First of all, what is your objective of arranging a company retreat?
To have fun with your team?
To finish a tradition?
To plan for the upcoming year?
If your answer is the last one, I suggest that you better not organizing your company retreat in one day.
Last week, I helped a company finish a 3-Days retreat (actually just 2-hours in a day and total spends 6 hours) to develop new ideas in the coming year. It is common to organize a company retreat for year planning and engage with your team—however, most of them doing it in one day or half-day to save time. One day, they stopped their work and joined together to brainstorm something new. It sounds cool, and it looks like a reunion of the whole company. You may meet some old friends or someone working in another team, and you guys are not free to have a chat. …
As always said, an Entrepreneur is a problem solver. They solve customer problems and provide values. It sounds easy. When you try to kick start your entrepreneur journey, you will find that it is difficult to find a problem to solve.
99% of startups fail, and one of the key reasons they fail is “There are no needs of their product/service.” They are not solving a problem.
Before solving a problem, you should find a problem first.
But how? Here are three angles you can start your problem discovery journey.
- Your Own Difficulies
- Your Family’s Difficulties
- Your Friend’s Difficulties
Clear? Right? It is simple. Just like a circle. Sarting from your own, then your family, finally your friends. …
“Let’s brainstorm something new!”
We always hear about this in a team meeting or when you are attending a Hackathon, and everyone is looking something “new.”
Then you started to discuss with others and think about what to do.
Maybe we can do this or do that. What is next? A person will say that “oh, it is difficult” “oh, I know someone is doing this already.” The atmosphere changed from hyper to low energy, and people felt tired about talking a lot and planned to restart the conversation next time.
Did you experience the same thing before?
If yes, this article will be useful for you to have the idea generation meeting next time. …
Because of COVID-19, many events changed to online. The same as mine. Initially, we planned to have a physical summit in Sep. In July, we decided to change it to a virtual setting, and that’s the start of this transformation journey, which is challenging. Some key numbers here:
- Total cost us about USD1000
- Engaged participants from 29 different countries
- Workforce? One person band
I want to share how we achieve it in this story.
Be prepared for a Growth Mindset.
First of all, and most importantly, it is a growth mindset. In a limited budget and timeline, everyone will tell you to cancel the event or wait until we can do the physical event again. Even your boss will say, “simply doing a webinar is fine. Management will understand”. However, I believe that we are not just working on finishing something. There should be a WHY. …
As an educator and design thinking practitioner, we always talk and emphasize the importance of Empathy. However, do everyone knows what empathy is. I want to kickstart the discussion with these scenarios.
Did you experience the following situation before?
“I am really hungry. Are you? What you wanna eat?” “NOOO, I just finished my lunch, I am full”
“Can you turn off the aircon? the office is too cold!” “NOOO, I just finished exercise outside, still sweating!”
“OMG! I’m in the period, why you don’t know how painful I am?!” …
The first time I come across the concept of Creative Confidence is when I am learning about design thinking and read the book “Creative Confidence, Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All By Tom Kelley, David Kelley”. It is a fantastic concept, and I focus on my design thinking program as well. Creative confidence brings us: sense to accept failure and to call the hidden message in our brain.
What is Creative Confidence?
In the wordings, it is the confidence of creativity. Generally, we think that creativity is a gift. The artist is creative, and as a normal human being, we are not. We may believe it is also a kind of skill. …
What is Lean Design Thinking (LDT) Tool?
Developed by ImpactX (https://www.impactxhk.com/), it is a tool to maximize human value. Its focus on two aspects:
1. User Involvement, 2. Fast Prototyping.
How to start your first LDT workshop?
We developed the LDT Canva for everyone to use.
It is a tool for you to follow the LDT process step by step. The LDT process is similar to design thinking, but it put more pressure on the assumption part. Therefore, the process is: Inspiration > Ideation > Assumption > Implementation.
It is a circular process. So you will keep repeating it step by step.
As a design thinking practitioner and trainer, I believe in the power of design thinking, which is a really innovative mindset to solve problems. However, human constraint makes it cannot function well for beginner.
By putting more and more time into the project, the belief in success will be increased as well. It’s because we don’t want to walk through the process again and again. Even we know that the powerful point of design thinking is reviewing different points, we will choose to believe that we are on the right track, especially for the Asian. In Asia culture, we are not really open-minded. …
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