Blend Fearless Innovation with Design Thinking to Create Learning with Impact

What’s the best way to create a learning experience that truly engages participants, generates real behavior change, and makes a difference in people’s lives?

At the upcoming Blanchard Leadership Summit, I'll be answering this pivotal question by demonstrating the power of design thinking techniques. If you work in the leadership development industry, you know the challenge of creating effective curriculums. Traditional approaches can be less than successful, leaving instructional designers to construct solutions that are merely passable.

The Traditional Approach: Falling Short

Typically, instructional designers receive a request to build a course, create a solution, and pilot it a few times. Along the way, they discover flaws in the design. While they may make adjustments, they rarely address core issues such as learner engagement or tangible impact. The result is often good enough, but not truly transformative. The critical questions remain: How much of the design sticks with learners? What behavioral changes do they demonstrate?

Bridging the Gap with Design Thinking

Design thinking offers a progressive approach to these challenges. It's especially effective for creating solutions that resonate with learners and drive real change. Our design studio team leverages design thinking to build tailored and customized leadership development programs that meet our clients' unique needs.

The Design Thinking Process

The process begins by empathizing with learners—understanding their needs, desires, and struggles. We ask crucial questions: What do we want these leaders to say, do, think, and feel because of the program? What pain points are they facing? What do they truly want at this point in their career? By empathizing with people, we develop programs that speak to their intrinsic motivations and make a lasting impact. This often includes creating personas that help us understand our audience and their goals, needs, and desires—which, in turn, allows us to focus on a point of view that meets these goals, rather than a broad-brush solution that is too content-centered.

The next step is defining the solution. This involves creating a relevant, targeted point of view that clearly identifies the audience and desired outcomes. It’s about honing the solution to meet learners’ needs rather than overloading them with content. This focused approach ensures that the training is both impactful and memorable.

Blanchard’s Unique Approach: Fearless Innovation™

At Blanchard, we blend design thinking with our Fearless Innovation™ model to empower everyone to become an innovator. While design thinking involves five phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test—Fearless Innovation follows a similar but unique process: Scan, Ideate, Experiment, and Launch.

Similarities:

• Empathize/Scan: Both models start with understanding user needs. Empathize focuses on learner needs, while Scan combines Empathize and Define to understand challenges.

• Ideate: Both models generate creative solutions.

• Prototype/Experiment: Testing solutions is critical in both processes.

• Test/Launch: These include finalizing and implementing the solutions.

Differences:

• Fearless Innovation emphasizes an innovation mindset with three key attitudes: Grace, Curiosity, and Proactivity.

• It combines Empathize and Define into a single Scan phase, which streamlines the process.

• It allows for greater flexibility and adaptability, which supports a global framework and various personas.

By integrating these methodologies, Blanchard creates leadership programs that are not only innovative and effective, but also adaptable and relevant to diverse organizational needs. 

The Future of Design

Design thinking has been around for several years but is now gaining significant traction. L&D professionals are increasingly using persona development, human-centric design, and generative AI. But remember—despite these advancements, your focus must remain on your audience’s real needs. There’s still a place for off-the-shelf solutions to common issues such as coaching, building trust, and delegation.

When coupled with Fearless Innovation, design thinking creates a model far greater than the sum of its parts. This results in training that truly excites and transforms learners.

Join us at the Blanchard Leadership Summit to discover how this powerful combination can transform your leadership development strategies!

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Editor’s Note:  Would you like to get a sneak peek at Britney Cole’s presentation at the year’s Blanchard Leadership Summit?  Join us for a free webinar on July 24.  Britney will be sharing key points from her upcoming session along with three other presenters from Blanchard’s Innovation Lab.  Learn more here.