The Turbocharger workshop

The power of customer centricity is that it shifts your attention back to where it should be - your customers.

Getting this right requires a shift in mindset. The normal way of conducting business is to spot problems and fix them. It’s an approach that seems to be programmed into our brains at a deep level. But while it’s good for fixing our own problems, in business we need to be able to solve our customers’ problems. And we need to solve them with other people.

Getting that right means staying in the uncomfortable place before a problem is solved. It means spending more time exploring problems and discussing different angles with colleagues. It also leads to unexpected results.

To do that, we’ve evolved a number of design methods which help our teams to find the right solution, not the first solution. This is what our clients call our ‘secret sauce’.

We’ve been sharing this directly with teams from our clients’ businesses in workshops we first developed for Porsche UK to solve some of their strategic challenges. In a series of two-day workshops, we’ve been helping them see problems in a new light, and find innovative solutions they can put in place rapidly.

Over the course of two days, expert practitioners lead client teams of around a dozen participants through a number of techniques, teaching and applying them as they go. The techniques help teams step outside of their normal ways of thinking:

• Conducting depth interviews
• Empathy Mapping
• Experience Mapping
• Task modelling
• How Might We? Creative Exploration
• Hypothesis generation
• Prototyping
• Testing, learning, and iterating

Here's some of the things the participants said:

• “What did you do with them?! I can’t believe how much the team looked visibly lighter, happier, more excited than when they walked in!”
• “Very open and positive discussions - the facilitators are so experienced”
• “Loved the fast concept development”
• “Interactive with a good level of support - one facilitator to each small group. It was brilliant!”
• “I liked the clear and steady pace”
• “I really appreciated the practical examples and exercises”
• “I learned how to frame the idea development process through examples of how to actually do it!"

Once the workshop is over, the impact can scale as attendees come back to work. Their new tools, and their new mindsets can be applied to the biggest challenges the organisation faces. And as innovative solutions emerge, this methods for bringing positive change will spread.