4 sources for collaboration exercises to use in design thinking facilitation
Remember the previous column, where I described design thinking facilitation? Well, when I recently gave a similar description in a talk, someone asked me, “where do I find all the collaborative exercises for each stage of a design thinking facilitation?” Let’s answer that, but before I get into the four key sources you should know about, let’s review design thinking facilitation.
Design thinking facilitation, review
As a reminder, the four typical phases of design thinking facilitation, a process that include these four Cs:
1. Collect—we collect ideas and information about the situation your group’s facing. This is where we empathise with the humans involved and develop our understanding of the ‘problem space.’
2. Choose—of all that we’ve collected, we define one challenge (or a limited number of challenges) to work on during the rest of the session. We use the ‘how might we…’ question format.
3. Create—then we create possible solutions to the challenge.
4. Commit—and finally we choose one (or a few) solutions to develop and deliver (usually in prototype form)
So, which exercises are good for ‘collect’ and which for ‘create’? What about ‘choose’ and ‘commit’?
Four sources of exercises
The four sources below contain a wide range of exercises. The thing is, only the first two are organised roughly into design thinking stages. The second two are wider ranging, leaving you to choose where they fit in your facilitation process—whether design thinking or not.
1. IDEO
First up is IDEO, a consulting company and prominent leader in the design thinking movement. IDEO started as a commercial company, working in silicon valley and notably for Apple, but over time the company began to explore design for social good through IDEO.org. In that spirit they’ve made a number of methods available in IDEO.org’s ‘design kit’.
You can filter the methods by three categories: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. To my mind, these correspond to collect/discover, create/develop and commit/deliver
2. Stanford University Bootleg
Since IDEO is closely intertwined with Stanford University, my alma mater where IDEO founder David Kelley has taught for many years, it is worth noting that Stanford has also produced some free materials including the D.School Bootleg Deck (available in German and Spanish).
The Bootleg Deck doesn’t include an expansive list of exercises, but it does organise them with some entertaining pictures into roughly the 4 C categories.
There may be some overlap between these first two, and keep in mind that neither is written from a facilitator’s standpoint. You’ll use the facilitator’s ways of working (touched on here and here) to apply the exercises to your group. The last two sources for exercises come in book form, but both have website ‘exercise catalogues.’
3. Liberating Structures
For me, Liberating Structures (encountered before in an article about choosing and dot voting) feels particularly suited to team building, but can also fit into design thinking methods. A lot of the exercises focus on networking and relationships. An example exercise, ‘wicked questions,’ asks the group to confront paradoxes they must address to succeed—for parents this might be “How is it that you are simultaneously raising your children to be very loyal/attached to the family and very independent individuals ?” Check out the ‘stories from the field’ on their site.
4. Gamestorming
The second book-derived set of exercises comes from Gamestorming. Here ‘games’ are what I would call ‘exercises’. Gamestorming isn’t aligned with a four-phase design thinking process. Instead these exercises are organised into facilitation ‘tasks’ like decision-making, opening, planning, team-building, or design. The book lays out the exercises more completely and in an easier-to-navigate format, but the website will give you a decent range of exercises.
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