How Learning Theories can make Design Thinking facilitation soar

When you facilitate design thinking sessions, do you feel like you’re steering a cumbersome freighter ship and dragging the group forward, or is it more like conducting an orchestra, where you’re giving opportunities for each instrument’s voice to blend and soar?

Design thinking coaches can always be on the lookout for ways to improve our facilitation techniques. For instance, I recently came across these four principles for successful design thinking:

• The human rule: Design is social in nature, and returns us to a 'human-centric’ viewpoint.
• The ambiguity rule: We need to uphold ambiguity, which helps with the ability to envision differently.
• The re-design rule: All design is re-design and addresses the context of human need, which may change with evolving technological and social variables.
• The tangibility rule: By making ideas tangible, prototypes become vehicles for communication.

These points made me think about how design thinking relates to models of learning. One reason I enjoy DT is because of its power not only to design solutions, but to engage participants by helping them to create a common understanding.

For those of you who have been out of university for a while, please bear with me if I become too dry. In education theory, the constructivist model says that we each construct our own comprehension by experience and by reflection. In other words, learners are engaged by doing things, and by thinking about what they are doing.

Does this sound familiar? We certainly want to provide opportunities for the participants to do, and to reflect, right?

Collaborative learning theory also says that someone can learn and retain more by working in a group. Active learning moves students from being passive listeners by becoming submerged in opportunities for meaning-making inquiry: action, imagination, invention, interaction, hypothesizing and reflection.

Do you give opportunities for meaning-making when you are coaching Design Thinking sessions?

A teacher (in the traditionally understood role) may give a lecture on a subject (which makes the learner a passive receiver), but a facilitator helps the learners create their own understanding. A teacher speaks a monolog, but a facilitator is in dialog and creates the environment for the learners to draw their own conclusions. A teacher tells, a facilitator asks. (If you're a cooperative learning teacher, you have a right to resent this portrayal).

Now granted, there’s more to Design Thinking besides engagement. But by creating an atmosphere where participants do become engaged, we as coaches are providing the foundation on which the Design Thinking process can become very productive – a symphonic masterpiece!