Learning Launch    Challenge and Selection    We recently had a Design Thinking session in our department, the first one we have ever had. Not  knowing the first thing about Design Thinking, it was a bit of a learning process for me.  But after some  guidance from the facilitator the session progressed very well, and the ideas started pouring in. During  the ideation process I quickly realized many of the issues identified were directly related to a lack of  communication within the department.     The Design thinking session focused on a different idea and the session went a different way, but the  communication issues stayed with me until well after the session had ended.      A coworker had recently been working on a project to create an internal web page to stay on top of  important information across the company and had asked for my assistance with the project.  After the  Design Thinking session, we came together and realized this might be a solution to the many problems  addressed in the session     Application     We performed a "pivot" to that existing project and started adapting the web page to address the many  communication issues within the team.  We started with a simple design and reached out to various  people within the department to gather some data and applied some changes based on that data. We  reached out to people outside of the department to gather more data and applied more changes. When  we rolled out the initial page it was still in its early stages without all the bells and whistles. The result  was a centralized place for communication within the department and the response was very positive.   The page has since undergone many changes and updates and is now a widely used source within the  department.     Insight and Approach    I realized that I didn’t have to come up with a perfect solution to the problem. My own bias wouldn’t  allow me to see all the issues with our original design. It was through gathering data from peers that we  were able to identify and resolve many issues. And, by rolling out an incomplete page, we were able to  “test and learn” to a better design.        While the time from concept to design was only a few weeks, the next time I will create a prototype  faster and roll it out faster. This will allow me to quickly pivot and make the necessary changes to the  idea, or to shelf the idea completely if it doesn’t work.

