The Design Gym

Free tool: Introducing the 'Innovation For Growth' Card Pack

Do these challenges sound familiar? Build a strategy for a rapidly changing economy. Grow faster...and do so with fewer resources. Expand with new products and new markets.

To help leaders like you better connect your priority projects with business growth levers, we're sharing our top 55x strategic growth and innovation prompts that we've used with clients including Marriott, Instagram, Netflix, Kellogg's, and Cisco.

Download your card pack here: https://www.thedesigngym.com/resources/innovating-for-growth/

Use these cards with your team to: Get unstuck. Bust assumptions. Supercharge a workshop. Add focus to a meeting. Co-create with customers.

The Innovating for Growth Card Pack includes:
* 15x Growth Model Cards to generate ideas that expand your business
* 15x Business Model Cards to consider revenue streams
* 25x What If...? Cards to provoke new ways of thinking about familiar problems

10-years in and some changes are in motion! Check it out and drop a line if anything is resonating.

The Design Gym Services Update: Strategy, Innovation and Culture Check out the latest updates at The Design Gym! With 10+ years of experience, we we take a human-centric approach to every problem we solve.

Resurfacing a beautiful interview our team did with Minneapolis based playwright Carlyle Brown last year on race, facilitating tough conversations, and investigating our own discomforts. In it he speaks about his experiences and inspirations for writing his remarkable play, Acting Black. Definitely worth a read.
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"I believe that discomfort is a sign of readiness for change. If you don’t have discomfort, then you don’t give a s**t."
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https://bit.ly/2AHZjY0�-

What does it look like to take a multi-week long project and trim it down to 1-day? Check out our Problem Solving Studio Session next Tuesday June 2nd to find out. Here is a sneak peak of the activities and outcomes you’ll go through with your team working on your problem.
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Interested in getting your team(s) in on the action to add momentum to one of their projects? Send us a direct message or check out the for all the details!
@ The Design Gym

Feel familiar? 👋👋👋

Lack of engagement during virtual meetings doesn’t mean your team ‘just doesn’t do well with remote work’. It usually stems from a much more fixable problem - ritual definition and good facilitation.

This is a foreign environment for many of your team members and, just like visiting a foreign country, you have to take a few extra steps to make it work. Here are some tips:

+ Don’t just push through it - that awkward silence that is filling your calls should not be ignored. Your team will not be able to do its best work with only one voice at the helm. If you’re missing engagement, call it out and create space to talk about how the team (not just you) can make it work better.

+ Create definition on how people should show up - Know what type of meeting are you having, and then get specific on how people should show up to best support it. Maybe status meetings don’t need video on, but collaborative meetings do. Maybe team stand-ups start with a headspace check-in, but all-hands cut straight to the chase. Name these things, and include them in meeting invites so expectations are set.

+ Be more direct - avoid broad, open ended questions. For an introvert, and even most extroverts, jumping into a digital void to be the first to answer a question takes a ton of energy. Instead, call on specific people to weigh-in on questions or provide feedback to something you shared. Often times people are happy to contribute, but don’t want be the first to hit unmute.

+ Share the responsibilities - after you create a structure, rotate the facilitation role to engage different voices and help others build empathy for what it’s like to lead the team virtually (it’s hard!).

+ Go easy on yourself (and your team) - this s**t is HARD. The best thing you can do with culture is to keep asking ‘is this working for us? If not, what could we try differently?’. Treat your culture like an experiment - it will never be perfect but if it’s better than the day before then you’re doing great. 👊

We’ve been endlessly inspired by our friends on the team over , from when many of our team members used it as a catalyst for building personal mental wellness practices years ago, to when they graciously offered to host some of our first bootcamps in LA just a few months ago.

The love fest continues - Last week they announced they’d be offering their mental health products FOR FREE to anyone impacted by COVID layoffs. Talk about showing up with purpose when the world needs it most. Check it out - it will quite literally change your life.

PS - even liked the idea 🤘 @ Santa Monica, California

Bring a team. Bring a project. We’ll provide everything else needed to turbo-charge your work in a facilitated strategy sprint, designed and priced for your team to move quick.

Check out http://www.thedesigngym.com/workshops for all the details and a specific list of deliverables your team will walk out with. See you in the Studio 👊

An uplifting video from Patagonia featuring the badass women behind the Hot Tomato in Fruita, Colorado. A beautiful look at what people first businesses look like, and the impact they can have.

Life of Pie | Pizza and Bikes Can Fix Anything In 2002, mountain bikers and entrepreneurs Jen Zeuner and Anne Keller moved to Fruita, Colorado, in search of cheap rent, world-class single track, and free ...

Improving your team's ability to generate a wide range of radical ideas can be a challenge. Doing so in a remote setting (without losing their attention or energy) can be even trickier.

Join us this Thursday from 2-4 PM EST for Leading Remote Brainstorms, a virtual workshop you'll leave with:

- Energizers and team stokes specifically designed to boost your team’s engagement and collaborative intelligence

- Best practices for prioritizing ideas and moving forward after the session

- Insider facilitation tips for democratizing group brainstorming and including all voices

Leading Remote Brainstorms This 2-hour, virtual workshop focuses on leading high-energy, remote brainstorms that lead to ideas that push your work forward.

Work life feels like a roller coaster these days—some times it's creative surges and full steam ahead, other times it's binging Tiger King and teaching your kid how to Zoom their teacher 🤦‍♀️

So, our team created a 30-day calendar full of virtual events that will inspire and energize you when it fits *your* schedule.

Sessions include:
- Leading Remote Brainstorms
- Tools for Remote Decision Making
- Remote Facilitation Fundamentals

Check it out below!

The Design Gym Workshops Through teaching skills, creating practice opportunities, and building community, we provide you with the tools you need to lead design thinking projects.

Wonderful post from our client Jason Cyr at Cisco 🙌 What he learned from being both a firefighter and design leader about quickly getting complex problems under control.

4 steps to make sense of chaotic situations at home and work. Inspired by how firefighters deal with complex situations, here are 4 simple steps to bringing chaos into order.