Service Archives - Agile Parenting

Future Founders Lab 19.-21.11.2024 an den Nymphenburger Schulen

Brigitte Neumann — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 16:12:11 +0000

Future Founders Lab 19.-21.11.2024 an den Nymphenburger Schulen

Was brauchen Menschen, um sich als Teil einer Community zu fühlen und sich einzubringen?
Welche Services würden Familien helfen, um stressfrei durch den Alltag zu kommen?
Warum gibt es eigentlich vor der Schule jeden Tag automobiles Bring- und Hol-Chaos?
Wie kommen Schüler in Zukunft an gute Praktika? Würde ein Alumni-Verein helfen und wie könnte man das organisieren?

Große Herausforderungen sind Startpunkt legendärer Geschäftsideen! Und deshalb veranstalten die Nymphenburger Schulen mit uns ein Future Founders Lab zum Thema

COMMUNITY INFLUENCERS

Das ist für uns sehr aufregend, weil unsere Töchter Antonia und Sophie an diese Schule gehen. Wir freuen uns sehr, auf diese Weise selbst Community Influencers zu sein, Schule aktiv mitzugestalten und voneinander zu lernen.

“Die Formel für den Erfolg ist einfach. Beginnen Sie etwas in dem Bereich, in dem Sie wirklich gut sind, stellen Sie Ihre Gewissheiten in Frage, reparieren Sie, was nicht funktioniert, und passen Sie alles an die Realität an.”
Elon Musk

Für wen ist das Future Founders Lab?

Eingeladen sind alle Schülerinnen und Schüler, egal ob Unterstufe, Realschule oder Abiturient. Elterngruppen und Lehrer, die gemeinsam einer Projektidee auf den Grund gehen wollen, sind ebenfalls herzlich willkommen. Um teilzunehmen muss man nicht im Vorfeld schon eine konkrete Idee haben.

Wir freuen uns über kompletten Größenwahn genauso wie über pragmatische Ideen für kleine, lokale Initiativen. Allen machen wir dieses Versprechen:

Ihr habt zwei Tage lang Zeit und Raum, um aus eurem Team geniale Ideen rauszukitzeln und zu staunen, wieviel Kreativität und Talent in euch steckt.
Ihr werdet Projektmanagement, Gamestorming und Design Thinking kennenlernen, wichtige Tools und hilfreiche Projekt Hacks ausprobieren und euch in ganz neue Gefilde vorwagen, die später im Berufsalltag gefragt sind.
Startup Magic ist ein wirklich starkes Erlebnis und unternehmerisches Denken und Agieren eine große Kraft.

Klingt super. Wie melde ich mich an?

Interessenten gehen bitte in der Schule auf Frau Kahle zu oder schreiben an die Moderatorinnen Brigitte und Wang Man unter info@agileparenting.net.

Ich bin Günder, Unternehmerin, Investor, engagiere mich bei einer Community Initative und möchte das Future Founders Lab gerne unterstützen.

Perfekt! Hier brauchen wir deine Expertise:

Als Coach für eine oder zwei Stunden am Buß- und Bettag oder am 21.11.
Als Pitch Doctor, der den Teams dabei hilft aus den 7 Minuten, die sie für ihren Pitch haben alles rauszuholen.
Als Helfer mit deinem ganz spezifischen Talent. Du bringst einen Kuchen vorbei oder einen Kasten Getränke? Du hast Lust bei der Logistik der Pitch Night zu unterstützen? Du kannst Plakate gestalten? Es gibt eigentlich nichts, was wir nicht brauchen können.

Melde dich bei Frau Kahle über das Elterportal oder bei Wang Man und Brigitte über info@agileparenting.net

Die erste Unterstützer*innen haben wir schon!

Astrid Heine

kreative Denkerin &
lösungsorientierte Macherin

mehr zu Astrid Heine

What If You Ran Your Family the Way You Run Your Best Projects?

Brigitte Neumann — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 21:00:16 +0000

So, what actually happens in an Agile Parenting Workshop?

It starts with a little theory — our ideas, our experiences, the tools and methods that have made a difference. Then it opens up: experiments, discussions, and room to figure out what might actually work for your family.

By the end, every participant should feel ready to start their own agile parenting practice. No obligation — but the option, clearly within reach.

Most families wish for more sanity 😉

“It [mental wellbeing] is more than just going to yoga classes or meditating – it is about understanding our roles, negotiating boundaries, communicating needs with confidence, our sense of leadership, and emotional awareness – and it takes work and yes, some pain. But trust me, with pain comes resilience. The pain is worth it.”

Quote from Enoch Li, our friend, mental health care pioneer and founder of Bearapy

Discussion at a workshop for international women in tech that we facilitated in Beijing

How do we do it?

A large family with young children and a minimalist lifestyle has entirely different needs than a solo mum with a demanding career and a teenage daughter. One might be looking for a fairer way to split the household chores. The other wants to cut energy drainers and protect the time that matters.

Both leave with something useful.

We introduce SCRUM and other agile methods — then step back and let participants shape them to fit their own reality. We’re there to guide, not prescribe.

Below is the outline from a workshop Wang Man ran with her daughter Sophie. Together, they introduced the Challenge Board — an agile tool they’d already used in their own home to get a handle on the habits neither of them was proud of.

Agile-Parenting-Workshop_Challenge Board Download

How does it work?

Companies invite us when they want to do something genuinely useful for their people — not another wellbeing initiative that gathers dust, but a session that sends parents home with tools they’ll actually use.

We also love showing up as part of larger events: agile communities, female leadership forums, innovation gatherings. Give us a slot and we’ll make it count.

The format works best for parents in high-performing environments — mothers and fathers who bring the same drive to family life that they bring to work, and want the methods to match.

What we need from you: 20 to 30 open-minded participants, a room with enough wall space for flip chart papers, and decent coffee. We bring everything else.

The post What If You Ran Your Family the Way You Run Your Best Projects? appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Experience Startup Magic with a Design Thinking Hackathon

Brigitte Neumann — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 19:05:01 +0000

What is a hackathon and what is Design Thinking?

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:

5 steps of the Design Thinking Method

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?

People: 30 to 40 participants works well — curious, open-minded, and happy to have their assumptions challenged for a weekend.
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.
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.
Food: Nutritious, tasty meals and snacks. Sustained thinking needs sustained fuel.
Optional: Branded give-aways to mark the occasion.
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.

T_Incubate: The Incubator for Startup Ideas from Teens and Twentysomethings

Brigitte Neumann — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 19:37:55 +0000

What is T_Incubate?

T_Incubate is a startup incubator for teens and twentysomethings — built for the moment the magic wears off.

Hackathons and Startup Weekends are electric. The room hums with adrenaline, with “what if,” with the genuine conviction that anything is possible. And in that environment, teams produce things they never thought they were capable of.

Then Monday arrives.

Getting from a pitch headline to a functioning MVP is hard work — and most teams don’t make it. Here’s why:

Working relationships are everything. Interpersonal skills make or break a business before the product ever does.
Daily life moves fast. Chores, obligations, distracting habits — they creep in quietly, and suddenly the idea that felt urgent on Sunday night has nowhere to go.
Teams hit a wall. They lack the skills, the tools, or the access to resources needed to build even a basic model of what they have in mind.

Charlotte Martins, the organiser of the first Startup Weekend I ever attended — Zero Waste, Shanghai, a few years back — put it well:

The team is more important than the idea. Sometimes you have a compelling concept but the leader loses the people. And without them, there is no success.
Charlotte Martins

How do we do it?

Hone social skills

Conflict management, communication, and group decision-making aren’t soft skills — they’re the foundation. Without them, even the most talented, diverse team falls apart before the idea gets a chance. And yet people were not born with them. Schools don’t cover them. They’re just expected.

That’s where we come in. We teach the basics, then stay close — coaching for steady, ongoing growth rather than a one-off workshop and a wave goodbye.

Adapt project management

When motivation dips — and it will — structure is what keeps a team moving. A high-level project plan, regular check-ins, clear deliverables, shared agreements. As loose or as rigorous as the team needs it to be.

There is no one-size-fits-all in project management. But there are best practices worth knowing — and we make sure every team does.

The agile toolbox has everything a team could need

Like most things that actually matter, nobody teaches this in school. But a real project — one with some stretch to it — is the perfect place to learn. The tools stick when the stakes are real.

Connect with our network

It takes a village to raise a startup. Most young founders simply don’t have that village yet — the network of people and organisations willing to help, quickly and without red tape, for free or close to it. We do. And we’re happy to make the introductions.

How does it work?

A typical T_Incubate project runs three months — from pitched idea to a fully functional MVP or model, presented to judges and supporters.

How teams get there is up to them. Daily standups or weekly syncs. In-person or digital. Self-organised, by design. What every team gets, regardless of how they work, is input, guidance, and practical help when it matters.

Here’s where our team typically steps in:

Interested? Let’s talk. We’d love to build a framework that gives young innovators the stability and structure to actually see their ideas through.

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

The post T_Incubate: The Incubator for Startup Ideas from Teens and Twentysomethings appeared first on Agile Parenting.

This Is Agile Parenting: Apply Best Practices From Work And Observe Positive Impact At Home

Brigitte Neumann — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 11:26:24 +0000

Agile parenting is not a religion or something with strict rules and do-s and don’t-s. In fact agile as practiced in the field of IT development or the corporate world itself, has a lof of variety, from rigid daily SCRUM stand-up meetings to creative be-silly design thinking sessions. It is very personal and we always advise our clients to define their purpose of agile and then pick the tools and methods accordingly. Not the other way round.

„Agile Parenting“ is based on the principles of agile project management. It plays with its tools, methods and the radically customer-centric and purpose-driven mindset. When we started it, Agile helped us to get a grip on this challenge: How do we help our kids to enter the world?

The original Manifesto for Agile Software Development was drafted by American IT experts in 2002, as a consequence of industry frustration.

They had experienced too often, that the created software did not meet the requirements that had been defined at the beginning of the project due to

too little involvement of the future users,
command-and-control communication instead of open discussion and a
lack of sincere search for the best solution.

The alternative they were looking for was pure value creation, which meant to them: Sustainable results in short lead time, high morale, safety, quality, customer delight.

Parents also feel frustrated.

1.      Families feel stressed due to high workload, social obligations and financial pressure. Maybe more importantly, they feel trapped in routines and social norms which they follow – while being aware that often they do not benefit them.(http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-captures-urban-chinas-unhappiness

Formal schooling is facing a massive crisis on a global scale. Children just do not learn skills for the 21^st century. They are not prepared for the professions we do not know yet but will be the economic drivers in the future. Most schools do not teach healthy learning habits. They do not foster curiosity. Instead of increasing resilience and solution-orientation, schools make children feel bored and fearful.
Family life is not how we expected it to be. Too often it is not a save space for everyone, filled with love and laughter, where we can re-charge and relax from our busy lives. Instead, there is conflict, fatigue and un-met needs. More and more parents and children suffer from anxieties and need treatment.

The Agile Manifesto claims that the items on the right are important but the items on the left are crucial.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

https://agilemanifesto.org/

“Responding to change over following a plan” is most likely natural for all families. Who has not experienced packing bags for a highly anticipated weekend getaway and the night before the kindergarten kids starts vomiting? However, the idea behind this item is even bigger. It encourages us to venture forward with as few items as possible on our bucket list and just look where the journey takes us. It encourages us to work with what we have. My child is a gifted artist but I envisioned a career as a lawyer for her. What is better? Item from the left or from the right?

This requires a lot of solution-driven, regular, structured communication. Agile project management has developed a bag of tools to institutionalize this, e.g. KANBAN boards, product backlog, review and retrospective. All of them can be used effectively by agile families.

The manifesto is further explained by the 12 agile principles. Not all are fully relevant in the family context. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html. These are the ideas we find important:

Self-organization is covered by various principles. In the corporate world as in the family realm, it requires a lot of personal growth by parents and coaching for kids until it really works. When your primary school kid insists on packing her school bag herself and then forgets her snack box, she will be hungry that day or ask her friends to share their snack with them. When your middle-school kid resists studying for a test, parents do not force him, and he gets a bad mark in the end, this will teach him a lesson. Either he embraces the assistance parents are willing to give him or he studies better by himself the next time.

Empowering your children is very important according to Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson They gives tons of scientific evidence why in their book The Self-Driven Child. Kids need to be allowed to fail on their own terms. This is the prerequisite for the deep knowledge that they have control over themselves. This experience actually builds up the frontal cortex in the brain.

Translated into the domain of family life “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” means that what we do needs to serve us as human beings. Some social norms like dressing nicely or keeping proper hygiene can give useful guidance on how to prosper socially and physically. Other unwritten rules, like which clothing brands you have to wear or when it is time for a child to stop playing with their cuddly toys can add pressure or even damage an individual.

Bruce Feller Adapt gives a good example in his TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_feiler_agile_programming_for_your_family?language=ry

Family dinner is a good idea but might be overrated and actually not fit the family situation. Instead of forcing this ritual, it can be better to re-frame it and define the target to spend 10 minutes of meaningful time together every day. This can be any time, not limited to dinner. According to Feller, happy families have an above average ability to adapt.

Furthermore, this item reminds us that it is not possible to draw lines with a ruler when it comes to human beings who are continuously changing. Organizing daily tasks with a KANBAN board might work well for a while and suddenly does not do the trick any more. Instead of forcing the daily standup on everyone it is better to find out how to adjust – or replace – this procedure.

As parents, we often look for proofs that we are doing the right thing. “Working software over comprehensive documentation” can serve as a reminder to focus on the actual outcome. For instance, this can mean that it is more important that my child enjoys playing the piano than winning piano competitions. Another example is not to measure learning success of a child by the hours she studied or the number of pages he read in a book but simply by assessing how much they truly learned and understood.

The idea “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” can be the most radical when applied to family life. The way we live it, it means that we communicate a lot, align expectations and needs of all family members and each member takes responsibility for everyone else. This is the contrary of order-and-control, which is often found in corporate and in family life where one person or group sets the rules and everyone else has to follow, receives and completes tasks. Don’t get us wrong: A top-down leadership style is not necessarily a bad thing and it can be vital in times of crises.

Agile emphasizes teamwork. One of its values is to give power for decisions to those who know best. Most of the time these are not the superiors or line managers but the individuals who execute the task on a daily basis. This challenges the “old normal” of hierarchies. In the context of agile parenting, this means that parents need to learn to trust that children can and should make important decisions for themselves. Children make decisions, the whole family gives constant feedback. For small kids this may mean that they may pick the clothes they want to wear even if this does not exactly reflect the color-coding you had in your mind for the dinner in that fancy restaurant. If children do not practice taking small decisions how can we expect them to take educated big decisions when they are teenagers or grown-ups?

Most importantly, fluid collaboration requires that team members work together daily. It is a reminder to have quality conversations every day beyond “how was your day?” Instead, they can cook and clean together, craft, draw or plan the next holiday together (link zu agile holiday). At home and at work the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Simplicity. The art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential: eliminate waste, build quality in. For families this can mean the adoption of minimalism: Why drive your child to school when she can take a bus? Why travelling overseas as appropriate for people of our status when everyone in our family would have more fun by just renting a cottage in the mountains? Why searching for your keys every morning instead of having the routine of putting keys at the same spot every time you enter your home? Why buying an extra wardrobe for all those clothes instead of sticking to a capsule wardrobe where you can mix and match everything and need much less?

The 12 Agile Principles do not explicitly cover our love for Experiment J. This is hidden within principle 1 and 3. Agile projects in the corporate world aim at producing an MVP, a minimum viable product as soon as possible. They start with a workable solution and only later add features as they learn about their customers’ additional needs and desires. The basic truth behind this: It is better to benefit from an 80% solution quickly – and then take it from there – than never reach the perfect 120% solution.

Experiment with fluids; make our own bath bombs and observe the reaction of acid and base in warm water; the way my daughter displays data

Most importantly, the Agile Principles emphasize Excellence and Sustainability. In the corporate world agile often is a pretext for sloppiness and lack of focus and planning. This is a crass misunderstanding. The product idea of a happy family where everyone can develop according to their talents and aspirations is a massive goal that does not allow half-heartedness.

If you are practicing agile parenting, please let us know why you do it and how. We are always thrilled to learn more. There is so much inspiration out there!

The post This Is Agile Parenting: Apply Best Practices From Work And Observe Positive Impact At Home appeared first on Agile Parenting.

What Does a Mum Need? This Is What Happens When Daughters Empathize

Brigitte Neumann — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 09:45:52 +0000

On a Sunday in August 2020, Wang Man and Brigitte facilitated a Design Thinking Bootcamp for the marvellous Ladies Who Tech in Beijing. The audience was predominantly women, invited to bring their children along. While the adults worked in one room, a separate session ran for the kids — four girls, guided by their colleague Gao An, exploring the theme of “Happy Family.”

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.

Picture brainstorming in action. Apparently, mums live a life of considerable glamour — or so the girls believed.

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.

Design Thinking When Making Fashion: Bringing The Method Back To Its Roots

Brigitte Neumann — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 09:40:32 +0000

The name says it all — and yet it’s easy to forget. Design Thinking didn’t start in boardrooms as a cure for PowerPoint fatigue. It is, at its core, the natural process behind any act of artistic creation: a loosely defined goal, a spirit of play, the occasional frustrating dead end, iteration, and total immersion in the work.

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.

Design Thinking with Kids: What Happens When You Give Structure to Playfulness

Brigitte Neumann — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 15:47:47 +0000

In March 2020, as things turned grim in China, many of us in the same circle made a quiet decision: look after each other. Meet regularly. Tend to minds and bodies together and find a way through.

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.

This is what a Design Thinking agenda looks like when I do it as a workshop for adults

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.

A girl filling in the Empathy Map template at a Design Thinking workshop for Ladies Who Tech. The task was to empathize with their mothers.

Kids discussing the content that should go into the Empathy Map

Define the problem

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

Photo brainstorming result by a group of kids to define the needs of a mother

Ideate

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

Ideation with the help of the Cover Story template

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.

Participants create a tangible product experience

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.”

Kids trying to improve their prototype

Tell your story

or a pitch wraps up the whole process.

Presentation of the results of the day

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.

source: NEA MACHINA; Die Kreativmaschine, Martin Poschauko, Thomas Poschauko

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.

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