Design Thinking for Social Entrepreneurs! — A virtual facilitator experience
Head note for readers:
If you’re reading the article to know more about Design Thinking as a process and how it can help Social Entrepreneurs, please scroll down till you see the headline — ‘Topics Covered during the session’.
If you’re reading the article to understand my virtual facilitation experience and some useful suggestions, scroll down till you see the headline — ‘Virtual Facilitation Experience’.
If you want to know more about the context of the webinar, and understand a bit about the background story — you’re in the right place, please continue reading!
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Last week, I received an invite to facilitate a learning experience for a bunch of 20 young aspiring social change makers, who are currently pursuing their 4 week internship with Innovating Media Organization (IMO), a non-profit organization. The student interns are connected virtually across India. Through interacting with the organizing team, I got to know Design Thinking was one of the topics that they required a facilitator with, and I was super excited to do a session on the same topic!
There was two reasons for my excitement — one because, the class of Grade 5 students whom I taught during the Fellowship (2016–18) was called ‘the Design Thinkers’ — we explored several projects using the Design Thinking approach and it was a greatly helped students to kindle the curiosity. Going back to the memory lane of the Fellowship is always wonderful — and I get to do once in a while during the prep of the webinar.
The other reason was about interacting with a bunch of social change makers. ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ is one of the recent domains that I was exploring through and enhancing my perspectives on. Interacting with many social entrepreneurs and understanding their theory of change is a great learning experience altogether.
I combined both and came up with the topic — ‘Design Thinking for Social Entrepreneurship’ and got started wtih my preparations for the two days, 90 minutes session!
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Topics covered during the sessions
Day 1:
There was a pre-work provided to the interns to research and bring 3 different problem-solving techniques.
The session on the first day was primarily consisting of the following topics:
Why Social Entrepreneurship? — We engaged on a discussion to understand the deeper purpose of all the interns of why do they want to pursue Social Entrepreneurship in the future.
Uncovering the pre-work — We went on to discuss on the larger group, the different problem solving approaches that the interns found online through their research.
Design Thinking as a process — Then, I went on introducing the concept of design thinking and shortly explained why do we need a structured approach towards problem solving & how it can help the Social Entrepreneurs in specific.
We jumped into all the 4 phases of the Design Thinking process.
(i) Feel — Immersing into the problem that we are aspiring to solve through interaction with the stakeholders, understanding the gaps and the requirements in depth.
Key question for this phase — ‘What are the 2–3 subsets of the problem that we are trying to address?’
(ii) Imagine — The process of thinking blue sky, to come up with creative and innovative solutions to the problems. Consciously not restricting the bar of excellence to our problem and confining the solution to a boundary but keeping the benchmark as a global one.
Key question for this phase — ‘What is your vision of excellence for the world without the problem?’
(iii) Do — The phase of action, where we plan intently and execute for the outcomes keeping the impact on mind. Orient our inputs towards the outcomes we are expecting in a specific duration of time!
Key question — ‘How do I carry out my actions in alignment to the vision?’
(iv) Share — The final phase of design thinking where we reflect and understand the strengths / areas of developments — resulting in iterations and amplification of the efforts for larger outcomes.
Key question — ‘How do you communicate your impact with the stakeholders?’
A personal example — Then, I went on to share an example, about a Community Impact project that I worked along with my co-Fellows during the second year of my Teach For India Fellowship — and explained the step-by-step approach.
I also shared some of my reflections around how the Design Thinking, helps us to narrow down our problem statements and provide us clarity to solve the root cause of the problems!
As a conclusion, I shared the next steps for the interns — to narrow down the problems that they want to solve, by talking with some of the stakeholders (Feel) and think about the vision of excellence that they come up for the world without the problem (Imagine).
Day 2:
We kick started the second day, with a jeopardy quiz hosted by the organizers. It helped everyone to bring in some momentum and the competitive spirit of the small groups that they have!
The second day’s session was completely focused on two things — deep diving into the structures they can use as part of the ‘Do’ phase and providing some examples around the globe on how ‘Design Thinking’ helped to revolutionize the problem solving approach.
Elevator pitch — With the spirit of unleashing the potential of the interns and help them uncover their pre-works in an interesting way — we had an elevator pitch activity! A time span of 30 seconds was provided for every member across the team to share their problem statement and solution in a crisp and impressive way. The rest of the others — imagined ourselves to be one of the leading philanthropists and evaluated the pitches and shared our ratings on a scale of 1–5.
Then, we moved on to exploring the different structures they can use during the ‘Do’ phase.
(i) Goals — How we can align our goals to our vision and make them SMART (ie) Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound.
(ii) Long-term plans — The process of arriving at the key objectives, milestones and the overall strategy for the specific period of time keeping the impact and outcomes on mind
(iii) Short-term plans — Breaking the long-term plan into smaller pieces like monthly plans, weekly plans and narrowing them to the daily to-do lists.
We also connected the dots - through ‘Design Thinking’ process how our problems helps us to create the vision, which in turn can help us to develop our goals, long-term plans, short-term plans to our daily to-do lists. In this way, we make all our actions so aligned to the problem-solving.
We also explored the different ‘Design Thinking’ approaches implemented around the globe with respect to the problem — ‘Unemployment’.
(i) Viriginia Hamilton (United States) — The journey of a American Federal Govt. Worker in the employment office and the impact of Design Thinking on the process of how they work with unemployed youth.
Link to article: https://apolitical.co/en/solution_article/virginia-hamilton-job-seeking-innovation
(ii) Hazel Scrimgeour (South Africa) — Understanding the problem-solving from a different context, we went on to explore the journey of an entrepreneur in South Africa.
Link to article: https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/tackling-unemployment-through-holistic-approach-design
(iii) IDEO Design Thinking — More examples about the human-centered design thinking approach can be explored through the IDEO website.
Anyone can sign up for free — https://designthinking.ideo.com/
Towards the end, we did a quick recap and summarized the day’s learning. And then, there was a short closing with some thanks giving! Yes, gratitude matters. :)
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Virtual facilitation experience
For me the biggest take away was the experience of doing a virtual facilitation for almost a time period of 180 minutes and keeping the audience engaged.
I had previously spoken at 9 online webinars to more than 1000+ students across India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh during the 40 days of lock down. All of them were short one hour sessions on a designated topic. From my experience — the virtual learning platforms has called up a ‘revolution’ in terms of our approach to pedagogy and engagement of the group of learners — because at sometimes, we have to follow really unconventional methods over the virtual call.
Both the days, the sessions happened over the CISCO WebEx platform — and I found it user-friendly and helpful as a facilitator especially. The only problem one may encounter is that the facilitator won’t able to keep track of the time when you’re sharing the screen, except if you have the comment box buzzing which shows the timestamp for every message.
I was able to reflect on many areas of developments with facilitation during the break between the sessions, and incorporated many changes on the secon day. Some of them includes,
(i) A strong engagement activity ahead of the session — Quiz served this purpose on day 2. The engagement was so good among the attendees— and the curiosity and enthusiasm was also carry forwarded to the learning session as well.
(ii) Providing specific activities for group learning — Instead of opening out the floor to thoughts and suggestions, it was interesting when we had customized activities aligned to the topic — it was more easy for the participants to engage and learn as well. In a virtual call — it’s important that every person is aware of the instruction very clearly.
(iii) Guessing Games & Asking more questions — Leveraging the chat option completely, and opening up with questions such as guessing words or phrases from pictures and identifying words that will fit in on an abbreviation are all exciting!
(iv) Less is more! — Understanding the fact that virtual attention span can be very challenging — engaging with instructions for a lesser time with occasional breaks, so there’s no virtual fatigue.
(v) Resources — Making use of articles, videos and other resources which are available online and engaging with them during the session is a great way to enable people to see the different screens and not stick to the same power point presentation for hours! :D
There are many more reflections for me to take back from the session — I’m thinking of doing a session exclusively for the educators with some specific examples, so they incorporate these learning techniques to make virtual classes exciting! Please drop me a message on LinkedIn if you’re interested to learn.
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Feedback & Testimonials
“Your session was exuberant and enlightening sir. Actually, I have many problem statements and I am a kind of guy who looks just my output as a number of people got impacted by me. I have taken many insights based on DESIGN THINKING approach to problem statements! Thank you very much sir. I feel some of the people we meet in our journey who becomes our enabler and ignites us to prosper the fulfillment in life by serving for a cause and in my journey I see you as such an enabler who had thought me a new skill of design thinking which could greatly add up to me in my journey. ☺” — Sumith Meesa (one of the IMO interns)
At the end of the day, hearing feedbacks like this keeps you going!
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Credits
Much Gratitude to the amazing organizers who made the entire experience possible for me — Sharif Mohammed (Lead organizer & a peer IEEE volunteer), Ashritha (Organizer, Teach For India Hyderabad Fellow & an IEEE volunteer), Saiteja & Sahithya (Organizers, hosts during sessions), especially for helping me out whenever required and providing me this beautiful experience!
There was also a bit of nostalgia — as the organizers were surprisingly showing some of the pictures during my visit to the Vande Maatram Foundation in Warangal during 2018 and interaction with the Grade 10 — which was an all time favorite memory for me!
I hope the lock down ends soon! Stay Home. Stay Safe.
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If you liked the article, be generous and ‘clap’ — it will motivate me to write more! If you want to share any feedback, please reach out to me over email <aravindhan.a.in@ieee.org> or <aravindhan.a2016@teachforindia.org>
