Conducting An Effective Prototyping, Design, and Action Workshop
How do aspiring change makers or even 9–5 employees tackle massive problems in their community or workplace? It’s exciting to see a growing focus on measuring the impact of our work on society versus merely measuring the inputs. In order to get real impact, we have to start by changing the way we tackle problems. As Albert Einstein put it:
Educational equality, financial independence, civil rights, healthcare & clean water access, and world empathy are only a few of the complex, high impact problems we’re facing. How do we solve these problems?
This can be a lot to handle by yourself! You are more likely to go down a pigeon hole or worse, not consider the impact of your solutions to the different stakeholders affected.
Design thinking & using rapid prototyping workshops is one way. Megan Goering showed 20+ of us (entrepreneurs/aspiring SF change makers) how to think through complex problems structurally during last week’s Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center’s THINK-DO workshop. Below are the lessons I learned from this workshop. If you want a quick copy/paste version of the steps for your reference, feel free to use this summary.
I definitely want to try this out for our next brainstorming sessions at L2O! It was a lot of fun & appears to generate productive results.
According to IDEO,
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success… It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional, and to express ourselves through means beyond words or symbols.”
# 0: Prepare for the workshop.
If you aren’t already well-versed in the complex problem you’ll be addressing at the workshop, do some background research. Google search, read articles on it, find out what other people are saying, and think a bit on your own regarding your thoughts on the topic & what you hope to get out of the workshop.
This is one of my favorite (comfort) steps. I often over prepare for any meetings or events I attend — it’s one of the few ways I feel comfortable (& respectful of the person’s time in the case of a one-on-one meeting). Setting the expectations for the workshop prior to it is important. The description for this workshop said: “Come with stories, research, and any relevant background on the student debt problem we’re tackling.”
# 1: Introductions to generate an instant community feeling — comfort, openness, etc.
# 2: Set the ground rules as a team — exactly like kindergarten! After all, we clearly aren’t fully open minded people & often bring our rough baggage to the table/start venting if we’re not gently reminded how to make this as productive as possible.
Megan started the class with introductions, switching off questions from table to table: Name, what you do, & either what inspired you to come today, what you want to get out of it, wha. The deep questions and answers took time, but was a vital part of instantly building a community feeling. She then asked us what are things that make us feel we can contribute to successful collaboration? This set the ground rules for how we would act/respect each other during the workshop.
# 3: Set a basic understanding to level set the entire group.
She broke down the 3 main kinds of problems we all deal with:
- Simple — you know the problem & solution & can easily fix it.
- Complicated — you can see, know, and describe the problem & solution. You don’t have what you need to fix it.
- Complex — you cannot discern the problem or solution. An attribute is that any interaction that touches the system impacts other things.
#4: Quickly survey with a few questions what attendee’s experiences are related to the problem being discussed.
For the student loan/debt issue, Megan asked questions like — raise your hand if…
- You’ve ever had a student loan?
- Your student loan is currently over $10,000… over $50,000… over $100,000?
- You don’t think you’ll come out of student loan debt in your lifetime?
# 5: Create diverse groups based on their experiences.
You can group these experiences in different ways depending on the complex problem you’re addressing. Megan thought of the above questions on the spot. The reason for grouping people together based on differing experiences is that it allows each party to better understand several viewpoints. In this example, if some people haven’t ever had debt and some have & it’s a huge emotional burden for them… you get an opportunity to develop empathy for the other party. This helps you be able to think of how potential solutions may affect different parties… remember, solutions to complex problems often impact other things in the whole schema. It also helps decrease the likelihood of group-think driven solutions because every person may have a slightly different incentive & thought on the impact of a solution.
# 6: Ask basic/core questions to think of the problem, actors, and what would occur if the problem was solved. Each person individually answers what comes to the top of their mind on their own paper.
This one is simple because you’re merely evaluating the problem at face value & dreaming of a happy state. I was pleasantly surprised when Megan requested we first do this individually. Her reason: Time, speed, and # of thoughts. Although brainstorming with other people does often result in more creative, wonderful responses, first thinking on your own is faster and you can probably quickly list out a bunch of responses. You put whatever comes to your mind. Plus you’ll have in your mind the research, reading, background knowledge you came to the table with.
As an example, these are my answers to the questions after a few minutes of brainstorming.
# 7: Hold empathy interviews in smaller groups from each of those large groups. These smaller groups will share their answers to the core questions with the goal of truly listening to and learning from the other person.
At this workshop, there were around 20+ people, therefore split us up into groups of 2.
# 8: Bring the whole community back together to Mind Map — take themes from the answers given to the core questions & map the words onto a blank page that everybody can see.
Mind mapping the vision of success is a key one not to leave out because it provides a reminder/hope for what can be if we work towards solving the problem. During this stage, you may also come out with process flows for how the system currently works.
# 9: “Good enough for now” — set constraints to stop at a certain time & keep to it.
This could be as arbitrary as you have one large post it poster & only 30 minutes to go through the Mind Mapping. Stop when you reach those constraints. The theory is that after awhile, you’ll only get marginal returns going forward.
# 10: Look over all the answers generated on the Mind Maps. What gives you energy? Choose that for your focus.
Whatever gives you the most energy is what will probably motivate you to work harder at coming to a potential solution & actually take action on it. Your interests are key here. Choosing one thing to focus on will also help you feel less overwhelmed & give you the power to tackle one thing at a time.
# 11: Think of what you already do really well. For example, blogging, drawing, etc.
Not everybody is a scientist or coding wizard. What are your skills — that you’re good at & you enjoy?
# 12: And… Action! Take paper & draw or write to start prototyping on paper what you’d like to do for your focus area.
Use the skills you do have to sketch a prototype of your proposed solution. You could do something as simple as sketch out what a website would look like if you it was aimed at accomplishing your focus.
# 13: But what if you don’t know what action you want to take for your focus? Break it down into manageable steps you can think through to get to a potential action/solution.
This part was really interesting for me to watch Megan tackle this! She separated the workshop into sections. Those who knew what they wanted to focus on and what action they wanted to take went to one side of the room to start immediately on their prototypes. Everybody else gathered around her. I was more curious as to what Megan was going to do with this group of people & was itching to continue learning from her, therefore joined there. This is where you’ll create a scene/a movie in your head or say it out loud. Here are tips for developing this:
- Who is the party you want to focus on?
- With the student debt example, it may be the student, a policy maker, parent, etc.
2. What are the behavior changes you want to see to make the world a better place/help to at least partially solve your complex problem?
- For example, having students proactively take ownership over this issue by becoming more knowledgable about student debt, what they can do to manage/mitigate the risks & issues, the possibilities/hope beyond debt & what they can do to open the doors to those possibilities, etc.
3. The who & what result in your product statement. Don’t be afraid of committing to one product statement — it can change over time.
4. What are the risky moments… what would need to occur for this behavior to come to fruition?
5. And… Action! Design a prototype to test that risk. Some into one interaction and evaluate.
Have you used design thinking & rapid prototyping to help solve some of your community’s complex problems?
Don’t feel overwhelmed. You CAN make a difference.
Share the wealth of your knowledge with others to help them with the complex problems they’re trying to solve. Share your examples — they may be the same problems others are trying to solve!
