Beyond Bootcamp Four steps to advance your design thinking mastery

Design Thinking has become an important and popular methodology in the corporate, startup and government space in the last decade. It has helped teams design all manner of new products, services, policies and better ways of working based on actual customer needs and validates these new solutions quickly and cheaply through low fidelity experiments.

Many Design Thinking practitioners have now reached a stage where they are thinking what’s next and how do I further advance my or my team’s Design Thinking skills, taking them to the next level of mastery?

When I’m asked what is advanced Design Thinking, my response is that mastery doesn’t come from purely training alone, but practice, practice, practice, interspersed with injections of training (when you plateau or need to fill a skill gap) and supported with great coaching and mentoring along the journey.?

So what is a possible journey you can take from awareness to understanding to proficiency to mastery and even sensei (teacher)??

1. See One

A great place to start on this journey is attending a reputable Design Thinking Foundations (Bootcamp) program. A reputable Design Thinking program will teach you not only the key phases and tools of Design Thinking, but also the key behaviours and mindsets. Whilst in learning circles this phase is called?see one, a good Design Thinking program will actually have you learning by doing and tap into all the different learning styles whether you are predominantly a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learner.?

Look for training programs that are not only run by good trainers, but trainers who are also practitioners and that have actually applied it on multiple types of projects and even industries.

If you’ve already recently done a good Design Thinking program, you’ll be ready for step two.

2. Do One

Do one is then about applying your learning to an actual live project. First time up I recommend having an expert Design Thinking facilitator lead you and the team through the process and workshops. That way you get the benefits of??‘doing one’ under the safe guidance of an expert, as well as all the extra tips and tricks they’ll impart.

So we’ve done one. Have we now mastered Design Thinking? Hell, no! Some say it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill to a world-class standard. You don’t necessarily need to become world class, but I’m sure you get the point. You get better at anything by repeated practice and the continual learning that comes with this.

My own journey started in product innovation in the fast moving consumer goods industry for Unilever. This role taught me the fundamentals of consumer-insight driven new product development and the innovation stage-gate process.

During this journey I attended training and conferences in consumer insight, product management and innovation and in my spare time read up on the literature – a mix of the classics, the contemporary and the emerging books on innovation.?

It was the ongoing iterative process of applying my learnings to live projects, working and learning alongside others, that taught me what worked and what didn’t and enabled me to hone my design thinking approaches.

3. Lead One

I believe it is really important and valuable to master leading and facilitating design and innovation projects before you start training and teaching it. You’ve got so much more to offer your team or clients (training participants) if you’ve also got experience leading innovation. For example, all the war stories and scars that come with leading innovation in uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and the course corrections, pivots, failures, some wins and so on that you experience. This is why I add ‘lead one’ to the traditional see one, do one, teach one framework.

Personally, I went down the path from Product Manager to Brand Consultant and facilitator fairly quickly in my career. I was lucky to find what I loved early on and I wanted to do it more often! My passion for innovation drove me to learn more, but my role also required me to.?

My role as facilitator also meant I got to experiment with new methods working in many different industries and markets with lots of different clients on a near weekly basis. This not only helped me master a customer-centric and design-led approach to innovation, but also to start evolving it. This included experimenting with new techniques and behaviours, evolving how we set up innovation teams and ran workshops all the while keeping what worked and perishing what didn’t.?

4. Teach One

My own journey from facilitator to trainer came from a passion to develop individuals and teams to be more innovative and fulfilled, which arose through the consulting and facilitation work I was doing. I realised that teams could better innovate if they had the right skills, behaviours and mindsets and also worked in a culture that supported innovation. I also realised that life was a lot more fulfilling for people and organisations if they were more customer-centric, creative, experimental and innovative.

Becoming a trainer is a lot like starting all over again. I put myself through a top train the trainer course, read the literature, worked with some great trainers and applied it to developing people and teams, reviewing what worked and what didn’t and kept iterating the methodology and delivery.?

Becoming a trainer requires you to really have mastery of the craft. It’s true that you don’t really deeply know something until you teach it. You learn so much more about the subject matter and about yourself for that matter. It often also requires you to become an author or instructional designer. That is, to design and write training content that inspires, empowers and equips people to do something new.

Once you get to this stage (or the stage before if you’re not interested in becoming a trainer), you’ve most likely reached a practitioner or mastery level. The journey never stops though. You can keep learning new methods, apply them to projects as a facilitator, review and iterate and/or then apply them to people and teams as a trainer or mentor and review and iterate.?

Diagram 1. Continuous and Interconnected Learning

Diagram 1 shows how iterative and interconnected my own learning journey was, applying design-led innovation to both projects as a practitioner and facilitator and to people and teams as a trainer and mentor.

Five Advanced Design Thinking Programs to Fast Track Your Mastery

Training can play a key part in advancing your Design Thinking and innovation abilities, fulfilment and career. A good time to undertake advanced training is when you’ve already completed a quality Design Thinking foundation program (seen one), been facilitated through a Design Thinking innovation project by an expert facilitator (done one) and have since led or been part of a team applying the methodology to a few more design and innovation projects (bedded the skills down).?

When aligned with your strengths, weaknesses and passions, these advanced Design Thinking programs could really take your mastery to the next level.

1. Advanced Customer Research

Customer research is a specialist field in itself. As a Design Thinker it is important to understand the value of customer research, how to brief it in well and how to use its outputs, but I think there is a lot of value in engaging the specialists to run these stages of innovation.?

Regardless, of who is running the research I always recommend the project team attend research alongside the researchers to get a first hand experience of the customers and their lives.?

And if customer research is your calling and this is the area you want to specialise then training that goes deeper into how to lead, plan, manage, run and present customer research is going to be very important and relevant for you.?

2. Advanced Insight Generation

This is what I believe is the toughest and most important stage of innovation and Design Thinking. Therefore, it warrants specialist advanced training and mentoring.?

I purposely split this out from field research. Whilst, I recommend teams hire specialist customer researchers for the fieldwork phase and acknowledge that these same people are generally also good at insight generation, I firmly believe we should all be good at generating customer insights, as they are the lifeblood and inspiration for all innovation and experience design. And I believe through some great training, mentoring and practice we can all get better at insight generation.?

In our?advanced customer insight program?we not only train participants in unpacking, synthesising, prioritising, crafting and testing compelling customer insights, but also how to design and facilitate the insight phase and workshops, and how to use customer insights as the creative spark to inspire ideas at the next phase.?

3. Advanced Creative Thinking

We go through school, life and business, generally having creativity taught and beaten out of us, so we could all benefit from rediscovering and increasing our creative thinking capabilities and capacity.?

Learning how to boost creativity in individuals, teams and workshops is relevant to all leaders today let alone design and innovation leaders. All teams and organisations could benefit from getting better at generating fresh, relevant and useful ideas that solve customer needs and problems.

In our?advanced creative thinking program?we teach participants the key?barriers to individual and team creativity and how to overcome them. Plus, how to design and facilitate the ideation phase and workshops. Participants get lots of opportunity to practice, and receive plenty of feedback and coaching. We also cover how to pitch your ideas to get stakeholder buy-in and gain momentum for your ideas and how to turn these ideas into experimentation briefs.

4. Advanced Experimentation

Many organisations still jump from customer-tested concepts (desirability) straight to business case development. The weakness with this approach is that?business cases rely on certainty, clear facts and data, and little change. However, when innovating we are dealing with uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The ideas that we are creating are new and don’t exist yet, so there is often little to no data on them to build an accurate and realistic business case. Therefore, we end up making up feasibility and viability of our solutions.?

Furthermore, business case development is also very time intensive and costly, and in innovation speed is of the essence and we’re often innovating on a tight budget.

A faster, less expensive and more accurate approach for innovation is to take an experimentation method to choosing which ideas to take into development and commercialisation.?

In our?advanced experimentation program?we teach participants how to prototype solutions into business models, generate?a broad range of hypotheses, test these for desirability, feasibility and viability in fast small-scale experiments, progressing the more successful designs, pivoting others and perishing the failed ones.?

5. Train the trainer and train the facilitator

Depending on your journey, next steps for you may be workshop facilitation mastery (lead one) or training mastery (teach one).

Workshop facilitation and training can be very fulfilling – you get to spend your time helping teams innovate and unleash their true potential.

Our?train the trainer?and?train the facilitator programs?cover everything from how to connect with audiences and own the floor, the art of story telling and actor’s edge, managing state and training for different learning styles, facilitating difficult people and finding your own training or facilitation style.?We give participants lots of opportunity to practice through vignettes whilst receiving coaching and feedback throughout.

And through this training, some practice and a little hard work participants find their own way to move and inspire people.

I hope this article helps you on your journey as a design and innovation practitioner or team leader looking to develop your team’s capabilities further.

What’s next for me? Recently, it has been authoring and publishing a book, mentoring individuals and speaking at events for teams and organisations. And I still love leading and facilitating innovation projects and designing and delivering innovation capability and training programs for teams.

If you're interested in further reading my book,?Innovator’s Playbook, published by Wiley covers more of my experience, learning and many of the areas above more extensively.

And if you’re interested in attending any of our Advanced Design Thinking training programs please reach out.

Nathan Baird?is the founder of customer-driven innovation and growth firm Methodry and author of?Innovator’s Playbook: How to create great products, services and experiences that your customers will love!?He has been practicing, leading and training design-led innovation for over 20 years, and is a?former Partner of Design Thinking for KPMG. He helps teams build their innovation mastery and works alongside them to create new innovations. Visit www.methodry.com