Design Thinking For Executives

Last March (from 18th to 20th), I have attended a Design Thinking Bootcamp organized by Genovasi (www.genovasi.com). This is a program for executives facilitated by Stanford University. It was fulled of fun and pack with activities. Program started at 8:30 am till 5:30 daily. Our facilitator was Jeremy Utley and Perry Klahbahn from d.school of Stanford University.

We started our activities with Design Thinking Teasers. I met a very nice lady whose job is travelling to other countries. This activity is to design a new city experience using Design Thinking approach. It is about a 2 hours program. The result of this activities is for us to design a product or service for our partner. I created an allergic reaction gadget based on my understanding from the experience of my partner. Our Design Challenge is to DESIGN SAVING FOR PEOPLE NOT THINKING ABOUT SAVING. Our journey started with EMPATHY activities. We were divided into groups and were assigned to interview people around BANGSAR. Our coaches demoed the right techniques to interview and how to ask questions. Our team consists of five people and we walked around Bangsar town and managed to interview variety of people including foreigners from Pakistan, security guard, businessmen, housewives, a cobbler and a hawker. At 3:30 pm, we unpacked our activities using Post It Notes and whiteboard. We have to identify the tensions and constraints before we produce a Point of View (POV) Statement. The second day of training is PROTOTYPING DAY. Our team started to prototype our solutions based on the POV we built. We tested our prototype with a real customer. We gather the feedback in a feedback grid. Then, we were asked to present our prototype in a storytelling technique. All of us presented our prototype to our sponsor on the third day. It was fun presentation with a lot of laughs and giggles. Even the sponsor was totally amazed with the solutions although we took only three days to come up with solutions.

At the end of the bootcamp, each of us was awarded with a d.stanford pin and called ourselves a DESIGN THINKER. It was a fun bootcamp with fun and creative instructors at a wide space (used to be a warehouse) at genovasi. This bootcamp gave us a full understanding on DESIGN THINKING METHODOLOGY AND THE USAGE IN INNOVATION. Before we dismissed we were awarded with a certificate and a nice souvenir.