Background

Just as any design team, our designers occasionally host design workshops collaborate and solve design challenges. It became clear that design-led workshops could also support other business functions in strategic planning, intellectual property, and customer engagement. By broadening our workshop capabilities we were able to create new value for stakeholders and create growing demand for this work within the organization.

Challenges Faced

• Senior leaders need to effectively align on strategy and planning

• Innovation activities could be improved by increasing the focus on customers

• Scaling to meet increasing demands for our team

Approach

As the leader of our design department I started receiving requests from senior leadership to strategic planning workshops with their teams. This was on the tail of the pandemic so teams were widely distributed, remote, and looking for ways to effectively collaborate. Following the success of these workshop I was asked to perform more. Soon enough I was facilitating workshops for a CTO Offsite, exploring emerging technologies with our Intellectual Property team, guiding the creation of a charter for our Human Resource team’s employee experience initiative, and others. This work allowed me to expand my internal network and gain a deeper understanding of our business, but it was not sustainable for me to do these on my own.

I enlisted the support of skilled workshoppers in my team and in Learning & Development. Together we started crafting workshop guide and templates to improve our efficiencies.

Our engagement with Customer Advisory Panels prompting the creation of a new workshop series called "Blue Sky Banter" aimed at encouraging interaction and collaboration among customers. The unique approach of focusing on customer experience rather than workshop output received positive feedback and led to increased customer engagement.

Our Blue Sky Banter sessions attracted the attention of a C-suite leader, leading to discussions about employing this format at the C-level with external partners. This potential expansion of the program highlights the impact and value of design thinking.

Lastly, our workshop team outlined a vision for an Enterprise Design Thinking program that could further scale these efforts. The idea was to create training and a community of practice for design thinkers across Johnson Controls. Although a pilot program with the Solution Architecture team was successful, changing organizational priorities prevented it from becoming a formal program.

Conclusion/Learnings

Workshop facilitation became an invaluable and highly sought after tool in our design team’s toolbox and something that I really enjoy. I still believe that there is tremendous potential in training non-designers in design thinking and workshop facilitation. For now, we’ll continue to be the center of excellence and look to create new champions organically.

NEXT UP: Research Insights Repository