College Wesleyan Church Design Thinking Session.
Overview.
In Fall 2021, we created a series of design thinking sessions for College Wesleyan Church (CWC) leadership, which allowed church leaders to discover innovative ideas to accomplish their church’s goals. We led CWC leadership through ten activities in two, one-day sessions.
Background.
College Wesleyan Church, located in Marion, is dedicated to making and equipping disciples. One of CWC’s goals is to equip the laity of the church to disciple others in the workplace. Before meeting with us about the design thinking session, the College Wesleyan staff interviewed members of the church to reveal the resources, practices, and communication they felt they needed to shepherd others well.
Objectives.
College Wesleyan leadership shared three goals with us:
Identify a problem statement.
Develop a series of daily habits to achieve their goal.
Form a process of evaluating the habits to determine if they are effective.
As we began our work to design the session, we had these goals in mind:
Inspire innovative ideas within the church staff.
Affirm creative methods for discipleship.
Process.
First, we needed to select design thinking activities that would align with the church’s goals. To accomplish this, we referred to our previous experience in leading design thinking sessions. The knowledge we gained from previous sessions provided us with an understanding of which activities work well. Because design thinking is human-focused, however, we still needed to consider the CWC leaders who would be participating in the session. With this in mind, we developed a framework we knew to be effective and adapted it to match College Wesleyan’s parameters, such as time restrictions and the number of participants. The Objecttstorming method is unique because it combines elements of traditional design thinking with a new Marion Design Co. spin.
After discerning which activities we would lead, we designed the materials required for each activity, such as imagery or charts. We took visual inspiration from the natural environment and played with organic shapes and lines alongside images of pastures and shepherds. We also applied CWC’s brand colors to the materials to further unify the session with College Wesleyan. We created mock-ups to visualize the flow of activities and ideas.
After the first session, we reanalyzed our plan for the second design thinking session to ensure that the planned activities would continue to push the CWC leaders from where we ended on the first day.
Results.
We led College Wesleyan through two design thinking sessions, on October 26 and November 2, 2021. Fifteen CWC leaders participated in the session, completing a total of 10 design thinking activities.
On the first day, we led the following activities:`
Innovation Checkup, which evaluated innovation already at play in CWC’s work through a questionnaire.
Goals and Desires, which allowed participants to identify their desires and articulate goals that would place them closer to meeting their desires.
Personas, which instilled empathy in participants by guiding them in creating personas that would be directly affected by their ideas.
Vision Cone, which broadened participants’ perspectives on what has worked in the past and what they can bring to the future.
Six Word Memoir, which pushed participants to summarize the essence of their wicked problem in a concise way.
At the end of the first session, we also led the leaders through the process of creating a problem statement from their Six Word Memoirs. The problem statement allowed participants to articulate the problem they want to solve in a succinct way.
On the second day, we led the following activities:
Objectstorming, which pushed participants to think of ordinary objects in innovative ways.
How Might We, which applied the innovation from the Objectstorming activity to the problem statement.
Riskiest Assumption, which identified the assumptions underlying the participants’ proposed solutions and which assumptions could create a challenge.
Experiment Canvas, which guided participants in creating frameworks for potential solutions to the problem statement.
Validation Canvas, which refined and pushed ideas to become more robust, ready for application within the church.
By the end of the second design thinking session, we witnessed College Wesleyan leadership apply innovation and creativity to form new methods of serving the church.
