IBM Design Thinking Workshop

In IBM Brasil we have an IBM Design Thinking - IDT - Chapter in Hortolandia office, led by Marcos Gialdi and Natalia Maistro and I had the great opportunity to participate of multiple meetings to address real-world issues of our clients using IDT techniques focused to service delivery and technical issues faced by our teams. Here in India the techniques used were pretty much the same, but the focus was very different because back in IBM almost all IBMers knows a little about IDT and its techniques, meanwhile when applying for our NGO partner, we needed to explain in detail each of the techniques and why we were doing so.

Our IDT Session was completed this week, on March 14th from 10am-4pm and I can say we were able to meet the final goal of this session and multiple amazing ideas were raised by the READ India and Centers' staff. I got myself thinking this workshop should have been completed long time ago, because out of this workshop, our deliverables became clear for our team. Now we have a final goal well established with tangible deliverables.

We applied the following techniques:

1) Hopes and Fears

2) Empathy Map

3) Feedback grid + Ideation

4) Prioritization grid - We were able to explain the technique, but not apply as the time for this session was over.

In the past I used feedback grid in a very different way than how we used here. I used to use it for Agile retrospective meetings and have the ideation done completely apart from the retrospective session. I can say we were able to successfully implement the technique, even not being in the standard way of doing so.

After the workshop, some of the participants asked us to share the techniques, and some materials so they can reference to run workshops like this by themselves with their students and staff even after our READ India CSC team leaves back home. One of the most gratifying experience was to see the participants increase their participation and transparency throughout the process, which allowed us to get great outcomes by the end of the session.