Common Pain Points

Enhancing creative problem-solving skills

Tackling complex business challenges

Fostering collaboration across diverse teams

Goals & Highlights

Innovative Problem-Solving

Learn to leverage research, ideation, and prototyping to address even the toughest business challenges.

Collaborative Learning

Engage with industry peers to explore creative approaches to problem-solving.

Human-Centered Design

Embrace a human-centered mindset to understand and address the needs of users effectively.

Academic Perspectives

Gain insights from multiple disciplines including design theory, organizational behavior, and social psychology.

What to expect

  • Introduction to Design Thinking

    Understand the core principles and stages of design thinking.

  • Research & Empathy

    Learn techniques for gathering insights from your users/customers and empathizing with them.

  • Ideation & Brainstorming

    Generate creative solutions through collaborative ideation sessions.

  • Experimenting & Testing

    Develop experiments and test them to refine your ideas.

  • Real-World Application

    Apply design thinking to real-world business scenarios.

  • Presentation Skills

    Learn how to pitch your ideas so that others will believe in your vision.

Outcomes

Enhanced Problem-Solving Skills

Develop the ability to tackle complex challenges creatively.

Improved Collaboration

Foster a culture of collaboration and innovation within your team.

Human-Centered Mindset

Gain a deep understanding of user needs and how to address them effectively.

Practical Tools & Techniques

Acquire practical tools and techniques to implement design thinking in your organization.
Case Study:Make a brand new innovation team vibe across all the disciplines without once saying the only word more triggering than Voldemort: team-building.

Tyson Food

Team building

Context

On paper, the innovation team was bullet-proof. Brilliant, accomplished, capable.

But every individual was coming from a different established team within Tyson Food. Without any familiarity or a single shared inside joke, how were these professionals (some extroverted, some contemplative, many from an R&D background wanting to know “the right answer”) supposed to think critically and effectively as one brain trust?

Approach

Get people to talk about non-work things in order to build a foundation of shared experience. Sample methodologies:

  • The Two Headed Artist

    Two people partner up, sitting before a single sheet of paper. Each person has a colored marker and is only allowed to draw one line at a time, alternating back and forth without speaking. A room of high-achievers quickly erupts into giggling participants squeaking their markers. The teams then present their drawings like priceless pieces out of MOMA.

  • “I’m Someone Who _______”

    This fill-in-the-blank exercise is an introspective show-and-tell that gets tearful surprisingly quickly when a co-worker says, “I’m somehow who wishes they were still living at home.” The lack of pretense in the room invites people to be vulnerable.

Outcomes

Tyson Labs was recognized for their innovative work on food waste, releasing their first product, Yappah!

  • Improv Effect has continued to work with Tyson Labs (and the company at large), helping to facilitate team growth from Project Manager to Senior Leadership roles.
  • The former Head of Innovation, Rizal Hamadallah, was recruited to Ocean Spray and promoted to Chief Innovation Officer. He again hired The Improv Effect to develop similar programs for the innovation group as well as the C-Suite.
  • The Improv Effect’s empathy training became embedded in Ocean Spray’s cultural norms and required training.
  • Once again, Hamadallah hired The Improv Effect at Clif as he transitioned into the role of Chief Innovation Officer. At both Ocean Spray and Clif, we partnered to restructure the entire organization and impact major cultural change to ensure innovation was not happening in a bubble, but across the entire organization.