After hours and hours of deliberate practice over years some people still cannot step into design thinking. Changing habits is hard.

Now let’s look at how design thinking is often taught: in boot camps and one day workshops. That’s design theater, not design thinking.

It’s not enough to say, look there is a better way! It takes practice. Lots of practice.
Christina Wodtke

I’ve been thinking of this quote as I get started outlining a series of workshops I have been tasked to facilitate for some kind of accelerator program that the Startup Zone (SUZ) is going to hold.

To their credit SUZ has held numerous workshops and talks over the past year, my favourites have generally been the smallish ones that are more conversation than speech, allowing for a more enjoyable flow. My least favourite are the almost day long events, in particular there was a workshop designed to teach you about personas with experts from off Island that taught without once uttering the word data. Personas without data are something else all together. The design thinking workshop was only moderately better, and only useful in that the facilitator was great and the activities entertaining.

In the past my approach to all talks was to cram as much information into peoples heads as I possibly could. This followed the philosophy endeared to me at Humber Music where they would often say that it will take us years to unpack all that we learned. This worked well with audiences in Taiwan and China in the past (I now know the younger generation desires more hands on, conversational approaches) but I realize this doesn’t fly here. Nor should it.

My other method, the method I use upon myself, is to simply point people to a few books and say – go read. When I joined a service design project in Fuzhou, despite all the similarities to what I had done in the past, I ordered and read the 3 most popular books on the topic. Not because I am smart, or like to read, but primarily out of fear. Despite all the available material available online, or in print, much of it cheap, this approach isn’t popular either.

I think my approach will likely combine what I experienced at Crafting {:} a Life (the conference that keeps on … influencing), kick off a topic of discussion with some salient points, give people something to work on, point them to resources to help them learn and maybe understand, and make myself available for help if I can give it. I’m not sure what else I can accomplish in an hour with people who may never have broached any of the topics we need to go through.