Design thinking is not a new concept in many areas of business, but in HR it is beginning to gain serious ground. In a recent Deloitte report, of the 7000 respondents, 79% felt that design thinking was an important or very important issue for them this year, with HR professionals believing that they are ready for the journey of moving from “process developer” to an “experience architect”. (Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2016). This hands-on session will introduce you to the main tenets of design thinking and allow you time to try a couple of exercises as applied to the context of social technologies and HR. Participants will walk away with some tangible insights that they should be able to apply to their workplaces immediately.

1. 00:00
1

2. 00:01
A bit about me.
I’ve been in experience design for about 17 years – about
99% of them with Habanero. For the last 10 years I’ve been
part of the management team but I’m just recently back from
a year of leave to travel with my family and decided to hit a
big ol’ reset button when I got back so now I’m back into
consulting and projects with our clients.
2

3. 00:02
So a bit about Habanero. We are a 60 person consulting firm
with three offices in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto. We
started in Vancouver 20 years ago.
Our purpose is to help people and organizations thrive. And
a big part of thriving in the modern workplace is humanizing
technological experiences. We use a combination of design
thinking and great technical skills to do this for our clients.
Let’s jump into today’s session!
3

4. Ok Design thinking and HR!
Now I realize that a lot of you are here to learn more about
how to use social media in your recruiting strategies, so I’ve
framed this session in terms of first what is design thinking,
some of its tools and then the two hands on examples at the
end of the session will be oriented around social media and
recruitment. These tools are very broad however, so if you
have other accountabilities in your role, you should be able
to see some other applications of them outside of social and
recruiting.
4

5. 00:03
Ok so first up, let’s establish what design thinking even is.
How many people are familiar with the idea of design
thinking?
At its simplest, it’s:
And I believe that as HR professionals, we’re in the business
of creating amazing experiences for our employees. Not
processes or procedures, but experiences. They make for
greater connection, learning and engagement, and ultimately
the strongest results. It’s a bit like planning a big party. Do
5

6. you want your party to be a great process or experience?
Apply that to say, recruiting. Mostly we treat it like a process.
Go through these steps, get these results. But what if you
take something like recruiting and turn it into an experience…
instinctively that just sounds better. There’s science behind
this too:
5

7. 00:04
Focusing on just one of our brains happens all too often in
workplaces – namely organizations are all about process,
procedure and tools (again, a holdover from our industrial
era workplace management roots). Process, procedure and
tools are all geared towards meeting intellectual needs.
Emotion/instinct are consciously (or unconsciously)
overlooked as “nice to haves”. But by appealing to just 1/3 of
our brains, we are necessarily setting ourselves up for less
than optimized experiences, and therefore, adoption and
engagement.
As an aside, I think is what’s behind all the interest and focus
6

8. around corporate culture. I think you can actually look at
culture and experience almost as synonyms in the
workplace… ok I’ll leave that there for you to mull over while I
push on into more on design thinking!
6

9. 00:06
design thinking puts people at the center of the process
rather than focusing on the solution or technology or process
first. This empathetic approach helps make the invisible
visible and when you pair that with the next pillar you can
expose more connections between processes and
experiences.
7

10. 00:07
One of the biggest differentiators of experience design from
other types of problems solving the altitude at which you
view the problem. In order to become better problem solvers,
we elevate our awareness to see the entire landscape. Now
we can see the interconnectedness of people, tools and
channels.
You can go after the root problem, not the symptom
8

11. 00:08
Experience design is about designing with people instead of
for them. By collectively creating something, it instills
accountability and ownership and a desire to see things
through.
9

12. 00:09
Prototyping and rapid experimentation – you have
permission to fail and learn from your mistakes because you
can come up with new ideas, get feedback and then iterate.
You need to be able to take (controlled) risks.
10

13. 00:10
There are challenges in using language to communicate
complex ideas and problems to many people in a consistent
way. Pictures, models, and infographics can often be much
more powerful in creating a shared understanding that
enables everyone to collaborate on problems together.
11

14. 00:11
So just to riff off this idea of being visual…
Let’s walk through some basics so you guys can become
sketching whizkids
1st -- sketching is great for suggesting, exploring,
questioning, provoking! It’s not high stakes like drawing
• Low pressure!
• Just about getting visual
• Be bold
• Use strong lines – don’t feather
12

15. • If you don’t like your line, sketch another and
connect the two
• Better to have your lines go past each other than not
touch at all
• Turn your paper if you like
• Warm up – here are some basic things that you may find
come in hand as you start sketching more of your ideas
(even if it’s just in your own notebooks)
Ok, let’s say you have an experience you want to re-design.
Here’s a super high level view of what it might look like to do
that.
12

16. • 00:17
• Start with “Seeing”
• Immerse yourself in the hearts and minds of your
employees – observe the current state of the
experience you want to re-tool
• Typical activities would include empathy maps, interviews,
workshops, in situ observation, external research (case
studies, competitive analysis)
13

17. • 00:18
• Shape
• Draw some conclusions from what you’ve seen
and start to give your solution some shape. Start
wide and then narrow into what would be feasible,
engaging. Look for the experience gaps and
painpoints.
• Typical activities could include…
14

18. 00:19
Journey mapping.
This is a journey map of our onboarding experience (as
opposed to our onboarding “process”)
A journey map is reflection of a very specific current
experience over time and its highs, lows. It could be
considered a subset of your previous experience map (or
maps)
The maps can be organized in a number of ways, with
different focuses and outcomes, communication
15

19. channels/touchpoints, a persona’s unique narrative, design
interface flow and emotional journeys across interactions.
15

20. 00:20
This is an experience map of the performance
management/manager lifecycle, from starting out with your
performance manager to parting ways (of some kind)
An experience map is a good place to start when you don’t
quite know the source of some particular friction. So for
instance, if you know you have more success recruiting for
some roles over others but you’re not sure why, this could be
a helpful way to start to structure what’s going on.
These are built off research of the audience in question –
interviews, workshops, in situ observations, surveys.
16

21. You could use an experience map as a way to lay out what’s
happening now or possibly what you’d like to happen in the
future, so it’s quite versatile that way.
16

22. • 00:21
• Create
• This is where you get to start trying out new
versions of your experience. You can sketch new
flows or experience maps. You can prototype or
pilot your experience in a safer, lower risk state
than a full on implementation
• You might use something like a blueprint as
another way of expressing what your new
experience might look like.
17

23. Another great tool for visualizing what a future experience
could or should be is a blueprint. It uses a stage metaphor to
organize all of its information.
Blueprints include all the action items required, as well as the
colour commentary to bring the experience design to life.
It discusses actions, touch points between the experience
and the actors, what’s happening front stage and of course,
backstage. And it also covers the support systems (human,
physical and technical) that make the magic happen.
So – armed with all these experience design artefacts, you
can start to get into the design of the tools and processes
18

24. required to bring this experience to life.
18

25. • 00:24
• Learn
• Build in the ability to gather data on the solution
(analytics, feedback) and have a process to feed
that into your next iteration of your design
• Take what you learn and carry on in another loop.
That loop could be to improve on your prototype or
pilot or maybe it’s you moving into a large scale
implementation.
19

26. 00:25
Ok so that’s the quick overview of what design thinking is
and one way in which it can be used. I want to give you a
chance to try out a couple of the tools we like to use a lot
when we’re in the “shape” part of the process in one of our
projects.
20

27. 00:26
Has anyone come across an empathy map before?
empathy vs sympathy – one is to walk in another's shoes;
the other is an emotional response
21

28. 00:27
This is one version of an empathy map. Why you would
create one:
If you want to
• Deepen your understanding of the needs and wants of
your actors
• Determine their expectations of an experience
• Identify gaps and challenges with current experiences
• Understand relationships with people inside and outside
of their team
• Very specifically prioritize proposed features and
22

29. functionality
So let’s think about a social media/recruiting scenario. You
can use this tool to get a little more into the hearts and minds
of your target candidates in order to shape your social media
strategy. The more insight you have of your candidates, the
better you’ll be able to shape your plan around what you want
to create, share, tweet and retweet. You’ll be in a better
position to understand the key messages, the employer
brand elements that you’ll want to call out, resonant
hashtags, how to work with your employees to get them to
support your efforts with content creation, sharing and re-
tweeting. You’ll be able to zero in on key LinkedIn groups.
And finally, you could even use this tool to learn more about
your team and gaps you may have that you need to fill to
bring your social media recruiting strategy to life.
Ok, so grab your blank piece of paper. This will be your
canvas for your notes you jot down.
Start to think about what you’ve heard and observed for
yourself about your candidates. Presumably you’d like to get
more in touch with the top performers you’re hoping to attract
and hire. Picture a recent top performer you’ve come in
contact with. You could think of one specific person or a
make a mental composite of a few top performers you’ve
met. Now start to work your way around the map – can be
methodical or just roll with what comes to mind.
What does this person
- Think and feel? What really counts to them. What are their
major preoccupations, worries, aspirations?
22

30. - See? What’s the environment around them. Who are their
friends? What is the job market offering them?
- Say and do? What’s their attitude in public? What’s their
appearance like (what demographic are they). What’s
their behaviour towards others?
- Hear? What do their friends say? What do their
influencers say? In which venues do they say these
things?
22

31. 00:37
Ok so now you’ve tried out an empathy map. Next up is
something a little broader in scope; it’s a game for thinking
about an initiative.
This game is designed to reveal desirable and less-than-
desirable conditions so that you are prepared to move your
initiative toward success.
The metaphor for your initiative is that you’re going places!
Are you more of a bike or a boat sort of person? In the centre
of your blank page draw either a boat or a bike.
23

32. Now, on your voyage there will be tailwinds, headwinds and
obstacles that could end your trip. So draw your headwind,
tailwind and rocky zones.
Frame your voyage with a title. For example, “how might we
use social media to attract the best engineering candidates?”
Write your title at the top of your page.
Now start to think about the things that will propel your
initiative faster, slow you down or stop you completely. One
idea per sticky and add them to your sketch.
Ready?
23

33. 24

34. 00:43
To give credit where credit is due, at Habanero we get a ton
of inspiration from this book: Gamestorming. You can pick it
up or there’s TONS of stuff online. Just google
“gamestorming”.
25

35. 00:47
One last quick thing to throw at you.
Taking inspiration from Jon Lax and a talk he gave a little
while ago that he then …
26

36. 00:48
re-cast as a Medium article on “how to use a playbook”
27

37. 00:49
Who’s pretty familiar with the idea of playbooks as far as
sport goes?
Playbooks are used in sports because they allow coaches to
collect a huge array of plays, organize them according to
scenarios, and lay out the details of how the play is run, by
whom and when.
It’s the same with experience design playbooks.
A playbook lets you
28

38. • Document and teach how you build things
• Provide shared language and understanding
• Understand the situations teams typically face when
building solutions and provide tools and methods that
have worked well or believed to work well based on past
experiences
Consider creating a space (virtual or physical) where you
collect the plays you like best, how you used them, share it
with your team and make it a living collection you can all
contribute to. We have a shared OneNote notebook that we
add and refine during all of our projects. As you use design
thinking techniques more and more (and possibly for more
than socialHR), it’s super handy to be able to collect your
plays and related learnings.
28

39. 00:49
Ok! So we’re at time and that was your super fast review of
design thinking, a couple of exercises and a way to start
collecting your go-to “plays”.
I hope this has been inspiring and please feel free to reach
out to me if you’d like to talk more about anything at all I’ve
brought up today!
29

40. 30