Ashley O'Callaghan
Social designer, researcher and storyteller
Overview
Learning Experience Design and Facilitation
June 2019 - August 2019
In response to the need to create modern organisations and desire to learn our ways of working. Futures Academy is an organisational change programme designed and tailored to individual organisations to create the conditions for running a 21st-century organisation.
Role
Working with another facilitator and a learning experience consultant we co-designed the course and materials which we iterated on throughout the programme.
We selected nine Essex employees from different departments and at varying levels of seniority. Then spent a day with them every week for 2 months covering the basics in design thinking such as problem definition, service mapping, user research, synthesising insights, prototyping and testing. They then had the week to come together as a team and experiment with these skills by deliver their own service design project. At the end of the course the cohort presented their prototypes and learnings to their colleagues.
Main activities
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Learning experience design
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Facilitating workshops in design thinking
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1:1 mentorship with the cohort students
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Engaging with senior stakeholders to feedback on the course progress and plan for future programmes
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Engage with the departments of the cohort to ensure that the students would be able to implement what they had learnt in the future
Outcome
The cohort learnt the value of cosistential identifying their design assumptions behind a potential solution and testing them as early as possible. They felt less afraid to present work that wasn't yet polished and encouraged their departments to do so. Some of the students ended up filling roles as user researchers while others champoined design thinking within their current roles.
Due to the success of the academy other programmes were set up in organisations such as HM Land Regsitrty
"We realised that instead of spending weeks polishing a first draft, it’s better to get out there with our rough and ready Blue Peter model and test it with users. If it works, then we finesse, if it doesn’t we think again."
- Student from the Essex cohort
Materials designed to help participants articulate the conditions they need for optimal learning
Training the cohort on how to identify and frame user needs
