Design Thinkers Academy - Amsterdam

I recently attended a fantastic service design & design thinking training course with the Design Thinkers Academy in Amsterdam.

The course was absolutely brilliant: very carefully thought out and planned, carefully selected content, and incredibly well facilitated by Adam St Lawrence, Marc Stickdorn (author of 'This is Service Design Thinking'), and Markus Hormeb.

The course was attended by relatively diverse group from across Europe and the US, and almost all the particiapnts had significant hands-on work experience in design thinking and service design. This meant the quality of the discussion around different tools and methodologies was just fantastic - a real source of value.

Lego Serious Play in Boston

In October 2013 I had the great pleasure of attending a Lego Serious Play Facilitation course in Boston, run by Robert Rasmussen. Robert is one of the founders of the Lego Serious Play play approach and a fantastic facilitator. I always find it interesting when you are able to learn not only from the content, but also just from observing.

We had a very strong group, with experienced practitioners from both the creative industries, business and academia which made for some robust discussions around facilitation styles and methodology.

The great advantage of using a physical thinking tool such as lego to explore and model ideas and concepts is that when you're building models using your hands - or 'thinking through your hands - you are using both sides of your brain (left brain for right hand, and right brain for left hand).

This whole brain thinking has a strong and direct impact on the type of ideas that you generate when working with Lego, and I think everyone in our group found that this materially changed the nature of the ideas and solutions we generated in a very positive way.