3D Modelling is a physical process. Participants create a sculpture that represents their current situation and the emerging possibilities of their work and life.
The process prompts questions from four vantage points, allowing for 360-degree seeing and sensing of an emerging future. The power of the practice lies in participants relying on their hands, rather than on habitual ways of thinking, to discover new insights.
90-Minute Prototypes is a short and sweet prototyping workshop that challenges teams to build basic clickable app prototypes within 90 minutes. It’s easy to plan and run and demonstrates how rapidly an insight can be turned into a test-ready prototype. Use it to inspire your team to embrace a prototyping mindset.
Client-centricity” (or “client-focus”) is an approach to business based on putting the client/customer at the center of an organization's philosophy, strategy, and operations. This exercise promotes collaborative exploration and reflection around an organization’s approach to its clients. Participants discuss and share positive experiences they have had as clients, and use this to define their approach to “client-centricity” as a group. They discuss different groups of clients based on needs, and explore how successfully the organization has met those needs in the past. The exercise ends with a prioritization of areas for improvement.
Prototype space to evoke emotions and understand behaviors.
Repurpose your space in the name of design. Rearrange a room to role play how a user might experience your service or product. Try out these methods early on in prototyping.
Future workshop is a method that aims to have stakeholders design their desired future, avoiding constraints imposed by experts or organizations.
To be used when ideas need to be developed outside of the design team.
You can engage a group to learn and improve rapidly from tapping three levels of knowledge simultaneously: (1) explicit knowledge shared by participants; (2) tacit knowledge discovered through observing each other’s performance; and (3) latent knowledge, i.e., new ideas that emerge and are jointly developed.
This powerful combination can be the source of transformative experiences and, at the same time, it is seriously fun. Participants identify and act out solutions to chronic or daunting problems. A diverse mix of people is invited to dramatize simple elements that work to solve a problem. Innovations represented in the Improv sketches are assembled incrementally from pieces or chunks that can be used separately or together. It is a playful way to get very serious work done!
A short activity to run early in a program focused on sharing fears, anxieties and uncertainties related to the program theme. The purpose is to create openness within a group. The stinky fish is a metaphor for "that thing that you carry around but don’t like to talk about; but the longer you hide it, the stinkier it gets." By putting stinky fish (fears and anxieties) on the table, participants begin to relate to each other, become more comfortable sharing, and identify a clear area for development and learning.
This is a practical, dynamic and versatile method for groups to explore ideas and questions together. Something like a physical questionnaire; participants respond to questions by walking around the space and placing themselves on an imaginary line. This provides a starting point for reflection and discussion and brings teams together.
This exercise supports a user-centred approach to product and service innovation. Teams create an imaginary user (a persona), map out an average day in his or her life, and identify the challenges that he or she experiences. Teams then use this to brainstorm new products or services that could help with those challenges. Finally, sketches or prototypes of the best ideas are quickly developed presented back to for feedback.
You can help groups reflect on a shared experience in a way that builds understanding and spurs coordinated action while avoiding unproductive conflict.
It is possible for every voice to be heard while simultaneously sifting for insights and shaping new direction. Progressing in stages makes this practical—from collecting facts about What Happened to making sense of these facts with So What and finally to what actions logically follow with Now What. The shared progression eliminates most of the misunderstandings that otherwise fuel disagreements about what to do. Voila!
A process for understanding a complex problem situation
Spectrum mapping is designed to reveal the diversity of perspectives and options around any given topic and to organize them into a meaningful spectrum. It’s valuable because it unearths information that plays a role in attitudes and behaviours that otherwise may not be visible.