How to Run a Design Thinking Workshop

Whether it’s your first workshop or your fiftieth, this guide will help you and your team overcome ambiguity and create user-centered solutions.

It follows three simple steps (Prepare, Facilitate, and Document) and includes all the tools, templates and checklists you need to apply Design Thinking in today’s business environment.

Ready to run a great workshop? Let’s get started.

A Design Thinking workshop is facilitated meeting where multi-disciplinary teams plan and prototype user-centered designs. Unlike lectures or presentations, Design Thinking workshops are used when teams want to arrive at a user-centered solution while working together.

Depending on where the project stands within the Design Thinking process, workshops can be used to output anything from early strategic requirements to fully-functional prototypes. They are always participatory, and employ a range of activities designed to generate ideas (divergence) and make decisions (convergence).

Most workshops last 1-2 days. During this time, teams work through various activities that help model their users, define requirements and develop experiences. Common design thinking activities include user stories, user journey maps, sketching, storyboards and paper prototypes.

As the facilitator of a Design Thinking workshop, you are responsible for helping teams challenge assumptions, discover actionable insights, and arrive at innovative outcomes.

As a participant in a Design Thinking workshop, you are responsible for arriving in the right design thinking mindset. That means having a beginner’s mind and the confidence to share.

Participants	Facilitators
Adopt the Design Thinking mindsets	Champion the Design Thinking mindsets
Bring undivided attention – laptops down	Prepare everything the team needs to succeed
Participate in all discussions and activities	Coordinate tasks and keep creative energy high
Provide context on area of expertise	Avoid unnecessary technical tangents
Share ideas and inspirations openly	Assign homework and encourage sharing
Note any interesting insights	Document all major milestones

Running a successful Design Thinking workshop starts with knowing what you want. Before you prepare the agenda, consider the high-level objectives. Does your team need to discover new opportunities? Or connect closer with users? Do they need to brainstorm new ideas? Or align on specific requirements? Workshops can deliver on one or more of these objectives, depending on how long they run (and how well you prepare).

Common Design Thinking workshop objectives include:

Note: Expect to devote 1/2 day for each additional workshop objective. Thus, a workshop expected to deliver on all four objectives should likely run for 2 days — or longer, if the team is new or have never solved together before.

With your objectives in mind, you can begin the planning process. While there are many ways to describe the process, we’ve broken it down into three steps: Prepare, Facilitate and Document.

Together, these steps capture the breadth of content and considerations involved in running an effective workshop.

Running a successful Design Thinking workshop means ensuring the team has everything they need to make informed decisions in real-time. Given the complexity of opportunities, this step can be a significant challenge that requires anywhere 2 to 6 weeks — or longer, if any critical elements are missing or outdated (ex. user personas).

Consider the following workshop preparation checklist as a guide:

Team: Having the right skill sets in the room is key to generating innovative ideas with practical applications. That means all decision makers, technical leads, and even users (or their personas) must be represented.

• Business Strategy
• Sales + Marketing
• Technology
• Creative + Design
• Customer Engagement
• Project Management
• Users / Personas

Time: Complex problem solving takes time. Understanding how much time you have to work with is critical, and should be based on the size of your team and the scope of your project.

• 1 full day: Small teams, specific projects
• 2-3 full days: Large teams, broad opportunities

Location: A good environment supports great conversation. Whether your workshop will be in-person, online, or a mix of both, here’s what to consider when choosing your workshop location:

• Large room with space to walk
• U-shaped or boardroom-style layout preferred
• Ample wall space, whiteboards / easels
• Markers, pens and post-it notes
• Clear projector or other large display(s)
• Water, coffee and catering
• Natural light is a plus
• Off-site is a plus

The current landscape is living research document that helps teams understand the feasibility and viability of their ideas by answering three critical questions:

The information required to address these questions must be identified and collected prior to the workshop, as it will be discussed early in the day and referenced repeatedly throughout. Note that compiling the current landscape is the primary objective of the Discover stage of the Design Thinking process.

Who are we designing for? Rich user personas are the hallmark of Design Thinking, and an excellent way to articulate detailed behavioral information about whom you’re designing for.

If you do not have recent or robust user personas, consider drafting a set in advance — it is much faster to challenge and change user personas during the workshop than build them from scratch. Without user personas, it’s very difficult to align on a shared perspective of the people who will experience the solution.

What are we working with? The most productive Design Thinking workshops reduce the need for follow-ups by having all the right data on hand for decisions. While these sources of insight are highly project specific, consider the following four areas as a starting point.

Given the cross-functional nature of workshops, it’s often best to bring both executive summaries and raw data to workshops. Summaries can be shared early in the session to quickly level-set, while raw data can be referenced during activities or decision making.

How will we measure success? While you can expect a lot of discussion here, preparing an initial list of key performance indicators is a helpful starting point.

Design thinking is a highly iterative process, where insights from one activity often reframe the original opportunity. As such, the workshop agenda is more playbook than prescription — the most important thing is knowing what type of deliverables you want to generate (ex. user stories, concept sketches or working prototypes) and work back from there.

Selecting the right design thinking steps and activities gets easier with experience. In general, workshops open with divergent thinking activities (brainstorming) before switching to convergent ones (prioritizations). For details about the different steps and activities involved, see the Design Thinking process guide.

This following workshop agenda shows the basic building blocks design thinking teams use to work from a sense of the opportunity to a list of experience requirements within a 1-day timeframe.

Unlike a traditional presentation, the slides of a facilitation deck are designed to guide collaboration and generate discussion. Your slides should directly reflect your workshop agenda. When preparing your slides, plan to include four basic types:

While a save-the-date should follow shortly after you’ve identified your team, the pre-workshop email is typically sent a few days before the workshop. It includes detailed logistics and clearly outline the intentions of the workshop and its desired outcomes. This email is also your opportunity to assign any relevant pre-work, such as an ask to bring specific design inspirations.

Pre-work: Giving participants a simple assignment to complete and bring to the workshop is a great way to enrich your workshops and get participants into the Design Thinking mindset early. This is also a great opportunity to understand “what good looks like” to the different members on your team by requesting they bring inspiring solutions.

Note the inspiration doesn’t have to be apples to apples with your current project. Sometimes the best sources of inspiration connect seemingly unrelated industries. What you want are thought starters, not solutions.

With preparations ready and the agenda set, you can now facilitate a productive workshop. The following walkthrough outlines the major milestones you could expect in a 1-day workshop intended to align on the strategic requirements for a user-centered experience.

The goal of the Document step is to ensure all the insights and alignments generated during the workshop can be easily referenced and implemented by others. It serves as a rudder for cross functional teams working on complex projects, and takes 3 – 5 days to complete.

The level of detail you decide to document your workshop with should be based on the scale of your project — short Design Thinking sessions with a core team don’t require the same level of scrutiny as larger projects with extended teams who meet infrequently.

Once you’ve gathered all the information, compile it into a single document and share it with the extended team. Consider the following list of sections as inspiration for what to include in your post-workshop documentation:

• Workshop Details (date, agenda, attendees)
• Executive Summary
• Decisions
• Discussions
• Inspirations
• Archive (photos, scans)
• Reference Data

When it comes to communicating complex ideas quickly, having a library of visualization techniques on hand is critical. Common approaches in Design Thinking include empathy maps, storyboards, activity networks and cluster matrices. These visualizations not only help teams describe ideas, but also interpret data and make informed decisions.

Whiteboards help teams work through complex problems quickly. While physical whiteboards are the most engaging, excellent digital solutions are now available. Each tools has it’s own strengths (flexibility, integrations) and weaknesses (learning curve, limitations), but all provide a shared canvas and simplify data collection.

Technical tangents and These are the people your solutions must serve, and they are a constant source of inspiration. Design Thinking activities, such as empathy maps and user stories are a convenient way for organizing detailed user research.