Design Thinking for Innovation

Reflection Assignment - Learning Launch

Challenge

As a trainer in my company, I got to design and develop new training courses from time to time. One of  the training courses that I recently developed was named “Working with People of Different  Personalities”, which was a course introducing different personalities types and educating people how  they can better work with people who have different personalities. One of the challenges I faced was  how I should design the course in a way that was effective, practical and engaging to the training  participants.

Selection and Application

When developing the training course, I got an idea to include an experiential activity that could let  participants observe the behaviors of people who were of different personalities and experience how it  was like to really work with them. Here, I made use of the tool “Learning Launch”. I developed a game  called “Build the Bridge”, which required participants to split into groups of 12 and work together to  build a bridge of 6 meters long using the materials (like newspaper) given by the trainer. The bridge  should be strong enough to withstand the weight of a bottle of Coke, allowing it to pass from one end to  the other.

By playing the activity, I have made two assumptions: Firstly, during the activities, participants of  different personalities would behave in different ways and that people could experience how it was like  working with them and appreciate their contribution to the team. Secondly, participants would enjoy  playing the game in the middle of the 3.5-hour workshop, which was a fun and relaxing way to learn. By  using this “Learning Launch”, I would test and see whether my assumptions were true or not.

Insight

The “Learning Launch” is a fast, cheap experiment that can be used to test my assumptions. Only when I  tried out the activity in my training class could I really tell whether it works or not, in other words,  whether my assumptions were true or not.

Here are the results: For my first assumption, it did not seem to me that the activity was a good one in  reflecting the behavioral differences among people of different personalities. During the activity, it was  pretty hard to observe and categorize the behaviors of people based on their personality types. Perhaps  there were too many factors (like experience, competences, etc.) that would affect the behaviors of  people, and the activity was not particularly effective in bringing out the differences in participants’  personalities.

My second assumption, yet, was proved to be true. In the post-training evaluation, a number of  participants shared that the “Build the Bridge” game was the most enjoyable part throughout the whole  training.  It proved that people did enjoy experiential learning, and the idea of adding a game in the

middle of the training could definitely help enhance the level of engagement among training  participants.

Approach

With the experience from this “Learning Launch”, I was able to test my assumptions and got a better  idea of how I could improve the design of the training course “Working with People of Different  Personalities”. In my next class, I would still pursue with the idea of having an experiential activity in the  middle of the class (which was proven engaging), but would try to use another activity that can better  stress the behavioral differences of people of different personalities.  That activity would be my second  “Learning Launch”, and I would keep doing experiments until I successfully develop a game that is  effective, practical and engaging to the training participants.

