How to run a Design Sprint for 1,000 people
Part 1 of 5: Where the Story begins
This summer, 6 months after joining BT, I had the opportunity to run an amazing all-hands event for people working across IT, a critical enabler in the company. The event, called SUMMIT (Summer IT all-hands), was not only a big milestone in the company’s transformation towards more human-centred and agile ways of working but possibly also a world record in terms of the sheer number of people taking part in a Design Sprint.
I thought I would share what I learnt from this experience to help anyone else attempting to organise a Design Thinking exercise at this scale and to give interested parties a glimpse of how Design is having a real and tangible impact amongst the people of BT.
About BT
BT is the UK’s leading broadband internet provider and fixed-line Telco operator. Experimentation and discovery is part of the company’s DNA, and increasingly, we are looking at not only discovering new technologies but also new ways of working that will help us operate at a higher speed and scale, and enable us to deliver a wide array of products and services that people want and need.
As such, BT has been undergoing a transformation to its culture, strategy and operations. In BT Technology, our transformation programme is called Da Vinci (a renaissance of Art, Science, Culture and Technology), and a key pillar of Da Vinci has been around building a mindset and culture to truly understand and serve the wants and needs of our customers and people — in part, by using Human-centred Design (HCD).
This is the story of how we scaled Human-centred Design workshops to enable 3 Service Designers to successfully lead 1,000+ people on 2 occasions through a mindset-shifting experience that was simple to facilitate on the day.
Where our story begins…
Back in March of 2019, our small but perfectly-formed team at BT Technology had built up a huge amount of demand for Human-centred Design and Service Design. One of the goals for our Centre of Excellence was to get everyone in IT and eventually BT Technology to adopt HCD-inspired ways of working.
To help us scale our reach to achieve this goal, we created a series of digital ‘Learning Journeys’ — designed to allow people to self-serve HCD learning experiences in their own time. We also ran a series of Service Design accelerator workshops to tackle a number of challenges that were being experienced daily by people across the business.
The digital Learning Journeys were a powerful agent of change and helped us to scale our activation efforts, allowing over 5,000 Design thinkers to experience the benefits of HCD in the space of 18 months. The accelerator workshops helped educate over 300 gold standard design thinkers over the same period, who joined together to form a series of Service Design squads solving our biggest IT-related challenges.
Each of these squads worked in unison to create toolchains of essential IT services — 19 and counting — which are not only used by thousands of colleagues every day but also have an average NPS score of +55.2, a score higher than many of our customer-facing products and services.
Our success in scaling HCD meant that we received a flood of extra demand at the start of the year, which led to a packed schedule of consulting, speaking engagements and workshops throughout spring and early summer — almost back-to-back. Then, one day in March 2019, at the very start of this hectic schedule, we had a request come in from Rachel Higham, the Managing Director of IT at BT, and ‘Chief Sherpa’ on our Da Vinci transformation.
Rachel: Could we run an HCD workshop experience? for 1,000 people? Twice?
Firstly the ask was to run a Design Thinking workshop for everyone in IT in the UK at the start of July and then for our colleagues based out of Bangalore at the end of July — This would mean a thousand people in each location all working together to identify and solve the biggest problems we face in IT.
I thought about it in relation to our goal of reaching everyone in IT, and as this was an incredible opportunity to change over 2,000 mindsets, I said “yes”.
Starting at the end
To avoid jumping straight into solution mode, I spent time at the start of the process thinking less about the journey I wanted to take everyone on, but more importantly, where this would lead people to.
My primary goal was to take people from simply having an awareness of Human-centred Design, to experiencing it in person and understanding not only the key principles but more importantly, the benefits of working in this way.
So the outcome I was looking for was to inspire as many people as possible to want to learn more. From that platform, it would then be about making it easy to continue on their learning journey, and ultimately embedding these ways of working into their normal business-as-usual mindset.
North Star Success Metric
So I began by setting out a single measure of success that I would be able to ascertain straight away at the end of the events, that would inform my thinking throughout, and that was to measure the level of positive sentiment towards HCD from attendees on the workshops — if I could pique someone’s interest and get them bought into trying out an HCD technique after the event, that would be the beginning of the mindset shift I was seeking to drive.
Of course, I was also interested in how effective we had been in embedding HCD Principles and Practices into our ways of working, and how easy we had made it for people to learn more, but these were longer-term objectives that would have to be measured over time.
So, with this key high-level goal of driving positive sentiment towards HCD in mind, I went into the process of research to help inform our design process for the workshops, and crucially to see if anyone else had ever attempted such a large-scale Design Sprint event.
The Story continues…
This is part 1 of a 5-part blog post, read on to find out how we went about
- Learning from others
- Planning the Design Sprint
- Test running the Design Dash
- The 1,000 person Design Dash
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