Design Thinkers Podcast

Welcome to our new series: The Art of Change. In this series we will deep dive into the transformative world of design, innovation, and the people driving pro-social change.

Each month, we’ll bring you exclusive interviews with the people behind the scenes of change-making. We’ll dive into their stories—what inspires them, what challenges them, and how they’re making an impact. Stay tuned for our first episode of The Art of Change with our host Arne Van Oosterom launching later this month, across all our streaming platforms.

In our latest Design Thinker podcast we explore the importance of experimentation in business. We are on a quest to find out:

• What do we mean by experiments in business?
• Why should business leaders care?
• What does a good business experiment look like?
• And most practically of all, we are going to discuss how you run effective business experiments.

The podcast guests today are well-placed to answer these questions. They are all involved in a new book - The Experimentation Field Book published by Columbia University Press.

Natalie Foley and David Kester who feature, are two of the four co-authors alongside Professors Jeanne Liedtka and Elizabeth Chen, whilst one of Alan Penlington’s projects for British train company, South Western Railway, is featured in the book.

With examples from Virgin Atlantic, Nike and South Western Rail, this podcast answers the fundamental question of why to run businesss experiments and how.

How might we create equality of opportunity through design and tap talent potential in a multicultural society? That's the question we sought to explore in the first event of our 2023 Good Morning Design series: The Equity Activists.

This event featured Design Thinkers Academy London and DK&A founder, David Kester, in conversation with the social entrepreneur, Poppy Jaman OBE, the HR expert, Loraine Matins OBE & the comedian, Ahir Shah.

At the end of the panel discussion is an audience Q&A, for which the speakers were joined by Arup Major Project Director, Kate Hall & Assistant Director of Communities and Social Policy for the Greater London Authority, Tom Rahilly.

The Equity Activists also saw the launch of the Mayor of London's 2023 Design Lab for Workforce Integration, which will be run by DK&A in partnership with the Black Leadership Group this year. Please get in touch if you want to find out more.

With LGBTQ+ hate crime on the rise, what would you do to stop it? For Marta Lima, a Technical Product Owner for Cloud Engineering at Vodafone, the answer lay in design. In this podcast she talks us through her creation of Zoteria, a new app to help the LGBTQ+ community and the wider public to come together and tackle the issue of hate crime. Here Marta shares her own experiences and those of the wider community to highlight what inspired her to make the app and the Design Thinking process that shaped her journey.

Find out more about Zoteria here:

The pressures of the pandemic have left healthcare even more crippled than before. With patient backlog and patient waiting times at their worst in years across the NHS, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Trust knew they needed a new approach to improve Ambulatory Care for their patients. So they contacted our parent company, design consultancy DK&A, to research the problems patients are facing. This research could then be use to outline opportunity areas to innovate and help improve the patient experience.

In our latest podcast we talk with our Innovation Lead Hattie Camp about the project with GSST and how Design Thinking can be used to improve healthcare. This includes a deep dive exploration of the research process and the challenges that were overcome to produce a piece of research that could make a difference.On top of that, Hattie looks back to her introduction to the Design Thinkers Academy London, including her terror whilst taking part in our Facilitation Mastery course, as well as looking forward to our Design Thinking Fundamentals course.

"How to unleash the power of intrapreneurs like Joe? The key is to enable them to pursue their vision." This question, asked by Richard Branson back in 2010, feels more realised now than ever before. Across the globe more and more companies are giving autonomy and freedom to the so-dubbed intrapreneurs to drive innovation from within. Yet what is it like to be an intrapreneur? Well who better to ask than the man Branson referred to in that interview now 12 years ago; our coach Joe Ferry.

So do you want to learn about Design Thinking but you're short of time? Well, our Design Thinking Fundamentals course may be the one for you. Taking place over just two-days at our London studio, it covers the complete double diamond: discover, define, develop and deliver.

Adam Forbes is one such person who has taken the. course. He is the founder of Familiarize, a startup passionate about customers and helping early stage founders understand them better. Adam founded Familiarize because he believed "the old model of building products we think customers need and flogging them through advertising is dead. Previously Adam worked on the “growth” side of business, avoiding “cost cutting” wherever possible – mostly in innovation, a stint in the cabinet office’s e-government and many years in BP’s technology arm.

In this edition of the podcast we talk to Adam about his experience on the course, what learning's he's going to take from it and how he's going to put Design Thinking to use.

So you’ve taken a Design Thinkers Academy London course, but what’s next? Perhaps you slot straight into a Design Thinking project, but what if you’re in an organisation where Design Thinking is almost non existent? In this podcast with Design Thinker and facilitator, Arnoud Koning, we share all the tips and tricks you need on how you can become a Design Thinking champion at work and make it take off.

Arnoud Koning is not only a facilitator at the Design Thinkers Academy London, he’s helped promote Design Thinking at Proctor and Gamble, one of the world’s biggest consumer goods companies. He’s also worked as a consultant for the Design Thinkers Academy London’s parent company DK&A, and advised companies on how to use Design Thinking

In the podcast Arnoud goes into depth about the different ways to implement Design Thinking, covering everything from convincing middle managers on its worth to an anecdote on how nappies brought a team together. We end the podcast with a complete summary of the best tips and tricks to get Design Thinking to launch in your company.

A Service Blueprint is a is a diagram that shows how a service really works in detail. It connects the customers experience with the people and activities that help deliver that service.

In this version of the podcast, coach Simon Gough explains how to use Service Blueprints and why it makes Design Thinking even more powerful.