Abstract
The following workshop had the objective of gathering the employees responsible for a certain operation at Bayer in a co-creation session to develop a digital solution.
Twenty people from different nationalities and areas of the company attended the workshop. The session was divided into four phases of Design Thinking and it also counted with a gamified dynamic to engage the participants. I used a technique called Lego Serious Play in the prototype session. In the final part of the workshop I let them present their proposals and test it simulating the customer’s experience. To conclude this job I presented the result and proposals built during the workshop.
Pre-workshop
It is important to highlight that this workshop was set upon the Brazilian agro-business scenario and the initial assumption was that a digital solution would increase more value to a certain kind of crop operation. On that background, Bayer’s marketing department wanted to foresee the impact of such a solution in the operators’ lives.
That being said, I started out by interviewing different sectors of the company and I used canvas to describe the needs of each one of them.
These canvases were also a valued tool to guide my interviews with the leading teams. During our conversations, the interviewed person could follow his notes and insights and reflect on what was being said, this way we wouldn’t lose any of the ideas.
After gathering all the information to plan the workshop, I was able to set an agenda that would certainly tackle my goals. The interview step was also important to establish how the exercises and the dynamics would be, as well as how to divide the groups and which sort of insight I could bring up to guide them.
The demand description made in canvas helps to organize ideas and to come up with a value proposition for the customer.
Gamification
One of the greatest challenges that I came across during this workshop was keeping everyone focused on the same activity. The team of participants was mostly composed of heads of departments (one director as well), none of them willing to ‘lose their time’. For the exercises it was important to put all participants on the same level of knowledge, so that they could all feel engaged in the discussions and co-create along with it.
Considering the participants’ engagement I planned a game for them to compete in teams. The competition had one goal only: the development of a solution with a positive transformation for the final customer. We agreed that the winning teams of each session of the workshop would accumulate points to be added up by the end of it.
In order to make the game even more interesting, it was set that each participant should have a “superpower” that could help the team during the activities. The more the participants collaborated in one task, the more they would get points for that. Likewise, the opposite would happen, a non-interactive participant would lose points for his team. Even though the dynamics seemed simple, it got the participants entertained and committed with one another, and both teams worked together to create the best solution.
Logo Sirius Play
The workshop’s exercises were very visual and kept the participants focused on each and every table’s discussions.
The information collected during the discovery phase were presented as ‘cards of insights’, they were used by co-facilitators to interact during all steps of the conversation. The participants were able to build their journey and validate their ideas inside of their groups with the help of these cards. Some of the cards would also present the user’s weak points, which made the teams empathize and consider these aspects on every step of the game.
For the prototype we used two boxes of Lego bricks. This dynamic is known as ‘Lego Serious Play’, and it helped participants to build their solution models.
During this part of the process, participants were asked to apply all the aspects learned during the immersion and analysis steps, and imagine how the solution would look like. Inevitably, the participants’ reaction after listening to my guidelines was to doubt and feel skeptical; but just right after the first participants willing to start to build up something began to do it, the rest of them followed through with the exercise.
Debrief/ Closing session
At the end of it, the groups were asked to simulate the ‘users’ voice’ and to present their propositions to the opponent team. For the presentation, groups presented their commercial solution and the person playing the user would walk through the prototype and interact with the elements as if in real life.
After the two groups tested the solutions there was a feedback session in which the teams could say the pros and cons of each proposition. This was an important moment of the closing session where I could take notes on their points of view towards the results and write the final report.
Two boxes of lego bricks were used during the workshop.
Customer: Bayer
Target audience: 20 employees of the company, mixed nationalities and sectors
Exercise objective: digital solution
Materials needed: paper charts, markers, 2 boxes of Lego bricks
Sessions: → discovery → gamification → presentation → debriefing
Length: 6 hours