Planning a Billboard Design Thinking workshops is about creating complex human communication patterns.

If you are a Design Thinking professional and Design Thinking moderator who regularly designs workshops people will constantly be asking you what a Design Thinking workshop actually is all about and how they work.

You cant explain what a Design Thinking workshop is by describing activities, methods and results.

Usually, you will hear many different explanations referring to activities; methods are results created during or after the workshop for example:

• A Design Thinking Workshop is a brainstorming session
• A Design Thinking Workshop is about unleashing creativity
• A Design Thinking Workshop is about problem-solving

And of course there are many additional explanations, but in my opinion you can't explain what a sickness is by listing all possible symptoms, or you can't describe a person only by describing his/her physical appearance, and likewise you can't explain what a Design Thinking workshop is about by handing over a list with all activities, methods, and results used in the workshop.

Design Thinking Workshops are uniquely crafted communication patterns design to solve a specific workshop goal.

Realizing Design Thinking Workshops are about crafting unique human communication patterns helps you improve your workshop design.

This very mundane sounding insight turns out to be a huge advantage when analyzing previous as well as when design your next workshops. This insight will shift the way you plan, observe and execute Design Thinking workshops in the future.

It will shift the focus from thinking about methods and activities like story-telling, user-journeys, sketching, stakeholder mapping on a very superficial way to asking your self the question how these activities and methods assist participants in exchanging, uncovering and communicating information during the workshop.

Focusing on human interactions and communication in your workshop justifies extending and introducing new interaction patterns.

Human communication pattern for workshops doesn't need to be limited to talking and discussions.

When explaining what Design Thinking workshops are about the answer, you will often get is: "But in the end, it is only about people talking and exchanging ideas and information."

And yes, this is true but the crucial point to understand is that normal business meetings are horrendously inefficient for many reasons and this is easy to prove. The only reason most meetings will mandate a person to write a meeting protocol is the fact that at the moment the meeting ends hardly anybody knows what was discussed and this is especially true for long meetings where people talk, and talk and most participants have stopped listening and decided to use their time more productively by checking their emails or chatting on mobile phones, laptops or tablets.

Design Thinking workshops introduce the full pallet of human communication patterns avoiding talking and discussions as much as possible.

Introducing the Billboard Design Thinking communication architecture pattern.

For those of you who never heard of a Billboard Design Thinking workshops, the only thing you need to know is that you will need a large printed poster which is about one times five meters where all workshop activities are visualized as a sequence of Billboard templates.

During the workshop all workshop results are added to the poster and filling all templates from start to end defines how your workshop unfolds. If you are not familiar with the concept you can find detailed explanations in other articles I published on LinkedIn explaining the method.

Back to explaining the Billboard Communication Architecture pattern you can see five layers in the diagram above. The outer layers on top and on the bottom define the two user groups involved in a workshop the moderator and the participants.

The three layers in the middle capture definitions for segmenting and managing the communication patterns in your workshop. Those three layers have the following function:

1.  Moderation communication soft skills: This includes all soft skills the moderator will need to effectively master communicating the workshop intends, leading participants from start to end and managing human communication and interaction during workshop execution.

2.  The Billboard template layer represents a printed poster comprised of a sequence of Billboard templates that define individual communication patterns which define activities and how the participants will communicate when working on assigned tasks.

3.  The Prioritization and Information extraction methods list activities you can use to clarify and prioritize which of the information and insights created during the workshop are most valuable and shall be considered in when solving the problem. The connection lines between Prioritization methods and templates demonstrates that one prioritization method potentially can be used in multiple different templates during your workshop.

How to craft a Design Thinking workshop by defining the sequence of Billboard templates used in the Billboard Poster.

The glue that connects those templates are the information and results from participant create during the activities that are associated with each template. For example, let us pretend the workshop goal is to use end-user feedback from a survey about a consumer app to discuss what and how new features could increase customer satisfaction and make the app more popular for additional customer segments. Based on this information your high-level workshop design might look as follows.

Template 1: Problem matrix. Users get two minutes time to write down all problems they know customers are complaining about. Then those problems are place on the poster and grouped according to total cost and reasons that cause customers to uninstalling the app.

Finding the most important issues that need to be fixed is an example how prioritization methods are used during a workshop.

Template 2: Value proposition. Moderated discussion to craft a compelling value proposition that would mitigate the most important problems discovered when working on the Problem matrix.

Template 3: User Journey. Defining a perfect user experience including discovery, installation, usage and retaining end-users. Which also includes one or several prioritization method to make a decision which of the suggested features will most likely improve customer satisfaction.

Template 4: Project plan and ToDo list. Moderated discussion how this new compelling user experience can be implemented and who will take which actions.

I think it is obvious how the results of one template are used as input for the next template. In this example sharing all problems is the precondition for defining a value proposition. Then the value proposition is used to create a better user experience and guiding participants in crafting a meaning full solution. And the improved user journey defines the project plan and ToDo list.

In a nutshell, you have just witnessed a very simple example of how workshop templates are used to compose a Billboard poster. The important thing to keep in mind is there must be logical transitions between the templates and when I say logical I mean they must be easy to grasp for the workshop participants because if they understand how their contributions are the basis for achieving the workshop goal you won’t be able to stop them from bursting with energy and creativity.

Template outputs are used as inputs for subsequent templates and ensure there is a logical way to get from start to end. 

You know your communication patterns work if you can explain your workshop by telling a simple story

Both during the initial workshop design phase and after workshop completion you can easily test how effective your workshop design is. If you can tell a simple and compelling story starting ate the beginning of the poster and including all results added to the Billboard templates and arrive at the end of the poster capturing all insights and important points, than you know you have succeeded.

If you can use story-telling to explain how the workshop should work and can use story-telling when the workshop is completed your workshop will be successfull.

Two Billboard Design Thinking Poster examples

Here are two examples from Billboard Design Thinking Posters used in previous workshops. And here is a link to complete workshop documentation using the Billboard Design Thinking method.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/tietoped2018-planning-executing-sharing-one-complete-sean-mcguire/