Hour 1

1. Design Thinking is about slowing down and taking the time to deeply understand, think, and iterate on solutions to the toughest problems as a way of delivering value. We slow down our thinking and problem solving so we can speed up solutioning and iterating on that solution.

2. Techniques are simple precepts, axioms, or principles that are in many ways self-evident and simply need to be followed. On the other hand, exercises reflect a series of activities executed stepwise, one after the other, to arrive at some kind of understanding or output.

3. Our primary enemy when it comes to making progress in the midst of the toughest, most ambiguous, and most complex problems is time.

4. Design Thinking provides us with the foundation for solving problems and creating and realizing value. From Design Thinking comes a set of point-in-time best practices and later a set of common practices that typically suffice—until it is time to revisit the problem by applying Design Thinking.

Hour 2

1. Beyond the traditional ways of organizing projects or initiatives, we might also consider where they sit within the Design Thinking process and its four phases.

2. In the context of learning or empathizing, “Understanding Broadly” relates to understanding the broader ecosystem and situation, the people caught in the middle of the situation, and the problems associated with the situation and its people.

3. Traditional thinking tends to focus less on the problem and much more on the solution. On the other hand, Design Thinking arms us with techniques and exercises that help us think and ideate differently to approach OneBank’s initiatives in new ways.

4. Phase 3, “Delivering Value,” is the place where primary value is initially delivered through the Design Thinking process and its techniques and exercises. More importantly, though, value is also delivered incrementally throughout the process, particularly as we recursively learn, iterate, and refine our solution.

5. While the Design Thinking process follows a stepwise phase-based approach, the real value in Design Thinking is found in the power to recursively circle back to better understand, circle back to think more deeply or differently, and circle back to deliver new manifestations of value along the way.

Hour 3

1. One of the easiest ways of organizing Design Thinking techniques and exercises for individual and small team use is by learning more quickly, thinking differently and deeply, coping with ambiguity, prioritizing next best steps for uncertainty, and executing more effectively.

2. Ambiguity reflects the unknowns of the situation and problem, whereas uncertainty ties back to the choices or priorities facing the people in the midst of that situation or problem.

3. Design Thinking techniques or exercises useful for coping with ambiguity include Modular Thinking, Building to Think, MVP Thinking, Cover Story Mockup, and the Premortem.

4. Design Thinking techniques or exercises that can help individuals or small teams think differently include Visual Thinking, Pattern Matching, Fractal Thinking, Divergent Thinking, and Opposite Thinking or Reverse Brainstorming.

5. Design Thinking techniques or exercises useful for prioritizing “next best steps” in the face of uncertainty include Bullseye Prioritization; the Adjacent Spaces Exploration technique; the Rose, Thorn, Bud (RTB) exercise; and Affinity Clustering.

Hour 4

1. To make decisions more quickly and stay aligned from a strategy and operational perspective, teams should consider establishing a set of 6 to 10 Simple Rules (and probably develop a set of Guiding Principles for each of those Simple Rules or similar focus areas).

2. “How Might We?” questioning sets the stage for teams to optimistically approach a situation together, considering ideas that might not otherwise be shared.

3. Turn to Diversity by Design to help homogeneous teams improve how they ideate and problem solve. The greater diversity in terms of experience, ways of thinking, background, culture, time in role, positions held, beliefs, color, gender, lifestyle, and more, the greater the ability of a team to ideate and problem solve.

4. Teams that seem to be excluding others in discussions, meetings, and workshops would benefit from creating as a team a set of Guiding Principles for inclusive communications, along with adopting Inclusive and Effective Meeting techniques.

5. Briefly, the Archipelago Effect occurs when people and teams work too long in isolation and unconnected from others. Once people have become islands or collections of islands without benefit of connection and relationship, they become less productive, lose interest, and oftentimes leave for no other reason than to pursue something different that hopefully fills this relationship and connectedness hole in their lives.

Hour 5

1. Visual Thinking is nothing more than turning words into pictures and figures to help arrive at a shared understanding.

2. There are dozens of examples of Visual Collaboration exercises, including Stakeholder Mapping, the Power/Interest Grid, Journey Mapping, Problem Tree Analysis, Boats and Anchors, Metaphor and Analogy Thinking, Mission Impossible Thinking, Möbius Ideation, Pattern Matching and Fractal Thinking, Affinity Clustering, Running the Swamp, Cover Story Mockup, Culture Cube, Golden Ratio Analysis, Bullseye Prioritization, Force Field Analysis, Mind Mapping, 2×2 Matrix Thinking, Adjacent Space Exploration, RTB, Mockups, the Inverse Power Law, Concentric Communications, Structured Text, Process Flows, and many more.

3. In cases where a team cannot physically meet to run a Design Thinking exercise or session, consider using Klaxoon or Microsoft Whiteboard.

4. The three-stage process for running a Design Thinking exercise includes preparing for the exercise, running the exercise, and concluding the exercise.

Hour 6

1. Beyond good active listening skills, the three “listening and understanding” techniques that might help Satish encourage the organization’s business stakeholders to talk more freely and openly include Silence by Design, Supervillain Monologuing, and Probing for Understanding.

2. The Culture Snail for Pace of Change helps explain how various parts of the business got to where they are today by mapping key events, inflection points, decisions, successes, failures, and more as a way to describe the organization’s culture journey and its ability to absorb that particular pace of change.

3. Use the Culture Cube to view a team’s culture in terms of three dimensions and eight perspectives.

4. When it comes to researching and arriving at a Big Picture Understanding of a company or organization, consider the following environmental dimensions that start broad but help us narrow down and understand the organization more deeply: the macroeconomic environment and industry, the company or entity within its industry and environment, and finally the organization or business unit within the company or entity.

Hour 7

1. Each initiative leader should perform a Stakeholder Mapping exercise to identify and map their respective stakeholders to their initiative.

2. An easy way to reflect stakeholder sentiment is to color-code (using red, amber, and green, for example) an existing Stakeholder Map. Revisit this color coding monthly and use non-color-based markings to accommodate inclusive design and accessibility needs.

3. The Power/Interest Grid reflects power or influence on one axis and stakeholder interest on the other axis. Satish should pay attention to the two quadrants where power is the highest, as stakeholders in these two quadrants have the greatest ability to help or hinder the OneBank transformation and its initiatives.

4. Satish has at his disposal a number of techniques and exercises that might help him engage more deeply with his most important or influential stakeholders, including Empathy Mapping, Analogy and Metaphor Thinking, various forms of brainstorming and visualization techniques, methods for Creating or Increasing a Shared Identity, numerous communications techniques including Inclusive and Concentric Communications, Story Telling, Structured Text, and more, and promoting the positive changes that the teams have already successfully implemented as a way to drive stakeholder Empathy through Realized Changes.

Hour 8

1. A persona is an amalgamation of fictional characters (such as “finance user,” “sales user,” “executives,” and so on) of a community who share common needs and will use specific artifacts or features of a solution or deliverables in similar ways.

2. The Persona Profiling Design Thinking exercise is especially useful in organizing and helping a Design Thinking team connect with different personas.

3. The three types of empathy discussed here include cognitive, emotional, and compassionate empathy. While all three would be useful in understanding why consumers choose to bank elsewhere, the Moonshot team should consider “getting in the hole with non-BigBank users” to really understand their situation, why they are stuck in that hole or choose to stay in that hole, and therefore what BigBank might do differently to draw users out of that hole.

4. Empathy Mapping is the kind of work done from the safety of a desk as we identify and document what a user or persons thinks and feels; what they see and hear; what they say and do; what seems to be their biggest pain points; and what seems to be their top goals, gains, or objectives. Empathy Immersion, on the other hand, requires us to don the clothes and safety gear and “skin” of another person and actually “walk a mile in their shoes.”

5. A “Day in the Life of,” or DILO, analysis builds on Journey Mapping in three important ways. First, it extends the “journey” to consider the full day versus a portion of the day. Second, it adds context about how our user feels as they navigate their daily journey. And, finally, in a DILO we include the user’s thoughts and weigh in with our own thoughts as to how effectively or efficiently the time is being spent and tasks are being completed.

Hour 9

1. While we covered three Design Thinking exercises for identifying problems, the two that are known for creating good problem statements include the Problem Framing Exercise and the Problem Stating exercise.

2. A Problem Tree Analysis provides clarity by separating a problem’s root causes from its effects or outcomes, using a tree metaphor to share this perspective visually and visibly.

3. The four different Design Thinking techniques or exercises useful in validating a particular problem include Verbatim Mapping, AEIOU Questioning, the Five Whys, and Pattern Matching.

4. The Executive Committee seems to be confusing the power of Design Thinking to start and fail and learn fast when it comes to ideating, thinking, prototyping, and solutioning in general; the EC is trying to incorrectly apply this principle to problem identification and validating.

Hour 10

1. Without knowing more, the team’s execution model may indeed be fundamentally flawed. But it seems that the team members are spending all of their time “doing” and probably need to step back and spend a lot more time “thinking” in the short term. They cannot possibly solve their continuing challenges with the same thinking that failed to restore velocity previously. And they’ll need some help to think differently and deeply.

2. For the short term, the initiative’s leadership team probably needs to flip the amount of time they are thinking and the amount of time they are executing, The need to practice more divergent thinking in particular, and afterward converge on a few ideas to make progress and restore confidence in the team and their work.

3. The danger of changing how a team thinks and executes in the short-term falls back on velocity. Team members will need to go slower before they can go faster, a bit like the adage of the tortoise and the hare. So we will need executive leadership support to slow down and deeply think through what needs to change before we can hope to go faster and operate more predictably against an updated plan.

4. There are quite a few tips for individuals and teams to “warm up” their brains for thinking differently, such as walking or exercising, dreaming, drawing, building something, listening to music, praying, and meditating, Even taking a warm shower has been shown to open our minds for ideating and thinking differently. And we might also use popular taxonomies as a way to help a team think through areas more broadly, including STEEP, AEIOU, a standard Risk Register, and even the Agile Manifesto’s 4 values and 12 principles.

5. Two easy ways to help people who are stuck in their old ways of thinking think anew include Snaking the Drain and Sacrificing the Calf.

Hour 11

1. In addition to a Postmortem, the team should also run a Premortem after it solidifies its plans for the second upgrade attempt. A combined Premortem and traditional Postmortem will help the team identify more what-ifs and flesh out the Risk Register with a fresh set of risks to consider and mitigate.

2. A Mission Impossible exercise should be run to push the team to think about how zero downtime might be achieved.

3. The team should think through the plan from a Good Enough Thinking perspective. The team needs to ask itself what “good” looks like, so it knows when to stop working through aspects of the plan that are adequate and instead turn its attention to those aspects that truly require more time.

4. Use a Boats and Anchors exercise to think more deeply about schedule risks as it lays out the next multiweek upgrade plan. Consider each phase of the plan in terms of anchors that might slow down progress, sharks that need to be identified and mitigated or eliminated, shoals and rocks that might cause the plan to run aground, major hurricanes and other issues on the horizon, and so forth.

5. The Möbius Ideation technique asks us to view a problem or situation through the lens of efficiency.

Hour 12

1. The Visual Thinking technique is really focused on getting thoughts out of the head and onto paper or a whiteboard as a way to increase shared understanding among a group.

2. Divergent Thinking comprises many different tips and techniques that help us think deeply and differently.

3. While Running the Swamp is a great way to drive new ideas, it also helps a team empathize with the people (rather than a faceless product or a project) trying to cross the swamp.

4. Use Fractal Thinking to help us seek out and see otherwise invisible self-similar patterns playing out at scale below, around, and beyond us.

5. Fibonacci’s Sequence forms the basis of the Golden Ratio, which gives us a measuring stick for analyzing the natural fit or dimensions of a particular solution (or problem, team, process, and so on).

6. The workshop’s participants should view this collection of creative thinking techniques and exercises as “bolt-ons” to be used atop other methods. For example, classic brainstorming is incomplete with concluding such an exercise with a follow-on Reverse Brainstorming exercise.

Hour 13

1. The difference between uncertainty and ambiguity can be briefly described in the sense that people face uncertainty, but situations reflect ambiguity.

2. Use Possible Futures Thinking and a six- to eight-section wheel organized by Social, Technology, Economic, Environmental, Political (and potentially other) areas to look out into the future and assess that future broadly.

3. If an organization wants to capitalize on what it already knows and what it already does but still transform itself incrementally, it may turn to Adjacent Space Exploration to capitalize on those areas that are least risky to tackle next.

4. Bullseye Prioritization serves two distinct purposes. First, it helps a team organize a broad set of options or choices across just a few areas (quadrants). Second, it allows for those options and choices to be prioritized against one another given that only one choice for each quadrant can occupy the bullseye.

5. It’s often said that the middle or mid-term horizon is the most difficult to envision or achieve because it occupies the space between what we know/who we are and what we aspire to know or be.

6. Run a Buy a Feature exercise to create consensus among a team that shifts and changes its opinions. Let the exercise’s use of imaginary money make each team member put their money where their mouth is (let the money do the talking).

Hour 14

1. To select and prepare the Executive Committee’s participants for Brainstorming, it’s recommended to employ Diversity by Design as a way to ensure diversity in thought, experience, background, education, culture, and more. The EC should give its participants plenty of advance notice to allow for preparation and share the Problem Statement as well as any recent findings or research with the participants.

2. Each Brainstorming session should begin with the facilitator stating aloud to the team that curiosity is the goal, and no idea is too crazy to be considered. Before starting the actual Brainstorming exercise, the facilitator should also consider running a creative warm-up to get the team thinking; examples might include sharing a taxonomy that reflects the problem area or practicing some of the divergent tips and techniques shared previously with the EC. Finally, to commence the actual Brainstorming exercise, the facilitator should use the “How Might We?” questioning technique to set the stage for thinking optimistically and inclusively.

3. When a Brainstorming session seems stalled or derailed, the Executive Committee could reinvigorate the team’s ability to focus or think by clearing or unclogging the mind through Snaking the Drain or Sacrificing the Calf, use a mix of solo and group-level Brainstorming, reminding the committee throughout the session that no idea is a bad idea, making sure that all voices are being heard and considered, and using keywords and guardrails for thinking differently.

4. SCAMPER is a stepwise method and acronym to improve a team’s brainstorming ability, using the following keywords in a “How Might We?” structure to consider a problem or situation in terms of (S) how might we substitute…?, (C) how might we combine…?, (A) how might we adapt…?, (M) how might we modify or magnify…?, (P) how might we repurpose or put to another use…?, (E) how might we eliminate or minimize…?, and finally (R) how might we reverse or rearrange…?. Each of these keywords opens the door to thinking differently and deeply.

5. To help ensure breadth and depth in the exercise, the Executive Committee and indeed every Brainstorming facilitator across BigBank should conclude its Brainstorming sessions with an opposite-thinking exercise such as SCAMPER (the R includes reverse thinking), Worst and Best, or Reverse Brainstorming.

Hour 15

1. The OneBank initiative leaders can take many different steps to create a shared identity, all of which revolve around accelerating relationship building by finding common ground, developing cross-team relationships, and creating common threads or themes between people and teams. Some of these steps and methods include icebreakers and relationship builders, such as the Rating Game, Fun Facts, and This Is Me.

2. Use the Framing Governance for Collaboration technique to help create an overlay or matrix of governance across the collection of OneBank initiatives,

3. Concentric Communications is a Design Thinking technique that takes into consideration how communications may be visualized through radiating circles that call out the specific cadences and channels for different people and teams.

4. Black Box Illumination is a good technique for visually simplifying heavy word-based communications.

5. When a visual or picture is not appropriate, use the Structured Text for Rapid Comprehension technique to create concise and easily consumable written communication.

Hour 16

1. Four techniques that can help a team benefit from user feedback and other learnings through “learning by doing” include Cover Story Mockup for creating a shared vision, Process Flows for creating clarity, Building to Think to make progress when the path is unclear, and Rough and Ready Prototyping for thinking with our hands.

2. The Cover Story Mockup technique helps us paint a successful vision of our work in the future so we can visualize how that work would impact a community of users.

3. Use Process Flows to create structure by understanding and documenting how data moves from one place to another, and in which direction, and under what conditions.

4. The four techniques that can help us make planful and predictable progress include Forcing Functions, Time Boxing, the Inverse Power Law, and Time Pacing.

5. Parkinson’s Law is reflected in Time Boxing, which is based on Cyril Parkinson’s answer to the problem of work naturally expanding “so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Hour 17

1. The three techniques outlined in this hour that help a team “Execute to Think” and deliver something small and of value include the Proof of Concept, the MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and the Pilot.

2. To define and refine the notion of value, a team might use Objectives and Key Results.

3. When we choose to “Fail Forward,” we employ a Forcing Function that says there’s no turning back. This kind of focus and reality is useful because it aligns a team toward the future rather than spending time trying to return to an old and insufficient state or situation.

4. A pilot differs from a POC or MVP in that Pilots are functionally complete, unlike the tactical or partial functionality associated with a POC or the bare-bones functional capabilities available for only a subset of users reflected in an MVP.

5. The “Progress Mindset” is about small wins as we deliver value fast. Doing so establishes a way for making progress when the path is uncertain or the needs of a community are unclear.

Hour 18

1. Releases are higher in terms of hierarchy than sprints; many sprints are assigned to a single release.

2. Initiative leaders should consider the Smart IP Reuse technique, which includes using and adapting existing templates, documents, checklists, plans, and other artifacts to improve velocity.

3. Multitasking is a normal part of life, but if we follow our passion or our energy, we can get more done more quickly. And for the tasks that remain, use Forcing Functions and Gamification to drive progress.

4. The Gamification technique employs ribbons, badges, and other rewards (including tangible ones) to encourage and motivate people to complete their work faster than they might otherwise be inclined to do.

5. Shortcut Thinking (or Finding the Wormhole) sets the stage for reinventing a playing field, rather than resigning oneself to that playing field, to find a faster or more effective route between two points.

Hour 19

1. The five traditional types of testing include Unit Testing, Process Testing, End-to-End Testing, System Integration Testing, and User Acceptance Testing. In addition, the three performance-related testing types include Performance Testing, Scalability Testing, and Load and Stress Testing.

2. The Testing Mindset is integral to problem solving as we validate what we think we know, discover gaps as we uncover what we don’t know, and learn more throughout the testing process.

3. The five Design Thinking testing techniques outlined in this hour include Structured Usability Testing, A/B Testing, Experience Testing, Solution Interviewing, and Automating for Regression Velocity.

4. Structured Usability Testing is similar to traditional User Acceptance Testing in that users are validating our product or solution, but Structured Usability Testing is done much earlier than UAT, giving us much more time to pivot or change the direction of our product or solution.

5. The two Design Thinking testing tools we might use for capturing user feedback include the Testing Sheet and the Feedback Capture Grid.

6. Test leads should target 80 to 90 percent of test cases to be automated for Regression Testing.

Hour 20

1. A special technique called Silent Design reflects feedback gained from users and how they make changes to our products and solutions after they have been deployed to production.

2. The Testing Feedback technique is the broad-based technique reflecting feedback and other learnings from the breadth of traditional and newer Design Thinking testing techniques.

3. The three specific feedback techniques or methods underneath the umbrella of the Looking Back technique include running a Retrospective, running a Lessons Learned session, and running a Postmortem.

4. The Retrospective is an ongoing review we should conduct with our design and development teams or other sprint teams on a regular cadence (typically tied to the conclusion of a sprint or release).

5. To avoid waiting too long for feedback, we might share with Satish to deploy the work we are concluding. Design Thinking is about progress through iteration and learning, and we will have plenty of time to iterate and learn as long as we are making progress. Treat late feedback like a gift for the backlog and keep moving ahead.

Hour 21

1. The four examples of areas that many organizations struggle with when it comes to avoiding perfection traps include design, development, testing, and training or other end user readiness goals.

2. Consider applying the Fixing Broken Windows technique to flip “bad behavior begets worse behavior” into “good behavior begets better behavior”!

3. The moral of the Abilene Paradox story relates back to assumptions and their ability to derail us. We need to draw out people’s true wants and needs before making decisions that cost the group time and progress. We need to consider how to poll the group in a discreet or anonymous manner to validate their true wants and needs while honestly vocalizing our own true wants and needs too.

4. Turn to the Backward Invention Design Thinking technique to simplify a product, solution, or service that has grown excessively complex or unwieldy to deploy or adopt.

5. The long-time philosophy-based Design Thinking technique called Balancing the Essential and the Accidental gives us a way of thinking about complexity in terms of what is truly necessary and what is optional or unneeded. There is oftentimes a vague line that separates true value from lost value, for example. This line separates the essential from the accidental, the required from the unrequired.

Hour 22

1. Though several scalability methods are available to support BigBank’s transformation initiatives, Scaling and Subtracting by Fives and AntiFragile Validation for Longevity are a good initial lens for team scalability.

2. The Validating OKRs and Value technique forces us to consider value measures and how the notion of value might have changed throughout a project’s lifecycle.

3. Two techniques for bolstering operational resiliency include Buddy System Pairing to reduce risks and Slaying the Hero for disaster recoverability and overall operational resiliency.

4. Attention to Silent Design helps organizations such as BigBank plan, backlog, and implement sustainable changes to the system over time.

5. AntiFragile Validation can help BigBank consider and validate the fragility of its teams as well as of its people. Turn to AntiFragile Validation to assess individual and team health and expected longevity.

Hour 23

1. The four phases to the change process include awareness, purpose, readiness, and adoption.

2. A number of Design Thinking techniques covered in this hour may be useful to create awareness of a change, including Big Picture Understanding, Fractal Thinking, Stakeholder+ Mapping, Persona Profiling, Cover Story Mockup, Snaking the Drain, Sacrificing the Calf, Making (Our Awareness Collateral) Visible and Visual, and for some audiences problem-related techniques including Problem Tree Analysis, Problem Framing, and Problem Stating.

3. Design Thinking techniques covered this hour and useful for driving readiness include Analogy and Metaphor Thinking, Prototypes and Mockups, Design Thinking–inspired Structured Usability Testing and Solution Interviewing, and Buddy System Pairing.

4. The four techniques outlined in this hour that can help organizations and teams adopt change include Forcing Functions, Gamification, Context Building and Mapping, and Making Change Consumable.

5. Design Thinking techniques outlined in this hour that can help organizations and teams consider the timing of a change include the Culture Snail for Pace of Change, Bias Recognition and Validation, AntiFragile Validation, Fixing Broken Windows, Time Boxing, the Inverse Power Law, and Time Pacing.

Hour 24

1. The OneBank initiative leaders could improve governance across their respective initiatives by creating a set of Simple Rules and Guiding Principles for execution alignment and clarity, Framing Governance for stakeholder connections, using Stakeholder+ and Stakeholder Sentiment Mapping for understanding and tracking key relationships, and using the Power/Interest Grid for prioritizing key relationships.

2. When the traditional methods of managing an initiative’s scope fail to deliver results, the initiative leaders should turn to Time Boxing and Time Pacing, Journey Mapping, Balancing the Essential and the Accidental, Buy a Feature, Bullseye Prioritization, Affinity Clustering, Verbatim Mapping, the Five Whys, Golden Ratio Analysis, Rough and Ready Prototyping and other forms of Building to Think, and the “What, So What, Now What?” Design Thinking technique.

3. One of the most effective ways for the initiative leaders to think more deeply and visually about potential schedule impact includes running a Boats and Anchors exercise viewed through the lens of schedule management.

4. Interesting quality-enhancing Design Thinking techniques include Snaking the Drain, the Premortem Exercise, Worst and Best Ideation, Rule of Threes, “How Might We?” Questioning, Slay the Hero, Silent Design, Running the Swamp, and Golden Ratio Analysis.

5. The initiative leaders should turn to Simple Rules and Guiding Principles, Cover Story Mockup, Active Listening, Probing for Understanding, Silence by Design, Supervillain Monologuing, Storytelling, Concentric Communications, Inclusive Communications, AEIOU Questioning, Structured Text, and Mesh Networking to better connect and communicate with their respective stakeholders and teams.