Coaches and Chapters
While education and awareness programs were providing new skills to tens of thousands of IBMers, a small band of expert design thinking facilitators were making an outsized impact on IBM’s services business. IBM needed more of these master facilitators. In order to provide a supported learning path that could develop beginners into experts in a reasonable amount of time, we were going to have to make a breakthrough in teaching notoriously slow developing skills, fast.
“I want a way to know who I can push out of an airplane. Can you design me a Facilitator's badge?”
- Senior Partner (Former para-trooper)
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Recognizing the success of design thinking within IBM’s software group, IBM’s consulting divisions were eager to train their own teams. Their executives understood that adopting user-centered practices could improve all aspects of their business, but what they were most excited about was the Enterprise Design Thinking Workshop experience, and how it could transform their client relationships from targeted sales plays into strategic partnerships. They had developed their own program to develop facilitators, but after a year it had only graduate 100 people, and even those were under-prepared.
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Design thinking workshop facilitation requires high levels of emotional intelligence, communication, self-awareness, and empathy. These “slow skills” are notoriously difficult to train and develop.
Workshop facilitation, during a sales play with a client is a high-stakes skill. How can we provide extensive training and practice under the guidance of experienced mentors or trainers?
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We would develop local communities of practice, called Design Thinking Chapters, across all the IBM locations, and use them to teach, share, and validate.
We will get IBMers to teach each other.
This was our big idea, and as audacious as it was, it only took a few weeks and two designers to prove it was viable. With that POC in our back pocket, we were able to develop a learning path that met IBM Consulting’s need for expert workshop facilitators, as well as greater IBM’s need for versatile Design Thinking Coaches.
The one-year evaluation of IBM’s Facilitation course had reinforced what we already knew; Any conventional learning path that strove to develop mastery was going to be slow, passive and, for all of that, expensive.
Client-facing facilitation was high-risk, and based on slow-developing skills like communication, and empathy. Any two-or-three day course was bound to fail:
We looked at programs that had succeeded in developing mastery, drawing inspiration from historical apprentice models, Army Combatives Programs, and Crossfit.
We noticed that design thinking learners were intrinsically as well as extrinsically motivated. They were having great experiences learning design thinking, craved recognition, and wanted to be a bigger part of IBM’s design transformation. With this in mind we were confident that peer-to-peer community education could allow us to scale what would otherwise be a prohibitively costly learning program.
Needing to test our hypothesis, we immediately started the Chapter Program. In under a week we had over six expert design thinking practitioners volunteering to lead communities of practice. In under a month we had founded a dozen chapters, were hosting monthly global community calls, and had published a backlog of lunch-and-learn style education modules they could deliver for motivated learners in their local community.
But most importantly, for this story at least, we had the missing piece for developing Design Thinking Coaches. We had created resources who could find learner’s opportunities to practice facilitation safely with internal teams, or as a co-facilitator of a client workshop. These chapters would also perform the bulk of our learning assessment and validation activities.
We provided supporting materials for all phases of the learners’ journey; Printed handbooks outlining personal growth goals, a directory that connected learners with local community chapter. and digital tools to help design workshop agendas.
We still had a ton of work to do. We had to research and define the skills gaps, create a blended learning path that combined rich instructor-led classes with just-in-time support, and establish rigor around evaluating and certifying practitioners who had reached the necessary levels to perform in a high-stakes sales environment.
Impact
In the first year we grew the Design Thinking Chapter program to over 60 chapters.
Design Thinking Facilitators influenced 900 million dollars in Services sales, which was a 10x improvement over the prior year.
We now have over 80 chapters, who are an integral part of multiple distinct learning paths at IBM, and have now validated and issued tens of thousands of Enterprise Design Thinking Credentials.
Moreover, by placing trust in our community instead of relying solely on a panel of experts, the rigor and care around issuing of Enterprise Design Thinking badges continues to grow.
$600m
80+
in services sales
Global Chapters
