Background information
Facilitation is key in running successful design thinking workshop sessions, which usually bring together people from diverse backgrounds to work on specific challenges. Creating space and environment where people feel confident and be creative is the key responsibility for the facilitator.We strongly believe in ‘learning by doing’, so the facilitation training will be a high energy hands-on event. You’ll be challenged to work in small teams working on all the different aspects of facilitating workshops. The focus will be on improving your personal facilitation skills in the design and management of design thinking workshops.Day OneMorning: Learn core facilitation capabilities and processes
To facilitate is to make thing easier and ‘progress’ human situations and process. This session imparts the process of setting agendas, steering processes, framing analyses, and summarising conclusions.Afternoon: The design thinking process
We will walk through the design thinking process and how to plan for, initiate and manage a design thinking project. You will workshop key challenges in embedding a new, collaborative way of doing in your organisation.Day TwoMorning: Facilitating empathy building processes
Learn to facilitate human-centric participative processes that build stakeholder empathy. Design thinking is human-centric with empathy at its core. To design improved systems that are desirable a, you need to understand and feel how the stakeholders see and experience the system given their needs and circumstances

Afternoon: Facilitating divergent thinking
In the afternoon you will learn to facilitate participative processes that generated many diverse and innovative ideas. Divergent thinking is the ability to generate new or more complicated ideas from a single source.

Day Three

Morning: Facilitating convergent thinking
Learn to facilitate participative processes that synthesise and evaluate diverse ideas. Convergent thinking is the ability to synthesise and evaluate a wide variety of ideas and insights into useful formulations of design problems, leading to workable solutions.

Afternoon: Facilitating rapid prototyping
In the afternoon you will Learn to facilitate participative processes that bring innovative ideas to life. Rapid Prototyping: Iteratively and quickly create and test visual/ experiential artefacts that give detail, form, and nuance to the intangible concepts generated in the divergent/convergent thinking phases- failing fast and learning quickly about what is working and what isn’t.

What will you learn

The objective of the three-day classroom training is to understand the facilitation skills’ required to successfully plan for and manage design thinking sessions through a combination of facilitation experiences and coaching. The activities for the three-day classroom training are a balanced mix of theory and practice.

Topics during the training:

Core capabilities we will cover are Socratic questioning, focussing conversations and following participatory methods. Opening diverse and trans-disciplinary teams to new opportunities. The Double Diamond approach to Design Thinking; Management of participative processes across divergent and convergent thinking and doing practices. Facilitating for uncertainty and ambiguity in individuals, building accuracy and logic to reduce risk, covering feasibility and viability (adding value to stakeholders), how to bring the intangible to life.

Reconnect session:
Workshop Design and review of the participant’s workshop examples: The content of the Online Coaching Reconnect Session (one hours) will be adjusted based on the participants’ needs:

Who will facilitate:
The facilitators will guide you is Robert Bloom and Dr Svea van der Hoorn. Katherine Train will be your empathy coach.