Phase 1: Exploratory

Among the most critical phases is the first meeting with a team's sponsors—who initiate the workshops—known as “Exploratory.” Exploratory is analogous to writing a project brief; initiating a dialogue between team leaders and Menlo staff, this initial phase provides a forum for determining key issues and helps ensure that the resulting workshop process will allow participants to succeed in addressing them. It also reflects the consultative and empathetic processes of design thinking.

Menlo coaches listen carefully to sponsors in order to diagnose the cause of their challenge. Often, however, they must also dig deeper, seeking clues to complicating factors that might inhibit or undermine possible solutions. This process reflects a critical assumption in the Menlo model: the problem a team is experiencing is likely not a function of its raw ability, but rather a symptom of more subtle issues. Accordingly, Menlo leaders inquire about business problems, but also probe further to uncover possible impediments. The team may have an inability to communicate effectively, or may not have found an effective solution because they haven't really understood the customer's point of view.

During Exploratory, Menlo staff also preview their approach to the sponsors, including working through sample activities, to expose the sponsors to Menlo's principles and environment as well as manage expectations and achieve consensus on the workshop's objectives and basic structure. At the end of Exploratory, staff will have gathered enough information to begin formalizing a delivery plan for the full-team workshop, including customizing its content or duration for a team's specific needs. Decisions made at this stage include determining:

• The specific program framework that can best address the business challenges.
• The team and individual skills that warrant development.
• Key activities to foster and build those skills.
• Duration and timing of the workshop(s).
• Plans for offsite trips or special guests.
• Possible additional support from team sponsors going forward.
• Participants, in terms of both functional area/expertise and leadership level.

At Menlo, the last item is known as “ensemble casting” and is approached as a director might assemble a dramatic group, by considering how each actor's unique skills, personality, and point of view can contribute to the group's perspective and performance as a whole. For example, if a group is having difficulty developing a new product, the team's manager might assume that engineers alone should attend. However, Menlo staff might also suggest that representatives from marketing, human resources, or even an individual from another business area entirely who is not working on the project be present to add new sources of information and bring fresh insight.

Phase 2: Boot Camp at the Menlo Innovation Lab

The next phase is known as “Boot Camp” because it is an intensive preparatory experience intended to build trust, develop basic skills, and facilitate the team's cohesion for the innovation “battle” to come. Like military boot camp, participants are sent to a new, unfamiliar site for training: the Menlo Innovation Lab. The open-space lab is designed to foster communication and collaboration. Furniture is mobile, adaptable, and comfortable. Bright orange, part of the Menlo graphic identity, accents the lab area, where it signifies energy and stimulates creativity. JWD-Creative, the agency that worked on the Menlo lab identity, notes that they were inspired by Edison's own words: “Hell, there are no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.”³ In this sense, the Menlo boot camp is the antithesis of military training because the objective is not for innovation team members to surrender their individuality, but rather to function productively as a cohesive unit.

The next clue that the design thinking workshops are not “business as usual” is the request that participants surrender their mobile devices. As one design coach said, “This is what we used to call a wet lab: [rather than a device, we want you to] use your head, use your anatomy—use your brain” (Lawrence “Murph” Murphy, chief designer and facilitator, May 2014). He recounted an occasion when participants were distracted by a significant reorganization happening while the team was away in the workshop training. Sensing the stress, the Menlo staff showed a video by Honda automotive articulating its “Kick Out the Ladder” philosophy. The phrase describes a situation in which an individual is striving and climbing and, just as he gets to a high rung, the ladder is kicked out from under him. The metaphor conveys that valuable change cannot be achieved by moving safely and incrementally (rung by rung); instead, innovation happens when not innovating is not an option. After showing the participating team the video during a lunch break, the coaches erected a five-foot ladder in the lab and directed participants to leave their devices—and the tickertape of unsettling news being broadcast there—on its steps.

During boot camp, a team is guided through exercises that foster trust, lateral thinking (De Bono, 1992), empathy, creativity, improvisation, and collaboration. It is an experiential onslaught intended to break conventional modes of interaction, remove masks of professional personas, and create a team that not only functions together, but functions better as a unit.

For example, if Exploratory found that the team's interpersonal communication skills were causing an innovation bottleneck, the facilitator might lead the team in an exercise called “Pile of Rocks.” Everyone sits on the floor around a large pile of rocks; each participant is told to select a rock, look at it, and then place it back on the pile. They are then told to retrieve their rock, and the difficulty of doing so quickly conveys the importance of focus and attention to seemingly trivial details. Next, each is paired with a partner, to whom they must describe “their” rock so that their partner can retrieve it. Having to characterize an object that could easily be dismissed as indistinguishable requires precision of specification: “gray and round” is insufficient, and success comes only to pairs who can effectively communicate. An important part of the exercise is participants' discovery that not everyone shares identical concepts of vague descriptors such as “large” or “smooth.”

In this activity, as in many conducted by the Menlo team, the first impression can be one of absurdity—why pull advanced engineers away from projects to pick rocks out of a pile? But dismissing these as “silly games” would be a mistake. Instead, one lesson to draw from this is the importance of disruption. The Menlo team speaks of the importance of “scraping the GE off” participants. This phrase is not meant as a slight to GE, but rather is a way of expressing that innovation requires departing from the norm. GE is populated by very bright people accustomed to achievement who want to be shown a system so that they can master it. Yet so-called “wicked problems”—the very kind that can catalyze radical innovation—defy quick mastery. Introducing an entirely new form of playing field disrupts existing operating modes and forces participants to experiment with new problem-solving approaches.

[For Pile of Rocks], everybody's sitting really close to each other. Their eyes are locked together, because they've got to listen to every word that this person is saying to go be able to find that rock. And they learn that we're not always great at communicating to one another; we usually don't listen very well at all. We have tons of other crazy stuff that we do, and it's all the product of thinking about immersive activities that we can do to get a participant in the spirit of noticing where these problems are probably going to show up. After they've experienced an issue with team members in an activity, and they still have that feeling, we ask them, “How does same issue this show up at work?” It's really easy to make that quick connection when it's still raw.

Doug Dietz, Innovation Architect, member of core Menlo team, and Menlo Facilitator, personal interview, May 15, 2014.

A second premise and lesson to be drawn from the Menlo model: experiential learning is exponentially more powerful than passive information transfer. The eccentric activities are not intended to be literal skill training, but rather the means to foster memorable experiences, which in turn precipitate emotion that can be connected to a larger concept. Being told to “pay attention” and “listen carefully” is far less effective than having a visceral memory of finding an effective strategy to help a colleague find one specific rock among dozens.

Reflection is a critical step in transforming experience into meaningful learning, and at Menlo, time is always reserved to debrief at an exercise's end. Before moving to a new activity or phase, the subteams return to a single group to consider and answer a single, critically important question: “What just happened?” This part of the process can sometimes take as much time as the activity itself. Reflecting on when a similar interpersonal dynamic occurred during a typical project back at the office, noticing how and which emotions were provoked during an exercise, or explicitly articulating the specific connections participants make between their expectations and their experiences—all serve to cultivate “group genius,” the synergistic benefits that high-functioning teams develop. Moreover, although reflection is encouraged directly after activity completion, facilitators also structure the workshop's arc so that the “payoff” of a given exercise doesn't appear until later in the process. The skills that accrue in the course of multiple active listening, collaboration, and creative problem-solving exercises are intricately woven into a team's newly forming ability to move as a unit toward an objective. It is often not until a later stage that individuals can be made aware of how differently their team has begun to function, compared to when it began the workshop process.

This conversion is particularly transformational for employees of large companies assigned to cross-functional, sometimes geographically dispersed, work teams, for each exercise provides a highly personal, meaningful introduction to colleagues who until now may only have been a name at the bottom of an e-mail. Whether competing against other small groups to erect a camping tent in silence, describing yourself as an app, or introducing oneself through a collage that answers the question, “Where do you feel the most and least creative?” Boot Camp activities not only ignore traditional functional skills, but are designed to be challenging for all participants, an equalizing process that focuses talent at the team, rather than individual, level.

A third lesson of the Boot Camp process—and perhaps a critical explanation for the failure of some companies who have tried to adopt a design thinking orientation—is that enabling or activating a design mind-set is critical before any other modes of practice can be introduced. The Menlo facilitators emphasize that readiness is key to a team's ability to successfully learn, practice, and implement design thinking principles.

You might not get to a traditional design-thinking exercise for days, but that's a version of getting them to “fail early.” The traditional design thinking exercise might not happen until the middle of Day Two. You need to spend the entire previous day more on team activities or higher-level principle work to get the team working well.

Mark Ciesko, Manager of GE Healthcare Americas Studio and Menlo Coach, personal interview, May 15, 2014.

Indeed, readiness can be understood as providing the experience of design thinking principles within the product development team—prototyping, failing early and often, customer-centric empathy—before labeling them as such.

It is a very important factor, internal empathy for the team. For every organization that is team-based, most of the development and innovation happens within teams. Without this empathy and without setting the team up for success, everything else that you do will either be subpar or will not work at all.

Emil Georgiv, Senior Menlo Innovation Strategist and Menlo Facilitator, personal interview, May 16, 2014.

Fostering group genius—teams that work in concert and synergistically to allow relevant and powerful solutions to emerge—is a core value at Menlo. Indeed, although sponsors may have articulated a project-based objective during Exploratory, that project is not directly addressed during Boot Camp. According to Menlo philosophy, attacking the problem with existing perspectives, group dynamics, project history, and personal “stakes in the ground” can result in only incremental results. Boot Camp is an opportunity to immerse the team in a non–health care setting to help them learn how to see and solve problems with fresh perspective.

For example, a team that engaged Menlo for a problem with poor workflow assumed their problem was software related. The team was given a (seemingly) unrelated assignment: to redesign the fast food restaurant drive-through experience. As one facilitator explained, “We needed to help them see that workflow wasn't about a specific tool—software—but about the critical relationships among information, people, and needs.” Subgroups ideated concepts, which were then presented in a series of skits (itself an introduction to the concept of consumer journey prototyping). One team's solution called for the menu to be projected onto the car dashboard so it would be easier to read; the employee taking the order became a “health concierge,” and the customer's car was washed while waiting for the order to be filled.

One Menlo facilitator noted that making early design thinking trials removed from the actual business problem provides freedom and space for creativity: “It's not health care related, so they can be free to see how [re-imagining work flow] feels.” The resulting solutions can even surface issues that are relevant to the specific healthcare issue facing the team—how can value be added during experiences like waiting that would otherwise be experienced as pain points? What happens when employees start with the consumer's perspective?

The “design a better drive-through” example highlights other important Boot Camp components. These include opportunities for problem immersion, ideation, prototyping, and iterative refinement. Contextual immersion fosters empathy, both for teammates and for customers. As one facilitator asserted, “Empathy isn't transferable,” meaning that if a team doesn't share common experiences, it is unlikely to engage in meaningful interpretation and action. The workshops' inherent “learn-do-reflect” philosophy provide opportunities for participants to collectively experience design principles like “fail early, fail often” as a team.

It is hard to overstate the significance of conveying these principles through practice. In an engineering-led culture such as GE's, the reflexive response to problems is more likely to focus on system development and control than on generating potentially messy, irrational, or emotional ideas. “[Managers] often want to feel control,” noted a coach. “It's hard for them to let the team find its own way to address the challenge. But not letting go strangles creativity; it usually just doesn't work well.”

Menlo leaders have created a variety of worksheets to allow participants to document their learning in ways that they can refer back to and be inspired by when daily responsibilities insinuate themselves again. For example, a worksheet entitled “Design Thinking: Take It Home,” features three columns. Colored hexagons, each containing one of the fundamentals of design thinking practice (e.g., “Empathy,” “Define,” “Ideate,” etc.), are literally at the center of everything, dotting the length of the page like stepping stones across a river. Each is captioned with useful prompts (e.g., the words listen and inquire underlie “Empathy”). The top of the otherwise unmarked left side of the page is labeled “Personal Behaviors”; the column running along the right side is labeled “Business Challenges.” The message is clear: individuals cannot reap the rewards of design thinking unless their own behaviors are synchronized with the objectives they are working on for their business.

On the fourth day of Boot Camp, teams focus their efforts on “What We Wish We Knew,” an activity that asks participants to consider the kind of information they need to move their project forward. The list that results forms the basis of a research plan to gather the information that can make proposed solutions more likely to succeed.

Phase 3: The Research Plan

The phrase “design research” describes “any number of investigative techniques used to add context and insight to the design process.”⁴ Once a team has determined what they need to know to advance their desired innovation, Menlo's leaders help them identify the research methods that can best address their questions. These might include observation, contextual inquiry and cultural probes, interviews and focus groups, or techniques to reveal user emotions. No two projects are identical, so the number and combination of methods employed vary by project.

The teams are matched with design researchers within Global Healthcare Design, who guide them through data acquisition and analysis in preparation for the next workshop phase. While the design researchers are specialists and external suppliers are sometimes brought in to assist, the Menlo philosophy is grounded in experience, so facilitators strive to maximize team participation during the research phase, which is the longest portion of the Innovation Workshop model and can last up to three months. Whenever possible, the plan includes methods requiring engagement, a critical step toward fostering empathy. Facilitators have found that when participants observe or interview customers firsthand, they develop new appreciation for the perspective of those for whom they are developing a solution. Just as exhorting workshop participants to pay attention is less effective than placing them in a setting in which they will fail if they don't, telling those involved in developing a product to be mindful of user experience is not nearly as effective as engaging with the technicians or patients for whom a device or process is being developed. Health care is, after all, a context where design can have life or death consequences. Menlo facilitators report witnessing deep transformation in perceptions and behavioral patterns of workshop participants who are afforded the opportunity to not only learn about, but also develop empathy for, customers by personally conducting design research.

The research findings provide the foundation on which solutions are evaluated.

Phase 4: Innovation Camp

The fourth phase of the Menlo program is Innovation Camp. There, the research results are presented, and work begins toward solving the initially identified business issue. Co-creation is important for success, so customers are frequently invited to this stage of the workshop to talk about their experiences and challenges, while participants practice active listening. A new experience for many managers and their customers, the results deepen relationships within the team as well as with external stakeholders. And, now that the team has considered the research results in light of their customers' input and feedback, they are ready and able to (re)define the original business objective.

Participants are taught to write “opportunity statements,” brief summaries of the problem to be solved. Such statements, prefaced by the phrase, “wouldn't it be nice if…” prepare the ground for the ideation that follows, so participants must identify the need to be addressed, rather than determine a specific type of product that would fill a gap. Coaches work to ensure that statements are neither so broad that they are too general to work from (e.g., “Wouldn't it be nice if we made a better health care experience for patients?”), nor too narrow, which would presuppose or only provide a very limited solution (“Wouldn't it be nice to give every patient an iPad to customize their room lighting?”). A better opportunity statement might read something like, “Wouldn't it be nice if we created a more comforting patient environment?” because it identifies the goal but allows for multiple possible solutions.

Individuals are encouraged to develop six to eight opportunity statements. The statements, each written on a sticky note, are then aggregated on large whiteboards and clustered into common themes. Next, participants vote for their preferred opportunities by placing sticker dots on those they believe will be most important to develop further.

With a new level of focus, the group begins ideation exercises, inventing possible solutions for the opportunity statements while learning how to accept rather than dismiss others' concepts and build on them. Rejection emerges organically, the by-product of a “build to learn” philosophy in which simple, rough prototypes are constructed and tested. Those that fail are improved and the revised prototype is, in turn, retested. Such iterative improvement helps focus the group on meaningful, empirically evaluated solutions and minimizes failure once resources have been invested. Importantly, customers are frequently included in the prototyping stage of the project, where they are invited to critique and co-create emerging concepts. According to senior Menlo innovation strategist Emil Georgiev, multiple patent filings have emerged from Menlo innovation workshops that included customers as co-inventors.

Of the many solutions developed and prototypes tested, the team selects three to five concepts, presenting them—with collective pride and conviction—to senior leaders on the final day of the workshop.

Phase 5: Follow-Up

From its inception, Menlo has emphasized its own continuous improvement. So while early workshops were successful at shifting mind-sets and driving new behaviors, over time the Menlo group realized that the transformation individuals and teams experienced during the workshops was sometimes not sustained once they returned to the old habits of their normal work environment. Early attempts to stave off relapse focused on having participants complete exercises like the “take it home” worksheet described above to remind them of important lessons and principles. While still important, these efforts are now supplemented with more formal processes to transition teams back to their units as well as provide support when they tackle their business challenge with full resources and accountabilities.

The structure for this newest phase is still in development, and like the entire Menlo program, its implementation is customized for specific teams. Nevertheless, Menlo leaders have been experimenting with a range of formats to address the needs of current teams as well as the growing group of workshop alumni, who form an important organizational learning and support network. Current plans include hosting open houses for Menlo participant-alumni to share new design techniques, challenges, and ideas; scheduling a series of checkpoints so that the team can touch base with its facilitator; and having a coach embedded within the team during its further project development.

Success Factors

Menlo's developers are quick to credit those from which they have drawn guidance and inspiration in developing their innovation lab model. Among these are Stanford's d.School; P&G's Clay Street initiative; The Creative Problem Solving Group, and Matrixworks' Mukara Meredith and Sean Sauber. The following factors are common to Stanford, P&G, the Creative Problem Solving Group,⁶ Menlo, and other successful innovation labs:

1. Physical factors: Having a separate physical space that can both signal the end of “work as usual” and provide a safe environment in which to be vulnerable while learning and experimenting is vital. The space should be conducive to creativity, with no corporate boardroom or classroom-style meeting rooms, comfortable and adaptive furniture, and ample materials for expression.
2. Cultural conflict: Deeply entrenched organizational norms; function-based thought worlds and national culture can each create barriers to understanding, stifle creativity, and contribute to discord. Menlo's leaders have found that recognizing the sources and symptoms of stress and dysfunction is imperative to ameliorating it. However, these underlying tensions are rarely addressed directly, but instead are coaxed out in the course of activities designed to surface—and eventually resolve—them organically.
3. Autonomy: The importance of a “skunkworks” level of independence cannot be overstated in creating an effective design thinking program: bureaucracy is innovation's kryptonite. At Menlo, the leadership is largely supportive of the training program (some top managers, like Mark Ciesko, Manager of the Americas Design Studio, are also facilitators), but Menlo programs are conducted separately from the design studio's usual projects.

Challenges to Overcome

Menlo has not been without its challenges, and new hurdles regularly appear. These include:

1. Resource allocation: It can be difficult for programs without known outcomes—like design thinking—to secure sustainable funds. Not only is leadership support imperative, but it is equally valuable to develop new business models. Menlo, for example, generates some of its funding by operating as an internal consultancy.
2. Growth: Success breeds opportunities, but growth can strain resources. At Menlo, there are two areas currently exerting (welcome) pressure on the program: the first is having adequate staff to conduct workshops while maintaining quality and consistency for the program's core ideas, skills, and values, and the second is GE's global presence. Menlo has addressed the former with a “train the trainers” model in which participants who demonstrate enthusiasm and acumen for the curriculum are encouraged to apprentice as coaches. Meanwhile, Menlo has just begun adapting its successful curriculum to a range of different cultural contexts, including the design studios in Europe and Asia.
3. Resistance: New work modes can be threatening to those whose comfort and success is derived from the status quo. Because the Menlo program is so heavily team based, resistors can limit the momentum available to a group working on difficult or complex problems. Dietz (personal interview, December 1, 2010) explains:

When you bring people in, does everybody get it 100%? No, you're still going to have cynics. I love them; they've just been at GE so long that they've got this crust over them. We can get through that crust, but it's going to take some time. Usually by about three-quarters through the session, you'll see them start to take a few more risks. If you can build them up, you'll see them do something that's really unexpected. Before you know it, they've changed.

Menlo leaders have consciously embedded periods during workshops in which customers and GE executives participate in and validate the work the team is doing in order to illustrate and reinforce the benefits of the process. As a result, only two groups have chosen not to complete the workshop, and both were instances of departmental change that had to take priority.

Lessons Learned

While every organization has a unique culture and strategic objectives that would influence the development of an internal design thinking program, it is worth reiterating the hard-won lessons of GE Healthcare's Menlo Innovation program leaders, including:

1. Seek information and inspiration. Be alert to ideas from other innovation groups; investigate training techniques and new research from an array of sources. Dietz reads widely and also often credits his work with teens in the community for helping him develop new workshop activities. He reasons that if he can get reluctant adolescents to become vulnerable to new ideas, managers can't be much more difficult to engage.
2. Buy-in takes time. The process of developing the Menlo program did not happen overnight. Large organizations have short-term goals, nested commitments, and turbulent markets competing for their attention. Menlo's leaders persevered in their quest to teach their colleagues design thinking because they believed in its benefits. Just as designers are trained to prototype and iterate, the Menlo workshops have benefited from small wins and a commitment to continuous improvement.

   Similarly, incubation is vital. Dietz uses the phrase “going vertical” to refer to cases where a project stuck in neutral suddenly jumps forward as ideas click, risks pay off, and solutions emerge. Managers expecting a steady stream of incremental gains as the measure of success must be taught to be patient for a payoff.

3. Bigger isn't always better. Menlo's leaders might have been tempted to create franchises throughout the company to diffuse its curriculum, but they have focused instead on building a firm foundation for the program before scaling up. Moreover, the “train the trainer” model means that Menlo's reputation is carried by word-of-mouth rather than a managerial mandate to participate. Sponsors who request workshops have heard from trusted sources that the resource investment is worthwhile; they are therefore more likely to be committed to the process.