Written by Marc Bolick
In May, our latest cohort of thinkers, doers, innovators, and change agents from around the world reported for DesignThinkers Bootcamp in Miami. They honed their design thinking skills as they unpacked the design challenge of assisting the nonprofit Catalyst Miami with hurricane disaster preparedness for low- and middle-income communities.
DT Bootcamp is our flagship offering, far and above my favorite DT Academy course to teach, and hurricane readiness was an interesting challenge area to explore through human centered design.
Among our explorers was Kylie Henry, enterprise design thinking manager at Australian Pharmaceutical Industries (API). She traveled from the exact other side of the world – Victoria, Australia – to attend our Miami bootcamp.
Kylie was a self-taught design thinker. She’d found DT Academy while searching for a world-class training course that would build upon what she had learned on her own. She had employed some design thinking concepts, but knew she and the company could go further. “I wanted to validate what I was doing and explore what design thinking could look like for us,” she told me.
But, Kylie wasn’t just looking for theories. API had been working to improve the flow of data within the organization and needed concrete solutions to that nagging problem. This was one of those complex challenges that design thinking is ideally suited to unravelling, and she knew it would hold the keys to a robust approach.
That’s often the case for our attendees. Our goal is to equip them with a complete design thinking toolkit, and a ‘learning by doing’ experience that shows them how to use those tools. We give participants the needed space to discover new thinking, thereby changing the way they, and those around them, work. Our participants leave their week with us confident in their skillset for empathy, ethnographic research, building personas, customer journey mapping, constructing protypes and more.
For Kylie, consciously shifting her perspective to see through the eyes of the people most affected by hurricanes in Miami sparked a revelation. It challenged how she and her Bootcamp teammates thought about problem-solving, helping them grasp the importance of having deep empathy in order to find truly innovative solutions.
“It was about the connections that were made for the people in the room,” Kylie said. “Previously, most of us would have tackled the same problem in a way that we would feel about it rather than that the people who we’re trying to help. ‘What does it mean to them, not to us?’ It actually changes your thinking.”
“It was about the connections that were made for the people in the room,” Kylie said. “Previously, most of us would have tackled the same problem in a way that we would feel about it rather than that the people who we’re trying to help. ‘What does it mean to them, not to us?’ It actually changes your thinking.”
Kylie returned to Victoria to report her paradigm-shifting experience to her executive team. They were more than pleased: in short order, Kylie began facilitating design thinking workshops for managers at API, who then began requesting sessions for their own teams.
While API is in the midst of an organizational culture shift and open to reevaluating how they can work better moving forward, Kylie’s desire to innovate, combined with what she gained from our Bootcamp, is fundamentally changing the way API works as an organization.
“I learned a lot during the Miami Bootcamp. It was nice to be in a community that’s so different from where I live, and to learn from the people I met there. The problem-solving process of design thinking can be applied to almost anything. We were all from different industries, and we were all there to learn how to provide better products or services to people. Our cohort is still in contact through DT Academy’s WhatsApp group.”
In fact, through our WhatsApp group we are all able to follow Kylie’s experience planning and running a week-long design workshop modelled after the DT Bootcamp, using the same Bootcamp flow and tools. It was a huge success, and in Kylie’s words, “There was some uncertainty in the group to start but now they can’t believe we don’t work this way to solve all our complex problems!”
This is what I love about the work we do at DT Academy and DesignThinkers Group. With every training course, every workshop or design sprint, we have the opportunity to enable powerful breakthroughs like Kylie’s. Meeting diverse and amazing new people, and helping them grow are the things that make our work meaningful.
Our next DT Bootcamp is October 1st-5th in Toronto, Canada. I can’t wait to plan our next design challenge, and help reshape the thought patterns of another cohort of design thinking professionals as they learn how to grow their innovation muscles. We’d love for you to join us and embark on your own transformative experience.
By inviting people in, having an open door, you get repeat customers. Sometimes you get individuals that get so charged up about it that they want to help other participants by becoming a coach, so we will train them on how to help other teams – pay it forward approach. That’s what’s neat about design thinking. It creates a different culture around it.