Anything can be built. The question is whether it is worth it.
Thirty hours with twenty technical professionals, to reverse the usual order: start from the person's problem rather than from what the technology makes possible.
The challenge
The client is a cluster bringing together technology-intensive companies and institutions, and commissioned a design thinking course applied to IT and digital project management for professionals from several of its members: banking, industry and technology consulting.
The challenge was not teaching a method but reversing a habit. People from a technical background tend to think from what the technology makes possible, rather than from the real problem to solve or what the person living with it needs or expects. It is a logical inclination, and an expensive one: it leads to building correct things nobody uses.
And it had to be done with twenty people from different companies, with different cultures and different projects, across five sessions, leaving them something they could apply to their real projects the following Monday.
Approach
Thirty hours across five sessions, with the same shape each time: just enough conceptual frame and then work on a case, in multidisciplinary groups.
The case was a twenty-year-old chain of physical clothing stores that wanted to retain its customer base and attract new segments with a more digital product line. A business challenge, not an IT problem.
The groups walked the full itinerary: map the context, explore real needs, build solutions and test them. And above all, reframe the starting challenge from what they found instead of taking it at face value.
The last session went into landing it: how to decide which kind of project fits, given what is already known about the people, the time available and the level of ambition, and how that fits a portfolio serving both today's business and the one three years out.
- Designing with people rather than only for them: empathy, co-creation and testing with real users
- Focusing on the problem before the solution, with complex problems that have no single valid answer
- Mapping: five whys, brainwall, archetypes, journey map and stakeholder map
- Exploring: qualitative research, interview scripts, active listening and synthesis into points of view
- Reframing the starting brief into a design challenge based on the findings
- Building: ideation, SCAMPER and selection matrices by impact, effort, desirability and feasibility
- Prototyping to think and to show, at the minimum fidelity that answers the question
- Testing with a feedback matrix and going round again: without iteration there is no learning
- A final landing: knowledge, time and ambition as the variables for deciding what kind of project to run
Key outcomes
30
hours of training across five sessions, with the practical case taking up most of the time.
20
technical professionals from several member companies, working in multidisciplinary groups.
1
business case walked end to end, from unexplored context to a tested concept.
6
skills worked on explicitly: active listening, observation, critical thinking, visual communication, collaboration and problem focus.
The hardest and most memorable moment is reframing the challenge. Groups arrive with the brief they were handed and discover, after doing the research, that the problem worth solving is a different one. That habit — doubting the brief before starting to build — is what separates a project that gets used from one that merely gets delivered.
The limit is not the technology
In a technical team the default question is whether something can be done, and the answer is almost always yes. The useful question is a different one: for whom, why, and whether it solves a real need or merely demonstrates a possibility. Changing that question needs no new tool; it needs the habit of talking to whoever will use what you build before writing the first line.
Got a process that hurts?
Tell us about it in half an hour. No forty-page deck. If we are not the right people, we will say so and point you towards someone who is.