Do, Track, Network and Outreach - Do: Design Thinking

One of the emerging themes I identified back in my book, From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching, was Design Thinking. While this was several years ago, Design Thinking has now exploded into business practices everywhere. As a longstanding program designer, myself, it’s been natural to be integrating many of the principles and practices of Design Thinking into my own way of doing things.

In this week’s blog post, I wanted to share a little more about design thinking to get you thinking about how you might incorporate it into your program design, or conversations with clients.

“Design is the action of bringing something new and desired into existence—a proactive stance that resolves or dissolves problematic situations by design. It is a compound of routine, adaptive and design expertise brought to bear on complex dynamic situations.” —Harold Nelson

As we step into a new year, and new decade, what is it that you want to create? My guess is that there are probably many design opportunities for you on the horizon.
Design Thinking has emerged from many areas, and is a human-centered approach to any program design. If you’ve worked with me before, you’d know my affinity to the Group Coaching Design Matrix and how it gets us thinking through WHO our client really is.

CEO of IDEO, Tim Brown defines Design Thinking as:
“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.” — Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Design thinking is grounded in several principles:

• It needs to be human-centered
• It should be fun and creative
• It is a mixture of analytics and intuition

IBM has created what they call the Design Thinking Loop – Observing, Reflecting and Making.

Design Thinking usually consists of five or six steps including:

1. ​Empathize – who is your client and what do they want. Next call we will explore one of Design Thinking’s most popular tools – The Empathy Map
2. Define – What do they want, what do they need
3. Ideate – what’s possible
4. Prototype – build a prototype and test it out. Program design may be
5. Test – Test it out – what works, what doesn’t. Iterate again!

 
And the cycle continues….
 
What’s important about thinking about your program design in this fashion?
 
For more on this topic, check out https://designthinking.ideo.com/

Best wishes,
​Jennifer

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Jennifer Britton - GroupCoachingEssentials | Potentials Realized 
Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Join us for an upcoming ICF-CCE approved program including Group Coaching Essentials (8.75 CCEs), Advanced Group and Team Coaching Practicum (10 CCEs), or the PlanDoTrack Facilitator Training (24 CCEs). 
Author of Effective Group Coaching (2010), Coaching Business Builder (2018), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013). Check out my author page on Amazon for all publications.
Email: [email protected]