Design Thinking Out Of The Box

Design Thinking also known as Human Centered Design has been gaining traction across all industries in the past few years. Every innovation lab or digital transformation project in Singapore boasts of its benefits and vow to train all staff to leverage this new way of working.

We at Design Thinking Out Of The Box (DTOOTB) are part of this corporate movement and we want to use our facilitation skills to empower your teams to help solve problems and explore innovative ideas to improve your products and services using Design Thinking methodologies.

We are also on a mission to transform the way businesses ideate and to allow everyone a chance to experience innovation in action via collaboration. This is the new way of working and Singapore needs this transformation to become a truly digital nation.

Design Thinking is especially helpful in these scenarios :

Product and service innovation

If you’re looking for an innovative solution to a problem with your product or service, assemble a team of your best and brightest folks from a wide variety of disciplines. They can come together to come up with something non-conventional and unique.

Here’s some statement starters to begin with:

• How might we improve Product A to increase its sales for next year? (Product)
• How might we improve the online subscription process so that there will be less drop-offs? (Digital)

Operational efficiency

If you’re looking to get people to change the way they work because they’ve always been doing things in a certain way. Get them to come together to brainstorm a new way forward. Find out barriers they face day-to-day and collective think of ways to remove these.

Here’s some statement starters to begin with:

• How might we reduce the turn-around time for the credit approval process? (Finance)
• How might we increase the number of candidates for our job openings? (Human resources)

Collaborate to Innovate

Drop us a line to enquire about our services to facilitate a Design Thinking Workshop for your team of 5-12 staff or stakeholders and experience innovation in action.

We can:

1. Design and facilitate a workshop to solve a problem your team is facing i.e. How do we improve our employee on-boarding experience? How do I create a sales management dashboard that will be useful to senior management?
2. Design and facilitate a workshop to experience Design Thinking in action. We can work on a more generic problem statement of improving how your business operates and allow your staff or team to see how this works. You can then decide if you should send dedicated staff for further training to help your business or team going forward.

Our 3-step approach to helping you get your workshop or a brainstorm with your colleagues and staff together is pretty simple:

1. Define a problem statement – You can either pick a narrow area of focus of trying to solve a particular process or experience. Or you can go wide and plan a brainstorm to get innovative ideas for next year’s project list and how to prioritize those ideas.
2. Selecting participants – Pick from a range of internal stakeholders that are involved in the area of work. You’ll be surprised how much information you can learn from the actual users of your system or product. Participants should also have a positive mindset to contribute and be vocal about their ideas. What we need from a location perspective is a big enough venue i.e. a conference room to house the number of participants comfortably in 2 team working areas and enough free wall space so that we can pin up flip charts for the activities so that everyone has a clear view.
3. Run workshop – We will provide all the stationery and facilitate the whole session.

So drop us a line now to begin this discussion!

Finally,

We understand not every company, especially the SMEs and corporate departments have access to trained Design Thinking facilitators that can help solve their project or innovation problems.

Sending staff on a 1-day crash course does not make them a Design Thinking facilitator instantly. You need to have sufficient practice to be able to design and manage a workshop with a specific outcome to solve your problems or innovate.

We also know many companies would like to sign their staff up for some Design Thinking training because everyone else is talking about it and there are Skillsfuture subsidies for it. But not everyone knows what its exactly about and how it will benefit their business.

Let us help you.

If you are keen to do some innovative brainstorming with your teams or solve an internal challenge using the collective knowledge and power of your people, drop us a line now to begin this discussion.

Collaborate to innovate!