Hackathons are a staple of the startup world. Several teams, one challenge, a weekend to make something real. Along the way — coaches, experts, and pitch doctors circling to push the thinking further. The method holding it all together is Design Thinking: a structured way to turn creative energy into something that actually works.

• They walk away with creativity methods and techniques for sharpening ideas — from rough spark to something solid.
• They understand what makes a business model actually work.
• They practice collaborating under pressure: resolving conflict, making decisions, moving forward as a group.
• And they meet people worth knowing — the kind you follow up with. If everything clicks, the next unicorn – or zebra – is born.

Design Thinking is an agile practice built around one idea: start with the customer and work backwards. It’s an industry standard in software development — but the method travels well. From Silicon Valley to the rest of the world, tech companies follow the same steps:

How do we do it?

Design Thinking is Brigitte’s natural habitat. She finds a way to work at least one of its tools into almost every consulting project she touches. Together with Wang Man, she has also taken it somewhere less expected — into the room with kids, for some genuinely out-of-the-box innovation with kids.

How does it work?

The product idea makes or breaks it. In our experience, “do whatever you like” hackathons tend to go nowhere — too much freedom, too little traction. But a brief that’s too narrow kills the spark just as fast. “How do we increase profit for X” is a management meeting, not a hackathon.

The sweet spot? The UN Sustainability Goals. They’re big enough to inspire, specific enough to focus — and they never disappoint as a source of topics to chew on:

https://sdgs.un.org/goals

Take “water” as the theme for a weekend. One team might tackle plastic bottle consumption. Another starts with water, drifts to flow, and lands on a meditation app for teenagers. Both are valid. That’s the point.

Once the theme is set, the logistics are straightforward: Get 20 to 40 people willing to stretch their thinking for a long weekend, provide a space, basic catering and enough coffee. We handle everything else.

What do you need?

1. People: 30 to 40 participants works well — curious, open-minded, and happy to have their assumptions challenged for a weekend.
2. Space: Teams can work side by side in one room or spread out and only come together for the opening evening and the final pitch.
3. Inspiration: Experts drop in for an hour — entrepreneurs, industry insiders, communication specialists. They don’t hand out answers. They ask the questions that push teams to the next level.
4. Food: Nutritious, tasty meals and snacks. Sustained thinking needs sustained fuel.
5. Optional: Branded give-aways to mark the occasion.
6. Optional: Prizes for the winners — cash, access to consultancy, or whatever feels right for the crowd.

In practice, organizing a Design Thinking Hackathon is simpler than it sounds. We bring the materials, the props, and the experience. You bring the people. There will be one official winner — but everyone walks away with something: sharper skills, a broader toolkit, and a clearer sense of how to think for the century ahead.

Interested? Let’s start with your idea and your audience and take it from there. We love building something bespoke.

And if you’re a non-profit, a school, or an organization with an outsized vision and a modest budget — reach out anyway. We’re genuinely happy to find a way.

The post Experience Startup Magic with a Design Thinking Hackathon appeared first on Agile Parenting.

I try to go through life in style. To do that efficiently, I’ve developed the habit of preparing complete outfits roughly ten days in advance — clothes, socks, underwear, accessories, all matched and ready for whatever’s coming up. By my estimate, it saves at least 30 minutes a week. Time I’d rather spend reading to my daughter than frantically hunting for matching tights at 7am.

I can’t take full credit for this. It developed through a kind of reverse engineering.

Ten years ago, I read Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg. Somewhere in the book, she mentioned a friend who put her kindergarten kids to bed already wearing the next day’s clothes — skipping pyjamas entirely. I tried it. It worked perfectly. My daughter was only wearing soft t-shirts and baggy pants anyway, and smelled like a peach regardless. Morning chaos: eliminated.

The lean approach for my personal “dress-to-impress” was just a logical next step.

What are your LEAN tips and strategies? What are your hacks to save time at mundane tasks to have more for meaningful activities?

The post The Agile Mum Lean Startup Approach to Getting Dressed: One Hour, Ten Outfits, Zero Morning Chaos appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Their first task: empathise with mothers. Specifically, answer the question — what does a mum need?

It was a revealing exercise from the start, not least because none of them had ever thought to ask it. They began with a picture brainstorm — flipping through glossy advertisements and pulling out whatever spoke to them. The verdict: mums, apparently, need a great deal of luxury and serenity 😉

The next step was an Empathy Map. Here, as in any corporate workshop, the challenge is to move beyond stereotypes and ground observations in real evidence — specific examples, not assumptions. What the girls uncovered about the emotional reality of mothers turned out to be considerably less glamorous than the mood board suggested.

When mums speak, apparently, they give orders. “Do your homework!” “Practice the piano!” “Walk the dog!”

The lower right corner tells a different story — one of relentless multitasking. Working, running the house, being present for the family, all at once.

And what goes on inside a mum’s head? “Don’t give up.” “Don’t fall behind.” “I have responsibilities (for the dog ;)).” “I need time for myself.” “I want to have fun.”

Our girls were not entirely satisfied with our emotional state. Angry, stressed, moody, and tired came up with some regularity. We are, it seems, also hard to understand. The saving grace: happiness made the list too. Small mercies.

What do your children see, think, feel, and hear when they look at you? We’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.

The post What Does a Mum Need? This Is What Happens When Daughters Empathize appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Wang Man brought it back to where it belongs. She spent a day with her daughters and their friends designing fashion.

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test to learn

In their book Nea Machina, brothers and designers Thomas and Martin Poschauko lay out the entire process without once using the term Design Thinking. It was a major inspiration for Brigitte when she first started bringing the method into the corporate world.

The post Design Thinking When Making Fashion: Bringing The Method Back To Its Roots appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Sometimes that meant a mother needed an hour of uninterrupted concentration. Wang Man and I took turns hosting play dates to carve out a little breathing room in each other’s day. It was during one of these that I floated the idea of a Design Thinking workshop — something to break the homeschooling monotony and create a learning environment that children of different ages could actually enjoy.

Creative problem solving is a life skill!

I’m a firm believer in gamification — and I tell my clients regularly that a well-designed game communicates more than a thousand words ever could. Design Thinking is a creative problem-solving technique and an agile practice. Adults find it liberating. For kids, it should feel completely natural: drawing, making collages, telling stories. Being silly is not just allowed — it’s encouraged.

My daughter Antonia doesn’t like writing. That’s not entirely true. She loves imaginative stories but hates the part that comes after — the checking, the correcting, the criticism about spelling mistakes. My own feedback, well-intentioned but relentless, had done its damage. She’d reached the point of boycotting even picking up a pen.

Time for a fresh start. Other kids in the room, a new technique, and one simple metric: imagination. No school standards, no red pen.

Design Thinking follows simple principles:

The Design Thinking process: There are six steps that need to be covered.

Empathize

This is where every agile practice begins: stepping into someone else’s shoes. You take a real person and try to understand what she wants to achieve, what drives her, what shapes her days. In my consulting work with adults, I’ve learned to linger here longer than feels comfortable. Once you’ve truly connected with the person you’re designing for, everything else follows naturally.

Define the problem

From everything you’ve gathered, you distill it down to a single headline — the challenge you’re going to work on.

Ideate

Now you brainstorm. Generate as many solutions and product ideas as possible for the challenge you defined — quantity before quality.

Prototype

Move fast and build something rough. The prototype doesn’t need to be polished — it needs to exist. Getting an idea out of your head and into the real world is the only way to find out if it actually works. It also gives you something to show people, ideally the very person you designed it for, and get honest feedback.

This is done in the following phase:

Test to learn

In my experience, this is the hardest step. After all that creativity and making — uplifting and exhausting in equal measure — showing the result to outsiders can be quietly sobering. A simple questionnaire is enough to surface the weaknesses you couldn’t see from the inside. It’s uncomfortable. It’s also exactly what Google means by “Get out of the f*cking office.”

Tell your story

or a pitch wraps up the whole process.

How does this actually work?

Connect facts and feelings, logic and intuition

Design Thinking works because it wakes up parts of the brain that most of us have quietly stopped using. Adults spend their days in front of screens, one finger on a mouse. School kids aren’t doing much better. Here, we cut and glue and draw and craft. We flip through magazines, pull in what catches the eye, bring the physical world back into the thinking. Suddenly, decision-making capabilities that have been sitting idle start coming back online.

Make magic happen

The ultimate goal is the “What if?!” moment — that flash of possibility that can’t be manufactured, only stumbled into. To get there, you need total freedom. No fear of looking silly. No pressure to produce something immediately viable. Anything that chokes the flow of ideas is the enemy.

Playfulness — one of Design Thinking’s core ingredients — comes naturally to healthy children. Which is exactly why I was curious to see what would happen when kids worked with it deliberately.

My first experiment involved three primary school kids, one of them Antonia. Their task: write a story full of fantasy. First, define the main characters. Then describe them in as much detail as possible — what do they love doing, who are their friends, how do they dress? For inspiration, they could roam the house, browse magazines, or simply reach into their own imagination.

Try new agile practices with your kids before you try them with your clients. 😉

Brigitte

Next, they built out the story using post-it stickers and cut-outs from magazines — drawing, arranging, rearranging. Keeping everything loose and moveable was the point.

Once they’d settled on the problem and the resolution, the titles came next. Then a rework — refining the thread, adding details, tightening what needed tightening. Finally, it was time to present to the experts: each other. In the retelling, they discovered which parts landed, which lost the room, and where the logic fell apart — not that consistency was strictly the point, but it was noted.

And just like that, the stories started flowing.

Armed with everything they’d gathered, they started writing. And this was the part that stayed with me. The stories didn’t have to be coaxed out — they poured. All the content was already there, waiting. My daughter, who had refused to pick up a pen for weeks, wrote without hesitation. The anxiety was gone. The sentences just came.

It’s the same effect I see in Design Thinking workshops with adults:

• For a long time, very little seems to be happening.
• The real work is going on inside — and then, suddenly, everything materialises at once. The process is intense. When it’s over, everyone is spent.
• And the results carry real emotion. You can feel it in them.

To close, the kids presented their stories. Most of them were genuinely, gloriously weird — which is exactly what happens when you tell children to go wild and pile on the fantasy.

That said, playfulness without direction only goes so far. Each child hit a wall at some point — a dip in concentration, a flicker of anxiety, a slide into unproductive patterns. I could have reached for more tools from my corporate Design Thinking toolkit: the Cover Story exercise, storyboard templates. But I held back, wary of stretching the session too thin and losing them. Three hours of intensive work felt like the outer limit of collective attention.

The morning ran its full course. Every single child stayed engaged — motivated, wide-eyed, and happily surrounded by creative chaos. That evening, messages started coming in from parents. The kids wanted to do it again.

The post Design Thinking with Kids: What Happens When You Give Structure to Playfulness appeared first on Agile Parenting.