Design Thinking

Innovation is doesn’t always come easily. To be innovative means overcoming challenges such as creativity blocks, time constraints and a lack of imagination.

That’s where Design Thinking can come to the rescue. Design Thinking is a straightforward philosophy and practical process which can help anyone think like a designer in order to solve problems, create new ideas and innovate their way to success.

Course Content

The Business Case for Creativity

The importance of innovation in the workplace
How our brain gets in the way of creativity

Introducing Design Thinking

The underlying principles of Design Thinking: human centred, action orientated and experimental
The Design Thinking iterative process:

– Empathising with end users

– Defining the problem

– Ideate potential solutions (lot of them!)

– Prototype, creating a simple mock-up

– Test, gathering data to find learning opportunities

Experiencing Design Thinking

Walking through the process to solve a simple problem

Course Approach

CHALLENGE

Recognise the limitation of classic approaches to solving problems
Hold off creating solutions until you’ve empathised and defined the problem

CREATE

A more human centred approach to creativity
New approaches to brainstorming and idea generation

CHANGE

Your attitude to mistakes and failure
Produce fast, cheap prototypes you can test, improve or throw away

Embedding Success

CHALLENGE: The first idea

The first idea you think of is seldom the best idea. Next time you need to solve a problem set aside a meaningful amount of time to ideate as many ideas as you can.

CREATE: Define the problem

Get used to defining problems. Take an issue your team is currently working on. Define the issue in a few sentences or less. Get your colleagues to do the same. Are you all on the same page? How much clarity do you all have on what exactly the problem is?

CHANGE: Don’t defend prototypes

Received feedback from an end user on the usability of your prototype? It can be tempting to jump in to defend your prototype and demonstrate how great it is. Fight this urge and instead ask questions to understand more and gather feedback on what would make it better.

100%

of our clients would recommend Alpha to a colleague or peer

90%

of a cohort was promoted within 2 years after participating in an Alpha course.

96%

of participants felt more confident in their role, following an Alpha commercial leadership course.

Why study with Alpha?

Innovation and creativity born from experience

We are thought leaders in instructional and learning journey design and holistic solution architects. We have extensive finance and investments experience combined with skills application to deliver performance improving results. We develop immersive learning environments that maximize time to productivity, support talent retention and added value to improving quality of hires.

Knowledge Exchange Evangelists

We are focused on mining the embedded organisational intellectual capital for the benefit of the next generation. We create and curate best in class practice gathered from our experience with the leading financial institutions. We design our programmes with the end in mind – what results are you trying to achieve with this intervention? What metrics will we set ourselves to achieve that?

Generation Proof

Quality and innovation, using current market and industry best practices, have made us a trusted partner in delivering dynamic and motivating training for the financial and capital markets. Our programmes are generation proof and responsive to evolving learner needs and styles. Our solutions use a multi-stakeholder engagement strategy that expands beyond relationships between the learner and learning provider. We create connections with managers, peers and the wider business to drive impactful return on investment..

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