Situation
The leadership team at Aditya Birla Group, an India-based premium global conglomerate with more than 120,000 employees, wanted to better understand how design thinking could improve the business operations and community initiatives of the Fortune-500 company. The goal was to introduce design-thinking methods to the leadership team, allowing them to practice the tools and come-up with creative new solutions together.
Collaboration
The group invited Designit to conduct a Design Process Immersive workshop for select C-level and IT executives from various business units. Grounded in a real-life scenario, the workshop encouraged participants to tackle a business challenge using the design process. Aditya Birla’s leaders learned how to better understand user perspectives, identify problems and potential solutions, and translate their newly acquired knowledge into better systems.
The immersive workshop introduced Aditya Birla Group’s leadership team to a high-impact and strategic problem-solving approach that later helped each of the participants to rethink products, services, and practices within their domains. By the end of the session, the team realized the importance of empathizing with users’ needs and expectations, rather than just focusing on business objectives. They all understood the power of a rigorous, systematic, step-by-step design process – which, until then, had been missing from their ideation practices.
Outcomes
The entire learning experience left the group energized and excited about the potential impact of design thinking on their organization. The workshop showed the leadership team the importance of truly understanding a problem before coming up with a solution, and it allowed them to incorporate testing and iteration into their corporate decision-making process. One executive said they “learned the power of specific persona vs. average user – that’s what made us think of real user needs.” At the end of the workshop, Aditya Birla Group executives were equipped with an innovative, customer-centric methodology to apply to the digital transformation of their organization.