Design Thinking vs Workshops · Facilitator Club

Mar '23 (edited) in General discussion & questions

Design Thinking vs Workshops

Hi all! I've already found so much helpful content in this community, so I thought I'd come to you with something I've been struggling with.

I started my career at IBM where I was first introduced to Design Thinking. I got a couple of certifications and facilitated a few workshops and found it very valuable. However, over the last couple of years I started breaking away from traditional Design Thinking workshops and designing/facilitating different flavors of workshops. Sometimes those workshops used activities commonly associated with Design Thinking (like empathy maps), but other times the workshops were totally different from what I would define as traditional Design Thinking (like LDJs).

I've recently started my own small business with a partner focusing on workshop design and facilitation. A lot of our clients want to put us in the Design Thinking box, but we want to convey that workshops can be so much more than that. Have you all experienced workshops always being conflated with Design Thinking, and if so how do you explain the connections but also the differences?

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