What We Teach
These are the workshops we’ve developed to help design teams improve their 'C-skills': collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. Interested in us training your team? Contact us.
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Turning People into Teams: Rituals and Routines for Better Team Collaboration
How do you conduct collaborative work more effectively with groups on projects? In this one- to two-day workshop, individual team members will receive hands-on practice in leading team activities that will help them start, advance, and wrap up projects of any shape and size. At the end of this training, individual team members will receive a toolkit with activities they can customize and use with their teams. This training builds on what’s in our book Turning People into Teams.
Workshop Design for Cross-Functional Teams (a.k.a. “Workshop Workshop”)
Learn how to plan effective workshops that involve the participation of cross-functional stakeholders. This one-day workshop shares a methodology for planning workshops called “backwards design,” as well as hands-on demos of techniques for idea generation and rigorous team decision-making. By the end of this training, each participant will have created a draft outline of a workshop related to their current work priorities.
Design and Story: A Hands-On Workshop
Storytelling skills are seen as a ‘must have’ for anyone looking to grow in the design field. However, it’s assumed that everyone knows what a story is and how to create an effective one. We’re rarely given the time and tools we need to practice and improve. Let’s remedy that! In this workshop, we’ll give you hands-on practice in crafting effective stories from your product and service design efforts. By the end of this workshop, you’ll have created and received feedback on a draft story related to a current design project.
Designing with Assumptions and Hypotheses
Great products solve problems for people in a focused manner. Well-formed assumptions and hypotheses help designers prioritize and focus their design efforts, so when they generate and test their ideas with people, they increase the likelihood that an aspect of that problem has been solved by their product. In this hands-on workshop, designers will practice the craft of generating assumptions and hypotheses for different types of design work. By the end of this training, team members will be more confident in articulating their design assumptions and forming experiments to test those assumptions in action.
Futurecasting for Product Design
Futurecasting is a structured approach for exploring what products may be required in the far future (10+ years). In this design workshop, you'll work in small teams to practice the use of futurecasting tools such as signal projection and far-future scenarios. By the end of this training, each participant will understand when and how to use futurecasting as a designer, and what activities they can use with their teams to gain visibility into disruptive trends and identify new areas of opportunity.
Feedback & Critique: A Hands-On Workshop
This workshop is focused on helping team members better deliver and receive critique and feedback on their design work, especially when soliciting feedback from cross-functional team members and stakeholders. By the end of this workshop, team members will have practiced delivering and receiving feedback in two “realistic” role-play situations, and tried out structured critique in small-group situations.
How to Make Better Decisions as a Team
When working with teams, designers make thousands of decisions over the life of a project, both large and small. All too often, designers and their teams suffer because it’s not exactly clear how those decisions get made, and when to best involve teams in the design process. In this hands-on training, you’ll practice road-tested approaches for how designers and their teams can make better decisions together at critical moments through the product development process. This training builds on what’s in our book Turning People into Teams.
Effective Brainstorming for Cross-Functional Teams
When working with a team, what’s the best way to structure and lead brainstorming activities? In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use problem framing, timeboxing, ideation questions, and lateral thinking techniques to maximize the number of ideas you can generate with your teams. By the end of this workshop, team members will have practiced the above techniques through a sacrificial project, and identified where to best utilize them in your organization’s workflow. This workshop draws from the techniques in our bestselling book Creative Workshop.