How can we ignite inspiration and empower teams to think beyond boundaries by fostering seamless collaboration?
As a dedicated workshop facilitator with 4 years of experience, I thrive on cultivating an environment of creativity, collaboration and innovation. My expertise lies in orchestrating engaging design thinking and ideation workshops that unlock the collective potential of diverse teams. I have a background in Strategic design where I follow future thinking approach to solve complex innovation challenges and change the culture of decision making within the system of products and policy and everything in between.
Experience highlights as a design thinking facilitator:
1. Diverse workshop facilitation - Successfully led and facilitated design thinking workshops at Volkswagen innovation group and Sante Naturkosmetik on varied social and purpose driven innovation projects. At VW, our challenge was to create a service that increases autonomy for people with disabilities / mental illnesses to maximize their participation in society.
Image: Clustering research insights to identify opportunity fields to create a smart wearable service for a mobile society.
2. Inclusive workshop - During my tenure as a working student at Adevinta, I partnered with the organisation on my thesis research paper aimed at creating an inclusive environment for neurodiverse employees, demonstrating a commitment to diversity and inclusion. We conducted a 2-days ideation session.
Image: Ideation 1.0, used 6-3-5 and Sanchez method to brainstorm quantitative ideas and clustered them in different opportunities.
On second day, we focused on quality over quantity. The goal of the workshop was to critically evaluate 2 idea napkins and detailing out final journey map highlighting user actions, touchpoints and, product opportunities. There were diverse group of 10 participants with different neurodiverse challenges.
Image: Ideation 2.0, finalised journey map highlighting employee service experience when using our toolkit
Image: Ideation 2.0, situations from the idea evaluation workshop
3. Product discovery workshop - Facilitated several discovery meetings involving cross-functional teams at Adevinta, consisting of, Product managers, product analysts, UX designers and researchers, to craft a service concept enabling B2B car dealers in uploading their inventory and deliver vehicles throughout Germany using mobile.de platform (aka Online buying and selling lite).
4. Product testing workshop - Led workshops focused on improving the user experience, including product quality assurance workshops and usability assessments, resulting in iterative improvements to enhance user satisfaction.
Image: Digitally mapping out workshop the outcome using impact effort methodology
5. Academic Collaboration: Supported SRH Hochschule university professors in moderating design thinking workshops, fostering collaboration between diverse groups of SRH healthcare and education background to identify synergies and future business models.
Image: Situations from a 3-day design thinking workshop with SRH institution stakeholders
6. Student mentorship: Guided first-semester students in crafting design challenges, solution prioritization during ideation workshop, particularly relevant for teaching and mentoring them on how to use design thinking methodology.
Image: Day kick-off with an ice breaker and managing expectations from the participants
Goal was to provide guidance and support to students on crafting a design challenge, prioritising with their teams to explore opportunities, identify loopholes, check for patterns. Our challenge was to support freshers with the tools and activities while working from home during COVID 19.
7. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborated with cross-functional teams at mobile.de to define long-term vision and mission for B2B customers (car dealers) in order to support the platform experience more intuitive and holistic. As an outcome, we identified our excellence areas in transaction, lead management, vehicle onboarding and, multi media management.
Image: Feedback from the participants using feedback matrix tool
4 key takeaways as a facilitator / moderator:
1. Knowing what tools to pull out the sleeve: It is important for me to understand my audience, manage stakeholder expectations and, improvise on foot whenever needed.
2. Preparing fun exercises: I often use icebreakers for any workshop or a meeting to ask an interesting question and give everyone a minute to answer. It's fast and it makes everyone feel at ease.
3. Not jam-packing the workshop: Keeping up with audience's energy is crucial and I try to keep my workshops with 3-4 hours of focused activities in a day. Rest of the time is filled with lighter exercises and breaks.
4. Get set with expectations: It's a workshopping RULE for me to set expectations in the beginning of each activity to avoid the risk of disengagement and overwhelmingness.
