Hackathons are common in the Startup ecosystem. Several teams develop business ideas. During that time, there are coaches, experts and pitch doctors around to support and inspire. A typical hackathon lasts a full weekend. The method for funneling creativity into a feasible product is Design Thinking.

• Participants learn new creativity methods and techniques for gradually increasing the maturity of their ideas.
• They understand the basics of a successful business model.
• They learn to collaborate, mitigate conflict and make decisions as a group.
• They have the opportunity to meet kindred spirits to follow up on the hackathon result later on. If everything goes well, they end up with the next unicorn – or zebra.

Design Thinking is an agile practice and a process to develop customer-centric ideas. It is an industry standard for software development but not limited to that industry. Tech companies in Silicon Valley and the rest of the world follow these steps:

How do we do it?

Design Thinking activities small and large are Brigitte’s favorite thing and she will rarely miss a chance to use at least one of the typical tools when doing consulting projects. Wang Man and she also have plenty of experience for extreme out-of-the-box innovation with kids.

How does it work?

First, we need a compelling product idea. Our experience shows, that hackathons that have a “do-as-you-like-approach” have lame results. When the playing field is too narrow, like “How do we increase the profit/reach/customer satisfaction of this-and-that” lacks novelty to truly inspire participants. The UN sustainability goals never disappoint as a source of topics to chew on:

https://sdgs.un.org/goals

For instance, a hackathon can put “water” at the heart of the weekend-long activity. Based on this, one team might choose to work on an idea on how to limit the use of plastic water bottles. Another team might be carried away further and first think of water, then of flow and end up with a meditation app for teens.

Once this has been set, it is easy: Get a group of 20-40 people who are happy to stretch their brains for a long weekend. Organize rooms and some basic catering. We take care of the rest.

What do you need?

1. People: 30-40 participants is a good group size. They should be funny, open-minded and enjoy stretching their brains.
2. Space: Teams can work in one room or in separate rooms and only convene for the first evening and the final pitch.
3. Inspiration: Experts from the chosen industry, entrepreneurs, communication specialists etc. pop in for an hour or so and share their thoughts with the individual team. They do not give much specific advice but rather challenge the teams and help them to get to the next level of their business idea.
4. Food: nutritious, tasty meals and snacks will fuel all this thinking and creating
5. Optional: Give-aways with hackathon branding
6. Optional: Prizes for the winners. This can be cash or access to consultancy services etc.

This means, a Design Thinking Hackathon can be organized very easily. Our team will bring all the materials, props and experience to make it a memorable event. There will be just one official winner but tons of personal growth and enhanced skills for the 21^st century for all participants.

If are interested, let us discuss your basic product idea and audience. We would be pleased to organize a bespoke activity for you.

In case you are a non-profit, a school that caters to special needs, in general an organization with a big vision and a tiny budget, do not hesitate to contact us, either. We are more than happy to customize a pro-bono solution.

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

I try to go through life in style. In order to do this efficiently, I developed the habit of regularly preparing complete outfits for roughly 10 days in advance. I put together clothes for all lined up occasions, including socks, underwear and accessories. I believe this saves me at least 30 minutes per week, which I can use for reading to my daughter instead of hectically browsing for matching stockings in the morning.

I do not want to take full credit for this idea. In fact, it developed through a kind of reverse engineering. 10 years ago, I read the book “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead” by Facebook COO and feminist thinker Sheryl Sandberg. In that book she mentioned a friend who put her kindergarden kids to bed already wearing their clothes for the next day instead of pyjamas.

I did the same thing, saving precious time in the morning and honestly, it worked perfectly fine since my daughter was only wearing comfy t-shirts and baggy, soft pants anyway and smelled like a peach no matter what.

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 Agile Mom Lean Startup: Avoid Waste (Of Time) And Prepare Outfits For A Week appeared first on Agile Parenting.

This was an interesting exercise since they had never asked themselves this question. First, they approached this by doing a picture brainstorm. In any workshop this is an uplifting activity, since you browse through glossy advertisement and pick what appeals to you. As it turned out, they think mums need a lot of luxury and serenity 😉

As a next step, they collectively filled in the Empathy Map. In this context as in the corporate context, it is important to not just write down stereotypes. It is important to back up the findings with evidence and give examples for the observations. What the girls found out about the emotional state of mums was less glamorous than the result in the step before.

When mums speak, they give orders like: “Do more homework!”, “Play the piano!”, “Walk the dog!”

The lower right corner shows that the daughters see a lot of multi-tasking going on: They work, take care of the house and spend time with the family.

And what do they think? “Don’t give up!”, “Don’t lag behind!”, “I have responsibility (for the dog ;)!”, “I need time for myself!”, “I want to have fun!”

Our girls were not happy with our overall emotional state. Very often, their mothers are angry, stressed, moody and tired. Furthermore, they find us hard to understand. Fortunately, Happiness also popped up when the girls contemplated about how we might feel. Thank god!

What do your children see, think, feel and do when they look at you? We would be happy to read your comments!

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

Wang Man brought this method back to where it came from and spent a day with her daughters and their friends designing fashion.

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test to learn

In their book (in German) the brothers/designers Thomas and Martin Poschauko explain Design Thinking without even calling it Design Thinking. Their book Nea Machina was a huge inspiration for Brigitte when she started experimenting with this method in the corporate environment.

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

Sometimes this meant a mother needed some space. For tasks that required concentration. My friend Wang Man and I occasionally hosted play dates to free up each other’s day a bit. I brought up the idea of a Design Thinking workshop to break up the usual homeschooling routine and create an enjoyable leaning environment for kids of varying ages.

Creative problem solving is a life skill!

I am a big fan of gamification and preach to my clients that a well-designed game says more than 1000 words. Design Thinking is a creative problem solving technique and an agile practice. It is fun for adults and should be even more natural for kids since it involves drawing, making collages and telling stories. Being silly is also encouraged.

My daughter Antonia does not like writing. Well, that is not true. She likes imaginative stories but hates checking and changing at the end and getting criticized for her spelling mistakes. With my criticism about the mistakes she makes, which I considered below par, I had managed to completely demotivate her to the point where she was boycotting even holding a pen. Time for a fresh start with other kids around and using a fresh technique. No pressure to write a perfect story according to school standards but with the key metric “imagination”.

Design Thinking follows simple principles:

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

Empathize

This is the starting point for any agile practice and requires you to put yourself into the shoes of the customer. You take a real person and find out what she wants to achieve, what motivates her way of life. From my consulting experience with adults, I know that it is good to stay in this phase for a long time and do this thoroughly. Once you have fully connected with the customer, all the other steps are easy.

Define the problem

based on the intelligence gathered you choose a topic at headline level that you want to work on.

Ideate

Brainstorm until you find solutions and product ideas for the problem defined earlier.

Prototype

Very quickly, you sketch the beta-version of a product. The purpose is to check if it really works once transferred from the idea-level into the real world. The second reason for creating a prototype is that it allows you to show it to others, ideally your target audience and get feedback.

This is done in the following phase:

Test to learn

According to my experience, this is the hardest step. After all this creativity and crafting, which is uplifting and energy-consuming at the same time, it can be very sobering to show the result to outsiders. Creating a questionnaire to get awareness of the weaknesses of the current result. It is tough and at the same time reflects the Google mantra “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

We use techniques that trigger the brain to work in a rounded way. Usually, adults sit on a computer screen with just one finger at the mouse. This is all the sensual impulse they get. The situation of school kids is often not much better. With Design Thinking, we count in our surroundings, browse through magazines, cut, glue, draw, craft. Suddenly, we connect with parts of our decision making capabilities that are underutilized most of the time.

Make magic happen

This is the ultimate purpose: To create this WOW! This “What if?!” moment is just priceless. In order to get there, you must be totally free. No fear of being silly, no pressure to deliver feasible results immediately, which, chokes the free flow of ideas.

Playfulness, which is a key component of Design Thinking comes naturally to all healthy children and therefore I was curious to find out what happens when they work with this agile practice.

My first experiment was with three primary school kids, one of them being my daughter Antonia. Their task was to write a story filled with fantasy. First, they should define main characters and then describe them with as much detail as possible. What do they like to do? Who are their friends? How are they dressed? For inspiration, they could browse our house, magazines or their own mind.

It is a good idea to try out agile practices with your kids before doing them with your client 😉

Brigitte

Then they created the initial story lines by drawing on post-it stickers or cut out pictures from magazines. It was important that everything stayed flexible and the single elements could easily be moved or replaced.

When they had made up their mind about the problem and the solution of their stories they came up with titles. Next it was time to re-work the stories, maybe change the thread and add details. It was now time to present the stories to experts – which were the other kids. By re-telling they learned which parts were particularly funny, which lacked consistency (not that it actually mattered) and where their audience lost interest.

Stories miraculously started flowing

Equipped with this intelligence, they started writing their stories. This was the most amazing part because all stories miraculously flowed on the paper. All the content was already inside their inner selves ready to be released. My daughter had lost her anxiety and sentences just burst out of her.

This is the effect I also observe when doing Design Thinking workshops with grown-ups:

• First, for a long time not much seems to happen. All the action is happening in the inner realm but then everything materializes very quickly.
• The whole process is intense and when finished, everybody feels very tired.
• The results are filled with emotions.

To wrap it up, the kids presented their stories. Most of them were very weird, I have to admit. However, this is what you get when you ask them to go wild and overload the stories with fantasy, I believe.

However, they also needed guidance not to get lost in just playing but combining playfulness with target-orientation. The kids all had her individual struggles at some point, be it losing concentration, meeting anxieties or falling into unproductive patterns. I could have employed even more tools from my usual Design Thinking workshops from the corporate environment, like the Cover Story or templates for story boards but I was cautious not to spread the activity out too much and risk losing the children. I was not sure about the collective attention span but assumed three hours of intensive work might be the maximum.

The event was over a full morning. Amazingly, all children embraced the exercise with motivation and awe. They enjoyed the creative chaos when sitting in the middle of all the materials that were provided and the process overall. That evening, I received messages from the parents telling me that the kids wanted to do something like this again.

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