“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” Max Planck

This highly experiential workshop is rooted in the belief that the questions we ask frame the solutions we get. You’ll have the chance to explore a set of lateral thinking tools and exercises that help you change your perspective, see problems from new angles and discover new solution spaces through 10X thinking. We will challenge you to invert your thinking in order to unlock new possibilities that our normal problem solving processes won’t get us to.

Through a series of case studies, exercises and videos, participants will have the chance to practice looking at business, technical and design problems by pulling back to a wider perspective, reframing problems, and creatively developing solutions by changing their lens. You’ll walk away with an expanded toolkit for creative problem solving, as well as highly practical tools and frameworks to bring back to your teams and colleagues to help them expand their thinking.

Key takeaways:

• Learn critical thinking and creative problem solving skills, including tools for reframing a problem and brainstorming that actually works
• Flare before Focus: Practice exploring problems from different perspectives to broaden the range of possible solutions before choosing a path forward
• Introduction to diverse problem solving techniques from Design Thinking, Liberating Structures, and improv.

"Want to be a great coder? Develop a painfully deep sense of empathy. Everything else derives from that." - Phil Haack

While empathy may sound soft and fuzzy, we believe that great software is built by being able to ask open ended questions, understand root cause/user needs, defer judgement and see the world through the perspective of others.

The World Economic forum agrees- collaboration and emotional intelligence are rated as the 5th and 6th most critical skills for the workforce by 2020. This highly experiential workshop will explore how empathy and learning to see the world from the perspective of others can help software teams collaborate more effectively and build better human centered products, through a series of practical tools and frameworks.

Key takeaways:

• Explore how design thinking and human-centered design principles apply to software development
• Help your team become "customer obsessed" and learn how empathy can lead to writing code that solves the right problems
• Consider new approaches to collaborating and communicating with colleagues