How to run a Design Sprint for 1,000 people
Part 5: The 1,000 person Design Dash
On the day
After a bright and early start in Canada Water in London, we kicked off proceedings for our 1000-person Design Dash at the old Daily Mail printworks around 8 am to doublecheck that everything was ready to go. We had completed the setup across all the zones the night before, every one of the 102 tables was dressed how we wanted them, and everyone had enough post-it notes and sharpies to get through the day. We were as ready as we were ever going to be.
We had a few treats before we got started. We were greeted by our partners showcasing everything from their latest technologies to robots, holograms and a formula one car. Then we gathered together in the main event space as Rachel Higham, our MD and chief Sherpa kicked off proceedings with a rousing speech to review how much ground we had covered in our transformation in the last 18 months.
Next, Rachel had arranged for Olympic, Commonwealth and European Gold Champion hurdler Sally Gunnell to come and talk to us about how she focused on a long-term goal of winning Olympic Gold and how she experimented with lots of incremental changes to finally get there. Her talk was spine-tingling stuff, full of ups and downs, and showed how much guts and determination it took to achieve her single-minded goal of winning that gold medal. Her talk finished with the video from that race, and you could see the determination in her 26-year old self from the moment she took to the track to the moment she claimed victory.
We then got transported into the future by Azeem Azhar, a futurist thinker and speaker, who gave his insights into what he saw as the pivotal technologies that would shape the 21st century. Then, it was our turn…
Highlight Reel
Michael, Moshe and I took to the podiums in the Everest, Fuji and Kilimanjaro zones respectively, and kicked off the first session before lunch. Before we knew it, we were closing off the third and final session and inviting teams to upload their final video pitches ready for the Dragon’s Den judging.
I’ve got a short highlight reel that covers the whole event so you can get a sense of how it went on the day in London.
Measuring success
In the first part of this series I set out my main objective for running the 1000-person Design Dashes, and that was to measure the level of positive sentiment towards the Human-centred Design sessions from attendees. The idea being that if they enjoyed it and saw the benefit of working in this way, that they would continue along this learning journey and use more and more of these ways of working on a daily basis.
We invited all workshop attendees to provide us with feedback via the SUMMIT app we had created for the event, which gave attendees the opportunity to provide us with a score for how much they enjoyed the session, and if they wanted, to provide us with feedback about anything specific.
The results speak for themselves —
With an average attendee satisfaction score of 93% from 1,293 people who provided feedback from both events, the 1,000-person Design Dash was a resounding success, especially given that this was the first time we had run something at this scale
Verbal feedback from the event was also amazing, both in terms of what people said to us directly and what people talked about on Social Media — a search for #btsummit shows a range of our people and partners, from apprentices to VPs and Directors really enjoyed the experience.
I had a fantastic day as a Human Centred Design expert
Great to see the masses ranks of BT tech team embracing #humancentreddesign… It takes a good deal of sweat and evangelism to get to this point. Kudos
Awesome inspiring truly human centric experience
One of the largest human-centric design events in the work, dedicated to driving innovation with a customer-focused mindset
Designing useful outputs
I was also delighted that each team put a huge amount of effort into crafting some amazing entries for the Dragon’s Den competition, we had over 200 entries, with many clearly having significant post-production efforts following the event to help them stand out. Not only was this a strong signal that people were passionate about solving the problems, but it was also a strong signal that this way of thinking and working was useful and capable of producing tangible results in a very short space of time.
Currently, those entries are going through a process of judging, and I know that people across the business are keen to see which concepts make it through the process of scoring against Desirability, Viability and Feasibility to go through to the Dragon’s Den and hopefully brought to life. I’m looking forward to those ideas being made concrete and helping to overcome the problems they were designed to solve.
My key takeaways
So after a long build-up, a lot of logistical conundrums to solve, and a great day, what are the key lessons I learned from this whole experience? We analysed the verbal feedback from hundreds of attendees and combined our own thoughts to create this list.
#1 Design Sprints should flex to needs
By experimenting with the format of a typical 5-day Design Sprint, and condensing it down to bare essentials, we were able to take people through a recognisable Design thinking process in just 3 hours, and in the process help thousands of people experience what it was like avoid jumping straight into solution mode. Depending on the time you have available to run your Design Sprint, always consider what the best use of that time will be, whilst balancing the outcome you are looking to achieve, bearing in mind the maturity level of the audience. 3 hours was plenty for a learning exercise and we still managed to produce a lot of desirable concepts.
#2 Researching in advance reduced time and risk
A great way to accelerate the process of research and help a set of attendees who had an extremely mixed level of maturity to empathise with a target audience was to conduct the research on their behalf and share it back via a video. Doing it this way — doing the hard work in advance to make it easy on the day — allowed us to gather a larger set of reliable evidence than our attendees would have been able to in the time available, and by packaging up findings into a short video, this allowed attendees to download and digest the key points in a matter of minutes, all in a way that limited the chances of research going wrong or leading attendees down the wrong path.
#3 Larger teams need good briefings for team leads
We did have feedback from a number of squad members that their team leads could have been briefed to manage their time more effectively. Some team leads had clearly not engaged with this type of workshop in the past, and so weren’t clear from their briefing on what to expect. In retrospect, it would have been good to run a test session with all team leads, but with senior people, this would be tricky at the best of times with the short timescales we had to work with.
#4 Staging is critical for focus
The setup of the zones is critical, and something we probably should have spent more time checking in on with the events team. Whilst we did make contingency plans for those with visual, hearing and other impairments, it became clear that we had not been able to test everything, and therefore there were a handful of people who found it hard to take part. Despite best efforts, some found the angle of screens, reflected and dimmed lighting and the size of screens made it hard for them to follow some of the activities. Background noise levels were hard to predict, and some found it hard to listen in on team discussions. In Bangalore, this was a big problem as the zones were not partitioned, so the day before we set up a ‘silent disco’ setup with headphones for people in 2 of the zones to ensure they could follow along.
#5 Embedding HCD experts
In London, we had planned for HCD experts to be embedded in every team, which worked really well for keeping the flow of activities going within teams. In Bangalore, we ended up not having access to as many experts, so we had to make do with roving HCD experts which ended up slowing down the flow as they had to get up to speed each time they got involved with a team. With this size of event, with the mixed maturity levels we were working with, embedding experts is definitely the way to go.
#6 Allow time for grace periods
Some folk will always need a little more time, both at the start of each session and at the end. Despite plenty of 15, 10 and 5-minute warnings from the ‘Voice of God’ on the speaker system, a LOT of people were travelling to their zones minutes beforehand, and a LOT of people were still queuing for tea and coffee 30 seconds before we were due to start each session. Similarly, even though people had ample time to create their outputs from each session, some groups inevitably got stuck on some decisions about what that output would be. Certainly in terms of creating the outputs, if you are pushed for time on the day, I would recommend at least a 15-minute window at the end of each session to allow time for teams to complete the exercise to their satisfaction.
#7 Design Sprinting at scale shifts mindsets at scale
The energy we had on the day and the feedback about these sessions was fantastic. There was a pivotal moment when Rachel Higham, our MD, asked all the attendees to stand if they had taken one of several target steps along our transformation journey —
when Rachel got to the final question and asked who had taken part in the digital learning journey for human-centred design and almost the entire room stood up, it was electric!
At that moment, we collectively realised that we were all on this journey together, and the sessions had helped to cement this mindset and the idea that “this is how we do things now, this is business as usual”.
Achieving our goal — mindset shift
The one quote I’d like to finish on is from one of my colleagues from Bangalore, Rajashekar, reflecting on what they learnt from their experience.
A lot to take from today’s event, I’m inspired to look through my day to day issues in a different view.
That’s all folks!
This is the final part of a 5-part blog post, I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed being part of this great experience. If you would like to get in touch or ask any questions about how we ran our 1,000 person Design Dash, you can find me on twitter @robinow.
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