Moving design thinking projects online

If the conference room was available today, we could run a design thinking session.

Organising a creative team session is hard work, you need to:

1. find a suitable time for all team members;

2. find a room to run the meeting;

3. set up the room with all the material, e.g., poster, Post-its, markers, etc.

4. Run the session;

5. Clean up the mess;

6. Keep the visual (paper) outcome of the meeting and create a digital output form for it.

The success of a creative session depends upon many factors, preparing an appropriate environment is one of the most critical, and possibly the most overlooked.

But there is good news:

What if you could run a design thinking session without the pain of setting up a ‘physical’ room? A space that is always open for colleagues to join and contribute to a conversation which doesn’t end at the end of (today’s) session?

Ok, so let’s move design thinking sessions to an online space.

Don’t take me wrong; there is still a significant amount of work you need to do as the facilitator to prepare a design thinking session using a digital space, but the advantages are several.

First, you need not to wait for the conference room to be free (it never is anyway), second a digital room is always open so that the session doesn’t end when people walk out the room. Third, and most important the (visual) outcome of the meeting is available to team members but also made available to other people in the organisation.

So when your colleagues ask you about the creative session, you can show its visual outcome while explaining the dynamics in the room.

New software can enhance the success rate of creative team sessions, and this requires you to develop (on top of your current skills) a new set of skills and techniques associated with the digital space.

In the upcoming posts, I’ll dig into the different set of tools you can use to move your creative and design thinking into an online space.