Enterprise Design Thinking University
A relationship between IBM’s design organization and IBM’s consulting business led to an immensely popular and successful eLearning course. Though this course was developed with limited resources and an abbreviated time frame, it set a new precedent for how user-centered principles could be taught, and changed the way IBM would approach Learning and Development programs across all its domains.
“The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power.”
- Stuart Brand
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IBM Design had gained national attention for a design transformation that was primarily focused within its software group. Yet the consulting practices within IBM had seen how powerful Design Thinking Workshops were, and needed to scale those practices far more quickly than IBM’s award winning, but labor intensive, training, would allow.
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Our research had shown that the foundational behaviors of Design Thinking, like user research and early prototyping, were far more important to an organization's success than workshops activities. Yet practitioners (and senior stakeholder funding the project) often conflated the two. How could we resolve this tension?
Design thinking is generally taught in the workshops because the concepts and techniques are thought to be too hard to teach otherwise. An eLearning course could raise awareness of design thinking, for sure, but how much further could we go?
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Design thinking is taught in workshops because they provide active, contextual, and hands-on learning. In short, workshops are fun and effective. But while the workshop experience may be ideal, there is no fundamental reason why we couldn’t create a fun and effective eLearning course. Our big idea was that if we couldn’t bring the learner to a workshop, we would bring the workshop to the learner, and what we lost in immersive engagement, we would more than make up for by leveraging the power of innovative eLearning techniques. Our solution was wildly successful and went on to become the model for multiple enablement platforms at IBM
Our learning objectives required us to take learners well past awareness and well into exploration and practice competency. We knew that describing the practices through polished videos, or otherwise demonstrating the skills would not be enough. We needed to provide cognitive friction. We determined that learners had to be immersed into the world of a design thinking team and challenged to participate.
But, given the common misconception of design thinking, which conflates workshop activities with the broader and more essential underlying principles, the eLearning format could give us a opportunity to deploy a concept-based model that would allow us to reinforce the principles behind the traditional workshop activities. A strategy and design for the course had emerged, that would turn the challenge of teaching design thinking digitally, into a bold opportunity.
The course moved from an awareness level introduction, to an immersion program that translates this newly learned knowledge into the key practices, and the keys to performing them.
Learners are challenged through teach and recall interactions that challenges them to test their understanding through knowledge checks.
The self-assessment is a branching scenario developed using the Articulate Storyline product, and takes into account a real case study where learners are assessed on various principles, keys, and artifacts.
We paired this solid virtual course with powerful just-in-time resources that makes exploration and practice easy and engaging.
This program was immediately successful, with over 60,000 learners completing it in the first year. By successfully creating a foundational learning experience, the design thinking learning path was accelerated across the board, fueling a 10x improvement in business results attributed to design thinking in the services divisions.
This was IBM’s most successful eLearning course and digital credential. And it was immediately expanded into an IBM-wide and externally available Design Thinking University
We broke the curriculum into finer chunks to help with retention, and to make the material more referable as a job aid. Here I am speaking about Milestone Playbacks.
We further supplemented these paths with with community-based peer to peer learning, just-in-time learning materials, and refined, self-paced learning concepts.
These advancements allowed us to move from solving the consulting-specific skills gap that we were originally challenged with to solving education challenges around…
-Enterprise Design Transformation
-AI Innovation and Ethics
-Agile and Design Thinking Integration
Impact
This course was immediately successful, with over 60,000 learners completing it in the first year and 10x improvement in business results attributed to design thinking in the services divisions.
Based on the success of this course, IBM immediately invested in a design thinking eLearning platform and digital credentialing system, allowing it to tackle learning opportunities throughout IBM, and its clients.
The university was so popular we created subscription-based, premium content, and began to create white-label instances for our key clients and partners.
60k
600k+
Total badges by 2023
Learners it in the first year
10x
improvement in business results