Good to say: First d.camp mission accomplished.

Well done I would say: our first self-organized 3.5 day design thinking advanced training (yes, you can call it also d.camp) is done and it was – I am glad to say this – a real success. 😆

The main scope for the last days was to give  people running and working in and with agile teams (e.g. scrum master and product owner) an in-depth training about the ideas and the methodology of design thinking. In addition to this we handled some more tools and methods like the user-story-maps or the lean startup ideas, which are from our point of view helpful to run design thinking projects in a “corporate reality” and to build in the end also real (software) products. And as learning works best if you can experience it we focused not on never-ending slide decks but on as much as possible on concrete exercises and DOING.

We started with a relatively open design challenge: re-design the professional networking experience but after a first round of re-framing and charetting the teams focused on really different aspect in this area:

• How to establish trust-full relationships between colleagues working in remote locations?
• How to find high-quality information in an enterprise?
• How to link consultants and developers based on certain skill-sets?
• How to enable employees to start TGIF projects and to find team partner?
• How to support pupils to find a “right” job?

And then the hard work and the big fun started and we understood, observed, defined point of views, brainstormed, prototyped, tested and finally presented really good ideas. There was a virtual coffee-corner (which was even created between the offices in Rot and Walldorf), an innovation space for co-working projects, a data octopussy, a data slave and a job center for pupils based on Facebook.

We did of course a lot of warm-ups and even created a new one: the Origami warm-up. And yes, we did  also my all time favorite improvisation dance warm-up. Good to see that a lot participants “left their comfort zones” and joined even such crazy ideas from the workshop moderator.

The workshop moderator by the way really love to do such crazy things in his corporate reality …

Last but not least we found some new answers to the well-known question: what the hell is design thinking?

We will follow-up now with all workshop participants in about 6 weeks for one more workshop day. To hear their first findings and pitfalls when doing design thinking in their daily job with an agile team and to provide them with some more methods and details about design thinking, lean startup, interviewing, ideation techniques, visual facilitation, and and and …  Keep you posted …