How the WeQ can help us to provide better support processes

This week I had the chance to moderate the SAP Global Partner Summit 2014, which took place at the Innovation Center Potsdam.

Together with 8 design thinking coaches we organized a one-day design thinking experience for almost 50 SAP partners. The goal was to let them experience design thinking in a really practical way. The space at the Innovation Center gave us the perfect frame for this and we had a sunny, interactive and interesting day.

We put together some design thinking “all time classics” like the line-up game or the Marshmallow challenge, enriched this enchilada with motivating and guiding team coaching based on a flow, which ensures enough time to create good results (but still timeboxed 😉 ). The sugar on top was the visual recording of the whole day done by Stefan Behrendt and an inspiring key note from Prof. Uli Weinberg from the School of Design Thinking at the HPI.

Uli emphasized at the end a new initiative called “WeQ”, which will promote the power of the ‘We” instead the “I” while solving the challenges ahead from us.

At the end of the day the teams presented 8 ideas how to re-design the joined support process providing by SAP and the partners. My personal “Wow” of the day was the fact that all teams did this with really funny and enthusiastic role plays including the fitting costumes and acting. And most of them did not create only a new tool to improve the process but added also very much “WeQ” into it, i.e. presenting ideas how to foster the collaboration between the sad end user on the support line and the support guys. This could be a “support pizza party” every friday or special “empathy trainings” for support colleagues to ensure that they really understand the needs of their users. So – more WeQ than IQ and we will have lucky customers 🙂

A special thanks goes to the really cool coaching team: Heike van Geel, Hester Hilbrecht, Petra Meyer Thomas Thome, Thomas Schoerner, Raja Gumienny, Gerlinde Wallner and Dieter Breuer.