Facilitation and training

Through my time working at D2L and with FairVentures Innovation Lab, I’ve had many opportunities to support groups and teams to learn and apply design thinking and innovation practices. Here are some highlights.

Remote Ideation and Design Sprints (Kitchener to Morrisville 2018)

In 2018, one of the Fairfax companies wanted to learn how they could better serve a specific market segment. The Lab helped by conducting a remote design sprint followed by on-site testing. This was the first remote design sprint I had facilitated. I knew that so much of the magic of design sprints happen in a shared space at the whiteboard and following unexpected conversations; however; we were able to create a very effective week-long working session covering most of the design sprint activities. Each day we had a 3 hour morning Zoom session with a shared Google Doc serving as our shared workspace and whiteboard. Activities included user research interviews, value proposition mapping, crazy-eights, and solution sketches. We also used Figma for collaborative prototyping. When I arrived on-site 2 weeks later, we were all synced up on the prototype with test script in hand and conducted face-to-face interviews with their prospective customers to learn what they cared about. The results of this research led to a repackaging of the company’s services to specifically address the needs of this market. They also used the concept created to make in-roads and eventually partnered with the US headquarters of this particular organization.

Innovation Challenge (2017)

In 2017, as a train-the-trainer model, we were asked to support a Fairfax company to run a company-wide innovation hackathon to solve key chosen internal operational challenges. This was a combination of training and facilitation, whereby we coached the HR leads in how to set up the hackathon in the weeks leading up, but then facilitated the day of activities ourselves. Ideally, they would have facilitated, but they felt most comfortable if they could see how something like a hackathon works before plunging into facilitation themselves. Prep required selecting the right people in the organization, setting up the right teams, designing a theme (in this case, hatching ideas at the “Hatchathon”), and generating anticipation and excitement. On the day, we had all the materials we needed and the participants were excited to dive into ideas and solutions. After testing their ideas with internal colleagues, each team pitched to a panel of executive leaders in the organization. Several ideas from the session were sponsored and implemented. The hackathon also helped improve the communication and good-will between executive leaders and business leaders.

Future of Retail (Kitchener, 2017)

In 2017, as a way to better engage with Fairfax restaurants and retail companies the Lab created and hosted a day-long experience at the Lab that we called “Future of Retail: A day at FairVentures Lab”. I played the role of organizer and primary facilitator. This required preparing the theme and objectives, inviting the executive leaders at these organizations, preparing an agenda with presentations, start-up guests, and an activity to imagine the future of their business through curated technology and consumer trends. We had 17 leaders join the day: a cross-section of CEO’s, CTO’s, VP’s and Directors. Over the course of the day, each company shared their goals and how they were approaching their company’s “what next” question. Through the presentations and start-up guests, they got exposure to new ideas and trends. We finished the day with an activity where they could imagined the future customer journey for their products/services and how it might be changed or enhanced by these new ideas and trends. In response to the day’s activities we received a lot of positive feedback. They most appreciated having a forum where they could learn from each other and be exposed to new ideas.

Design Thinking for Specialty FIT Program (New York City, 2017)

As a part of a cross-organizational training, a Fairfax company asked the Lab to share its practices with a group of 20 emerging leaders. The focus of the 2 hour session was self-organization, group decision making, focusing on the customer, identifying a problem, generating solution ideas and critically evaluating those solution ideas.

Specialization Bootcamp

In 2016, the Lab was asked to help share the methods of innovation with a group undergoing a year-long bootcamp focused on their area of specialization. As a part of this, we organized and facilitated a 2-day workshop with 4 specialization teams through the value-proposition canvas, problem statements, ideation, solution sketches and story boards. We finished with an activity to learn the principles of lean and identify the biggest assumptions/risks to their solution ideas and how they could test those assumptions/risks. We coached them through the process of a “pre-mortem” (assuming the idea failed and imagining why or how it failed as a way to anticipate risks) and helped them propose the first experiment or prototype they could create to get customer feedback. The participants expressed they learned a lot through the experience and continue to apply these skills in other activities and events at the company. As part of the retrospective, we learned that they didn’t have the supports they needed, nor had the time in normal business hours to create a prototype and conduct the product experiment with feedback from customers. The Lab worked with the organizers to find ways that an explicit prototyping and customer testing component could be built into the bootcamp activity.

Fairfax Leadership Workshop (Toronto, 2016)

In 2016, selected leaders across Fairfax companies met for the annual Fairfax leadership and training event. The Lab was asked to provide a 3.5 hour introduction to innovation with activities as a part of the line-up. For this, we provided an intro to topics of innovation and seeded a conversation among their groups with the question: why does innovation matter to your organization. With their motivation in-hand, we moved on to topics of agile, lean, and design thinking and how they work together in a software product development setting and asked them how innovation happens at their organization. Then we finished with a solo-storming exercise to generate ideas for how they might enable innovation at their organization with sketches. To help them apply the concept of lean and small experiments we asked them to propose the smallest experiment they could run to test their idea along with an action plan for when they arrived back at their office. Overall, the response was positive. Some participants commented that this session was more lively than the other sessions in their training. This led to follow-on activities with individual participants and being invited to run similar workshops in future Fairfax leadership events.

2-day Innovation Workshop

In 2016 we were asked by a Fairfax company to run a 2-day workshop where about 30 selected leaders within an innovation program at the company could learn some of the concepts of innovation and generate ideas for where their company could better serve its customers. Leading up to the Lab designed the agenda of activities and worked with event organizers on target customer personas as a focus for problem identification. The first day of activities was about getting the group excited about the potential for innovation at their company - the executive leader of the group gave an inspiring speech about the need to think differently and a research team shared innovation trends they were seeing in insurance. The workshop activities began with sharing the customer personas and collaboratively generating a customer journey map whereby they dot-voted areas of the journey that were problems for the customer. That point in the journey was then isolated and we looked at the goals of the customer, the ideal experience for the customer, and then brainstormed ways that ideal experience could be created for them. Each of four groups shared their ideas and the next day we prioritized the ideas based on ease and impact and the group collectively selected 1 as a target for follow-on activities. Participants expressed surprise in the level of engagement and energy of the activities. They also expressed gratitude to learn the value of being customer-centred as a source of innovation.

D2L Design Challenges

At D2L we ran 3 different Design Challenge activities, each focused on a single product space: Brightspace Pulse (4 designers), Brightspace Mobile Content (4 designers), and Instructor Course Tools (entire design team - 15 designers). Within the busy and often chaotic environment of corporate product development environment, designers can be pulled in a lot of directions at once and the time to concentrate on the craft can be difficult to find. The Design Challenges were introduced as a way to provide time for designers to explore their ideas more broadly and deeply. We featured our remote designers using webcams and invited the rest of the product development and product management organizations to an open house where they could tour the designs and talk to their designers about their concepts. Designs were posted on the wall to allow people to see multiple ideas together and to generate good “hallway conversation”. The challenges allowed designers to learn how others were understanding their concepts and receives critiques, as well as to build confidence in conveying their design rationale. The open house also opened a healthy dialog between product management organization and product development about strategic direction.

Young Learner Research

As a part of an effort to better serve young learners through D2L’s Brightspace platform, we created a team to participate in a series of young learner research studies. These studies had to be facilitated differently than typical user research study - younger learners don’t have the patience for long-form interviews and typically don’t have clear recall on their past experiences. With this in mind we designed activities and games that would help us understand their experiences at school, how they interact with their homework and how they currently use D2L’s products. In one exercise, we had the young participants draw what they remembered from their school website as a way to learn what features were most memorable and by inference, most important . The researchers, the young learners, and the parents all had a lot of fun with the process and was certainly one of the more memorable aspects of my design experience at D2L. The project led to a deeper research investigation with young learners across schools in Georgia, prototyping concepts and the creation of a young learner focused iPad app called BrightSpace Portfolio. I was not at D2L when the concerted effort for the Portfolio app took place.

User Story mapping

After discovering the power of collaborative user story mapping as way of rallying a team around an idea, it’s become a mainstay in my facilitation tool set. Typically I will set a persona, a context, and a set of persona goals with the product manager / owner or whoever may be setting the direction in the project. I’ll have team members read the background prior to a collaborative story mapping session. At the outset of the session we’ll review the background answer any clarifying questions then each spend about 10 minutes imagining the tasks a user might take to fulfill their goals through an imaginary (solution agnostic) set of tasks. I’ve found that my colleagues are often very good at framing their thoughts in terms of what the user does and not what the system does. Then we each stick our notes up and organize the storymap quasi-chronilogical, horizontally clustering tasks on a sequence themes or user activities. The story mapping session usually ends with some review and reflection of the key user tasks in logical flow from left to right. Afterward, we comb through the story map, digitize it and share with the team. Then, working with the product owner and product manager, we prioritize the story map tasks into releases, which forms the backlog for our projects. This enables the design to be clear what tasks are most important to design for today and how to anticipate how the design might be structured and evolve over multiple releases. This also creates alignment and a source of truth between the product management group, the development group, and the design team. In the future, I hope to learn how this can be integrated with behavior-driven development techniques.