Design Thinking Assignment: Improve  Feedback Hackathon

1. Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.  My workplace has an untimely and convoluted feedback process. To receive feedback,  employees must wait until the end of a project, or formally request feedback from  colleagues.

I participated in an internal hackathon to improve the feedback process. Our team discussed  the current process with other employees and found this process limits the amount of  feedback employees receive each year and discourages peer-to-peer feedback. We also  found that colleagues could feel awkward giving constructive criticism to peers.

2. Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g.,  what it is and why you selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate  video lecture references)  To create a better feedback system, I chose the visualisation tool. Initially, I was worried  about using visualisation as I see myself as quite a bad drawer. But after watching Angela  Myer’s video on visualisation, I realised that when it comes to design thinking, visualisation  isn’t about drawing pretty pictures rather using visual tools to enable a team to collaborate  on ideas. As Ms. Myer said, visualisation enables us to “tap into a single picture” and  “achieve a sense of agreement and consensus”.

3. Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge  (e.g., what you did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).  I used visualisation to create a peer-to-peer feedback tool. I first tried to describe my idea to  other members of my team, but I found that each person had a different understanding of  what I was saying. I then drew this simple table:

My positive feedback for you

Your positive feedback for me

My development points for you

Your development points for me

Creating this table enabled my team to work on something concrete together. In homage to  Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde we called our tool the Snap Cup. As a team we  iterated on my initial design – we linked the feedback to our company’s values and  developed steps for sending and receiving this feedback:

1. ‘Colleague A fills out the first column and sends to colleague B.   2. Colleague B fills out the second column and sends the completed snap cup form back

to colleague A.’

Initially, we planned to propose building an expensive feedback submission portal. But after  co-designing the table, we saw how to simplify our solution to a word document that could  be emailed from one colleague to another then uploaded to our existing review portal.

We presented our idea on the final day of the hackathon. We came second and the judging  panel was impressed by our low-cost innovative solutions to the current feedback process.

4. Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your  challenge (e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about  design thinking more broadly).  A key insight I gained from using visualisation is that the act of drawing an idea isn’t about  me or my drawing ability, rather it’s about bringing others along the journey with me. By  using visualisation, I made my ideas on how to improve feedback concrete and effectively  expressed those ideas to my team-mates.

I think that design thinking at its core is about democratising idea generation. Particularly  when working in a team, visualisation helps break down intellectual silos, for example  feelings like ‘I’m smarter than everyone else’ or ‘no one understands me’, because everyone  is drawing or visualising together.

5. Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same  tool you selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.  Next time I would combine visualisation with a learning launch. To generate ideas  collaboratively is one thing, but we need to test those ideas to truly understand their  potential effectiveness. The combination of the two tools could also enable a team to  iterate and improve on an idea.

In terms of our hackathon’s task, if we could publicise our solution to a small subsection of  the company, for example the graduate program, then we could test the rate of uptake and  the nature of feedback given. With that data, we then could establish a business case for  scaling our solution to the entire company.

