You need to improve your team's design thinking skills. What's the best way to do it?

1. Hands-on workshops/training that is tailored to you and your team's specific needs. With our clients we find that usually with collaborative environement, it allows us to only introducing the principles and methodologies of design thinking through this hands on approach to make it easier to understand but also make it fun/engaging while discussing and teaching how to approach problems from a user-centered perspective.

Hands-on learning, organize workshops led by experienced practitioners. Foster a culture of collaboration and regular practice to cultivate a mindset focused on user-centric solutions and creative problem-solving.

Training and Skill Development: Relevant courses or workshops on design thinking and help ensure that everyone on the team understands the basics and is equipped with the necessary skills. Iterative Thinking: Promoting iterative thinking within design thinking is a crucial aspect. This comes with continuous reflection, feedback, and refinement throughout the project. This mindset helps in adapting and improving the project.

One effective method to incorporate is "brainwriting," where team members independently write down their ideas on a topic before sharing them with the group. This technique not only fosters a diverse range of solutions but also ensures that all voices are heard, thereby enhancing creativity and empathy—key components of design thinking.

To foster a creative and collaborative mindset that focuses on design-thinking. Some strategies include having workshops or training sessions conducted by design thinking experts that help the team engage in the process. Collaboration with team members from diverse backgrounds adds various points of view. Apply design thinking principles to real-world projects for hands on experience. Encourage empathy with end-users or customers they are designing for. Create a design thinking culture that would involve trial and error space to learn. Provide tools for ideation, feedback and iteration. Gain support from leadership. And always measure the result’s and impact which is key for design thinking or any initiative.

1. Empathy Interviews: Conduct interviews or shadow users to gain deep insights into their experiences and needs. 2. Brainstorming Sessions: Facilitate diverse and inclusive brainstorming sessions to generate a wide range of ideas. 3. Rapid Prototyping: Encourage quick creation of prototypes to test ideas and gather feedback early in the process. 4. Feedback Loops: Implement structured feedback loops with users and stakeholders to refine solutions based on real-world input.

Experience helps you become better and wiser. Practicing with real time challenges will get the job done. There's always a lot to learn from real tasks than any other drills, especially if it's a creative job.

Setting up a diverse range of people in your team helps everyone to grasp a wider perspective for things to do the right way. Teamwork is important. And putting up a team with different perspectives is much crucial for a creative job. It also helps them generate ideas better and faster.

A global and diverse mind combines multifaceted experiences, cultural exposure, resilience and open mindedness naturally, into your product’s design thinking. This widens your product’s value and use cases. Also eliminating the bias that comes when you’re restricted to set locations and demographics.

This is wrong. The core promise of design thinking is to make problem solving more structured and predictable. Look at the Google Sprint method, which provides a template for “solving big problems in just 5 days.” That process gives a day-by-day guide of design thinking activities that the authors claim will consistently lead to positive results, regardless of team or situation. So, a key indicator that a team is getting better at design thinking is the feeling of problem solving activities becoming LESS messy, uncertain, and frustrating. The entire point is to bring more structure and process to things like problem definition, ideation, and decision making.

1. Diverse Inspiration Sources: Encourage exploration of inspiration from unrelated fields or industries to foster innovative thinking. 2. Expert Workshops: Invite experts from various disciplines for talks or workshops to provide fresh perspectives and insights. 3. User Testing Sessions: Organize regular user testing sessions to obtain direct feedback from the end-users, ensuring solutions meet real needs. 4. Reflective Sessions: Hold regular team reflections to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and how processes can be improved, fostering a culture of continuous learning.

🛑 Seeking inspiration without proper thinking & judgement process wouldn't be of much help. Because this can lead you to unconsciously imitate. You need to define your current design problem perfectly. Then, you can look for inspiration to bring a solution. And guess what? You can find the inspiration in a very unexpected example. For example, the designers of B2 Stealth Bomber find their inspiration in Falcons. Now, go and check the images of the plane and the bird to understand what I mean here.

Take a sneak peek into the wild world of other organizations (completely unrelated to your turf). Scope out their artistic endeavors, online shenanigans, and the hottest trends in their lineup, all the juicy deets that make their creations sizzle. Mix It Up Academically, dip your toes into the vast pool of knowledge beyond design: think psychology, sociology, anthropology and tech wizardry. Let the wisdom from these realms sprinkle some fairy dust on your design team process, turning it into a dazzling spectacle.

Seek inspiration by looking beyond your immediate field; explore art, nature, technology, and other industries for fresh perspectives. Encourage your team to share diverse ideas. For feedback, create a straightforward, respectful process where team members can give and receive constructive critiques. Regularly hold brainstorming sessions and open discussions, fostering a culture where feedback is seen as a tool for growth and innovation, not criticism. This approach not only sparks creativity but also builds a collaborative and supportive team environment.

Organize workshops focusing on attention to detail, brainstorming, and prototyping to enhance team design thinking. Encourage open communication, problem-solving, and creativity. Provide resources and offer feedback for continual improvement.

The secret is planning before doing. Great design thinking requires prep time. It’s not just winging it in the moment. EG, if the design team holds a one hour cross-functional brainstorm and doesn’t plan before the session, the activity will yield little more than random ideas with no clear purpose or next step. But if the team plans for hours before the session, clarifying the goals of the brainstorm, creating prompts to stimulate ideas, and outlining a clear process for how to select the winning idea, the session will be successful. To outsiders, it’s looks like the team just did an hour of “design thinking.” But in reality, it took many hours, the most valuable of which occurred BEFORE the most visible design thinking activity.

To improve the abstract 'Design Thinking' skills, you have to seek inspiration elsewhere besides your focused occupation and industry. This will awaken those brain cells and create new links in your head to other bits of information and stimuli - creating an open mind (pun intended). > See how other organisations (not part of your industry) do their creative work, what they post online, what products/services are their most popular - what activities they do to promote them. > Cross-Disciplinary Learning: Draw inspiration from disciplines outside of design, such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and technology. Explore how principles from these fields can inform and enhance your design process.

Incentive a participação em comunidades de Design Thinking. Isso permite que a equipe compartilhe experiências, aprenda com outros profissionais e fique atualizada sobre as tendências.

When working in a design thinking environment, it is ideal to keep the focus towards customer rather to your team. Take away the 'personal output' from the equation and let them think in the direction that is desired out of the project at hand. Once they don't have the burden of showing themselves off, they will be in a neutral position for comping up with more original ideas. It's your job as a team leader to filter out the ones that would work.