENERATION

• The second sticking point I want to share is around finding assumptions. As workshop participants move from interviewing users and generating early ideas to testing those ideas, they need to figure out which assumptions they want to test.

• The challenge was that people were unable to list the assumptions behind an idea just by thinking about it. Instead, I would often assist each of the groups individually to find a testable assumption. This was an inefficient way of moving the class forward.

ASSUMPTION GENERATION

1. To solve this problem, I introduced a skill called Assumption Generation. The exercise prompts are in the following slides.

2. When I first tested to see if this skill would help groups, I split-test the prompts to see if any would be the best. I now use the punch/counterpunch prompt almost all the time, since it has consistently generated the best results.

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THE FIRST MAKING

BRIDGING YOUR EARLY IDEA

AND YOUR FIRST RESEARCH QUESTION

EARLY IDEA

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THE FIRST MAKING

1. Within your group, generate a list of assumptions upon which your idea is based

2. Rank those assumptions in terms of the potential they have to invalidate your idea

BRIDGING YOUR EARLY IDEA

AND YOUR FIRST RESEARCH QUESTION

EARLY IDEA

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THE FIRST MAKING

1. Draw a line down the middle of your flipchart paper to create two columns. Label the first column Thrill and the second column Kill. In the next five minutes, you will think of reasons why this is a thrilling idea AND reasons why the idea should be killed.

2. For the first TWO Minutes, brainstorm all the reasons this is an awesome idea and deserves to be given all the resources needed to make it a success.

3. Then, for TWO MORE minutes, brainstorm all the reasons this is a terrible idea that will never work and shouldn’t have time wasted on it.

THRILL/KILL37


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THE FIRST MAKING

1. Choose a scribe and draw a vertical line down the center of the sheet to create two columns.

2. Label the left column “Punch” and the right column “Counterpunch.”

3. In the “Punch” column, list every objection imaginable to your early idea. Under “Counterpunch,” develop your response to each objection.

4. Come up with a Counterpunch for every Punch right away!

PUNCH / COUNTERPUNCH39


THE FIRST MAKING

PICK THE ASSUMPTION THAT DIVIDED THE GROUP THE MOST

EARLY IDEA

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EXPERIENTIAL PROTOTYPINGAfter assumption generation, the teams move into rapid prototyping. This photo is an example of the end result!

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WORKSHOP-TO-WORKPLACE TRANSITION

1. The third sticking point I want to share is about taking the skills and mindsets practiced in a workshop back to everyday business. Participants were reporting that when they got back to their desks they didn’t know what to do first.

2. The rapid prototyping class is built around running fast experiments. So my solution to this problem was to have participants create an experiment in class that they can start to implement when they get back to their office.

WORKSHOP-TO-WORKPLACE TRANSITION

1. The following slides show the prompts for a Startup Weekend-styled voting and presenting exercise I did with a client.

2. One of my favorite parts of this exercise is that the final presentations are given to the workshop participants’ senior leader! That individual has the authority to approve the experiment in class, so work can begin immediately on implementation when class is over.

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But no senior leadership!

MODULARITY

1. Sometimes a senior leader cannot be present to hear the pitches for the experiments. That’s why I build all my workshops in a modular fashion, so parts can easily be changed out as needed.

2. This gives each workshop a very customized and personalized feel, without the expense and time of creating each one entirely from scratch.

3. The next slide shows how a typical day is broken down into separate modules.

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MODULARITY

1. The following slides show how the senior leader pitches are replaced by team pitches.

2. The main purpose of this exercise is to practice building a good experiment and to get feedback from your colleagues.

MAKING IT REAL

ON YOUR OWN: ‣ Come up with the idea you want to test based on

your work at .…. ‣ Frame your hypothesis as a question and design

your experiment.

WITH YOUR PARTNER: ‣ Share your experiment and collect feedback. ‣ Iterate.

ON YOUR OWN: ‣ Come up with a pitch.

AT YOUR TABLES: ‣ Pitch your experiments. ‣ Choose the best pitch to share out.

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EARLY IDEA


MAKING IT REAL



your experiment.



AT YOUR TABLES: ‣ Pitch your experiments. ‣ Choose the best pitch to share out.

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EARLY IDEA

5 MIN


MAKING IT REAL 56

EARLY IDEA

10 MIN



your experiment.



AT YOUR TABLES: ‣ Pitch your experiments. ‣ Choose the best pitch to share out. For use in General Assembly Enterprise workshops

MAKING IT REAL 57

EARLY IDEA

10 MIN



your experiment.




MAKING IT REAL 58

EARLY IDEA

5 MIN



your experiment.




MAKING IT REAL 59

EARLY IDEA

10 MIN



your experiment.




MAKING IT REAL

LARGE GROUP SHAKEOUTMake the pitch:

‣ What’s your idea?

‣ How would you test it?

‣ What’s a pass/fail?

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EARLY IDEA


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ITERATIONS

LEARNING FROM MY STUDENTS

• I want to deliver the best possible experience for my students and colleagues. To that end, I thrive on taking feedback and improving my curriculum through consistent iterations.

• General Assembly collects formal feedback at the end of every day of a workshop. We ask for a Net Promoter Score as well as other numerical answers to questions about student satisfaction.

• I also get feedback directly from participants in the form of “I wishes” and “I likes” on post-it notes (example of the next slide).

ITERATIONS

IN CLOSING

• Thanks for allowing me to share my design thinking philosophy and practice with you.

• As both a teacher and student of design thinking, my purpose is to learn as much as I can from my students and my peers to deliver the best possible workshop and facilitation experience.

• I can be reached at [email protected] and on linkedin: linkedin.com/in/ericmorrow

THANK YOU!

presentation on design thinking teaching pedgagogy

Leadership & Management