Thursday, 17. October 2024
It started as a slow burn and ended in a joyful, turbulent, emotional feast. This year’s Design Thinking Conference was a family gathering, enriched by many new guests, with talks and breakouts, surprising insights and deep conversations between sessions, and countless ideas and inspirations.
Let’s start with the big issues: I’ve long been feeling uncomfortable with too dense and still too shallow workshops, with time pressure and not enough space to go deep and think things through. It’s just so fun to ideate! So hardly anyone wants to sober up and change into the cold-hearted „mindset of the venture capitalist“, as the fantastic Jeanne Liedtka put it. At the back-end of design thinking, we ask the wrong questions, and not enough. We don’t use our creative repertoire to test our assumptions (not just fancy ideas!) and provide reliable proof. We need to change that! Because: being wrong is the foundation of all good solutions, and we can only find out through experimentation.
In this context, I fell in love with the term „errorism“, the „terror on error caused by fear“, which Willem Stortelder introduced. It’s the complete opposite of what we need to be creative & give birth to new ideas. Through his talk, he invited us to befriend ourselves with the discomfort of potentially being wrong, and to practice being wrong more.
Silence is the other most neglected opportunity in our design thinking practice. And journaling a very apt tool to reflect on what we experience while silent. Our charming Colombian-Norwegian host Olga Lehmann, who did her PhD on silence, made us try it out in 3 x 3 minutes. Wow! Have you ever written a poem, in a language which is not your mother tongue, in just 3 minutes? How much potential could we unlock if we used silence and journaling as a room for growth!
The Design Thinking Conference, this exquisite, friendly gathering & not quite the usual conference, is my safe haven to venture outside my comfort zone. It is a space of trust, where creators give free access to their intellectual property, and the others help to make it better. Claudia Mayer, for example, gave us the co-creation canvas, which is a great tool for initiating an managing projects.
My mind is still bubbling, my empathy muscles alert. My gratitude goes towards Jeroen van der Weide and the Design Thinkers Amsterdam, who open the space wide and have done it on an almost yearly basis since 2017.