New Course Release! Introduction to Design Thinking

Governments are increasingly faced with changes across policy, senior management, mandates from political perspective, budgets, and performance improvements – while handling crises management and internal issues. These challenges are complex.

At Spring2, we’ve spent A LOT of time working with governments to help them incorporate design thinking, service design, and change management into projects of all sizes, teams, and across departments. Because of our unique perspective, we created the Spring2 Methodology for Design Thinking – all our government-focused courses are grounded in our methodology, ensuring our learners are truly gaining knowledge directly applicable (and relevant) to their work.

Learn the five phases of design thinking – on your schedule!

Design thinking provides the tools to turn many of the challenges governments face into opportunities while increasing innovation, building resilience, and creating efficiencies. We know this – because we experience it daily, whether working with our consulting clients or hearing from past training participants.

Our NEW course, Introduction to Design Thinking, is broken out into easily digestible modules that include twenty-four (YES – 24! So much content!) instructional videos, downloadable reference material, examples of how design thinking can be applied in government, and activities. This course will introduce you to the five phases of design thinking and help you feel confident using a systematic design approach to creative problem-solving at work.

Modules:

Intro to Design Thinking
Step 1: Empathize
Step 2: Define
Step 3: Ideate
Step 4: Prototype
Step 5: Test

Registration includes 3-month access to your course dashboard, all twenty-four videos, all bonus videos added during your 3-months of access, all reference materials, and downloadables.

Here’s a sneak peek of one of the videos:

Ok – but HOW does design thinking help government employees?

Design thinking gives public servants the tools to be more user-centered while also identifying the real challenges to be solved and helping teams connect with each other, end-users, and senior management to ideate on possible solutions, create low-fidelity (resource effective) prototypes, experiment with solutions, and ultimately deliver on outcomes that have greater impact.

The Spring2 Methodology for Design Thinking incorporates additional time at the start of the design thinking process to really empathize with end-users and ensure the challenges being solved and the opportunities identified are the right ones. This improves both project efficiencies and outcomes.

Design thinking also gives people the tools to more effectively brainstorm, empathize, increase resilience, improve effectiveness, AND innovate in highly complex environments prone to change.

Even if departments outsource their design thinking work to outside contractors – it’s still critical to understand the language and concepts to ensure alignment with the contractors and ask the right questions.

But, don’t just take our word for it!

“I was introduced to Design Thinking by some former co-workers who had recent experience in the field, both of whom claimed the concept was right up my alley. That conversation opened up a whole new world to me and, after getting a green light from my manager, I began to explore the options available for certification. I went with Spring2Innovation on the recommendation of a friend who had had dealings with its founder, Nilufer Erdebil, and felt sure I would gel with her style. She was right.” –Fred Marais, Government of Canada

Want to learn more about how design thinking helps government?

Check out our case studies:

Read our Whitepaper Mitigate Risk in Your Next Project Using Design Thinking or check out our recent webinar Procurement Modernization: Embracing Agile & Design Thinking.