When was the last time you did something for the first time?
The full arc of design thinking, lived rather than lectured. Participants generate an idea from scratch, analyse it from angles they did not choose, build a prototype or a performance, and test it in front of the room, which hands them either a feedback loop or the confidence to discard it and start again.
What happens.
The day opens with games, because a group that has already been slightly ridiculous together will offer a bad idea out loud, and a group that has not will wait to see who goes first. That waiting is the single most expensive habit in an ideation session, and it is cheaper to dissolve it than to argue with it.
From there the cycle begins, and it runs several times rather than once. A group generates from a prompt drawn out of your own situation, in your own words, gathered before the day. They take the idea apart from angles they did not choose, which is where most of the discomfort lives, since the angle you did not choose is the one your idea was hiding from. Then they build something: a prototype, a scene, a song, an object, whatever the idea needs in order to exist outside the person who had it.
Then they test it in front of the room. A real audience, in the same building, within the hour. The room responds honestly because it has been made safe enough to, and the group leaves with either a feedback loop worth following or the confidence to discard the idea and start again. By the end most groups have abandoned more than they kept, and that is the part that transfers. Abandoning an idea cheaply is the skill most teams are missing.
The angle you did not choose is the one your idea was hiding from.
Nowhere in the two days is a diagram of the design cycle shown. Participants run it, several times, with their hands and their voices. If it is useful afterwards to name the stages they have already been through, that naming takes four minutes and lands, because it is describing something they did.
At a glance.
| Learning need | Ideation, individually and as a group. In a budget line: innovation capability and creative problem solving. |
| Who it is for | Any team, any function, any seniority. |
| Format | 1.5 to 2 days. |
| Group size | Works from 8 upward. Above 40 the room splits into parallel groups. |
| Where | Your site, or a venue we help you find. A room with space to move. |
| Prior experience | None. Nothing is graded. |
What we measure
Named behaviours rated by managers or peers thirty to sixty days later: does this person now bring unfinished ideas to a meeting, and does this team now test before it commits?
Psychological safety on the seven item team scale, before and at thirty days.
What we do not claim
We do not claim that a two day session raises innovation output, patent counts or revenue. Those depend on what your organisation does with an idea once someone has it, which is out of our reach.
We claim that participants practise generating, testing and discarding, and we invite you to check whether they do it afterwards.
The full evidence base, including the claims we have retired, is published here.
Ideas are cheap to test in a room and expensive to test in a market.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.