30 minutes to solve a problem
and increase any team’s understanding and collaboration.
I was tasked to create a short workshop (30 minutes) in problem solving, using modern principles and philosophies of design thinking.
Here is a link to the complete canvas to follow along in, print out to use or put as a template in a collaborative digital board, like the one it was created in, called Mural.
As a student of UX design and in my personal life, one of my firm beliefs is that empathy is one of the most important factors of how our brain functions. We can usually see what’s going on from our own perspective, but the problem is that our perspective is in 2D. To really understand something in the real world, we need more than one perspective.
Consider an ice cream cone. From the top view it would just look like a ball of ice cream, from the bottom just a cone and that doesn’t even start to describe the textures, flavours, memories and qualities that all go in to the concept that makes it what it is.
To tackle this problem I chose to base my workshop around role playing and empathy. A favourite tool of mine was created by Professor Edward De Bono and is called “ the six thinking hats”. It is meant to split our thinking in to six distinctive roles we can use in a workshop. His theory is, that if we all try to consider all angles at once, they end up crowding in on each other; “It’s like juggling with too many balls.” So when we split the hats between us and use only one approach each, we can collectively make sure not to miss essential perspectives.
Each role is important for different reasons. In a discussion a good place to start is with the white hat: The objective mind. White hats are focused on stating facts and potential lack of information. Is more research needed? What do we know?
The yellow hat; The optimist, is there to focus on the positives. What is great about the situation and how can we turn a difficulty into a winning concept?
The black hat; The critic, is the opposite view. What doesn’t work and what issues might arise as we go forward? This role is crucial to handle confirmation biases and not blindly pursue our favourite ideas. ‘Why’ it doesn’t work is the point though, not to just complain.
The green hat; The creative thinker should try to always see the subject from new angles. Are there alternative ways to do this? Can we frame the problem outside of our usual “box”.
The red hat; The emotional person stays outside of the facts and tries to follow the elusive “gut-feeling”. Instead of pointing to why something is potentially flawed, the red hat says they have a bad feeling about it. They can decide on a subject merely because it feels right.
The blue hat; the facilitator handles the process of the workshop. They explain the tasks, keep time, moderate discussions so all views gets equally heard and formulate what they perceive has been said.
As this workshop is mainly formulated for organizational teams, I also added an extra role that will be a relevant factor in any design process: The product owner. I considered merging the facilitator with the product owner but decided not to. The reason being that the most successful facilitators don’t express their judgement towards the participants. The product owner on the other hand, will normally have to make all the crucial decisions and can be very useful to be practiced by the rest of the team, to create understanding for the difficulties decision making involves.
I believe in the importance of a growth mindset for both organizations and individuals, so the most important hat for a person to wear is often the one furthest from how they usually think. So to choose hats I ask the participants to, one by one, pick the behaviour they feel they have the least in common with. This is also a fun “ice-breaker” for any team, as you get to express how you think you are and then hear the reaction of your peers.
As these abstract hats are put on we focus on the problem. Why is it a problem? How come? Repeating the question why, is a technique meant to determine what the root cause actually might be, so we don’t spend time only curing the symptoms.
When you think you know the reason behind it, you formulate the question in a sentence beginning with “How might we…” to turn it to a solution-oriented statement that opens up for ideas to adress it.
I see the term brainstorming as a term describing all activities meant to generate ideas. The method I chose to implement for ideation makes every new idea acknowledge the last one, and creates a good environment to build upon each other. The member speaking out his idea starts his sentence with “yes, and…” to avoid negating the previous one.
The selection and assessment phases are meant to first converge on the best solutions and then point out the potential benefits and backsides to them. It ends with a swift version of an “impact/effort-mapping”, meant to grade the ideas on their feasibility in the short term. The point of starting from the solution with the least effort required, is to quickly get to a prototyping stage. The best strategy to move forward, is to start taking steps as soon as possible. Iterative testing is a process that can take a seemingly normal idea to spectacular heights. It’s the most important tool behind most of today’s entrepreneurial success stories and a main pillar behind it, is that failure usually is the best teacher. If you fail enough times you can eventually be so knowledgeable about the pitfalls that it actually turns hard to fall in to them.
As a conclusion, these solutions need to be put into action, so it’s very important to formulate what moving forward actually means, by defining the next steps and delegate responsibilites after the workshop has ended.
Reflections should always be started before the end of the workshop, but I encourage all workshop participants to bring that conversation with them. A workshop should be a starting point and the lessons we learn in them can be brought along in all steps of life. To me that’s one of the important lessons of design thinking; it can really be applied to everything.
The world we live in is changing faster and faster, from the tech we use that’s transforming our lives, to the way we handle the problems that arise. To have the tools to handle these problems and be able to adapt is vital for anyone who wants to keep up with the time, since if you don’t, your perspective will gradually lose it’s power and become obsolete.
The past is history, the future is designed in the present. Go solve it!
