Design thinking for teams or for leaders: which course to book
Book the teams course when people need to run the work themselves: interviews, journey maps, prototypes, testing with real customers. Book the leaders course when the blocker is decisions, scope and funding, not skills. If both are true, start with the team doing one real piece of work.
Two of our design thinking courses look the same on the page: one for teams, one for leaders. This explains which one to book. It is written for the person with the training budget and a boss asking what changed on the customer journey.
Both courses teach the same method. They get booked for different reasons, and the wrong one puts the wrong people in the room for two days.
We have run these sessions for Philippine banks and insurers since 2015, and the examples below come from those rooms.
What each course is for
The teams course is for the people who will do the work. Interviews with customers, a customer journey mapped on a wall, a rough version of the new flow, someone from branch staff trying it while the team watches. They leave able to run it again on the next problem, and usually with a piece of real work half done. That is the version described on our page for design thinking training for cross-functional bank teams.
The leaders course is for the people who approve the work. Same method, much less sticky note time. The focus is what to ask for and what evidence is good enough to decide on. Heads of digital, CX and operations sit in it. The useful part is usually the argument over what evidence is enough to approve a pilot.
If you have not seen either run, what design thinking is and what a team does in the room walks through the steps.
Book the teams course when the problem is skill
The usual version: someone has a customer journey everyone agrees is painful. Onboarding takes too long, branch staff have workarounds, nobody has spoken to a customer about it in a year. The team is willing. They just have not done the work before, so it turns into another meeting about scope instead of five customers trying the flow on video.
That is a skill problem. It closes when the team runs the method once on a real journey with someone watching them do it. Not a case study, not a made up product. The flow their boss will ask about next month.
One warning. Train a team on a problem nobody has funded and you get a keen group and nothing shipped. Pick the piece of work first, then book the room around it.
Book the leaders course when the problem is decisions
The other pattern is a team that already knows how to do this and cannot get anywhere. They did the interviews. They built something rough. Then the review asks for the full business case, the scope doubles, and what comes out at the end is a PowerPoint and no launch.
No amount of extra training on the team fixes that. The people who need the session are the ones in the review. What they get out of it is a shared idea of what evidence is worth a yes, and the habit of asking for a working version rather than a longer document.
We saw this on a series of five day design sprints for a large insurer. Customer facing web journeys that used to take six months or more were designed, tested with customers and live in four weeks. Twenty six weeks down to four. Completion rates on the new journeys rose 80 percent, measured by the client, and the old drop off points went away. The method was the same one we always run. The difference was that approvals came off customer evidence instead of a longer document. If that is the kind of result you want, read what a design sprint is and what you have at the end of it before booking any training.
When you need both, and in what order
Plenty of banks and insurers need both. What matters is which one goes first.
If the team is stuck on how, start with the team. Give the leaders a short session at the end of it, where the team shows what they found and what they built. It lands better than a standalone leaders session, because the evidence is their own.
If the team is stuck on approvals, start with the leaders. Otherwise you train people to work in a way their own review process rejects, and they stop bothering. People try it once, get told to come back with a full plan, and go back to PowerPoint.
Set a number before anyone books a room
The usual way this gets measured is attendance and a feedback score. Both tell you people showed up, but that's it.
Pick one number on the journey the team will work on, and write it down before the session. Turnaround time on the onboarding flow, or completion rate, or how many customers anyone has spoken to this quarter, even if the honest answer is zero. Read the same number a few weeks after.
Then you can answer your boss when they ask if it worked. The team also knows what they are aiming at, so the work stays on the flow that matters.
If the number barely moves, say so. Usually it means the blocker sat in the review rather than in the team, and you know which session to book next.
What to do this week
- Name the one customer journey the training will be used on. Not a theme, a specific flow.
- Work out whether the team is stuck on how to do the work, or stuck waiting for approval. Ask two people on the team rather than guessing from the org chart.
- Write down one number for that journey today, even a rough one, and note where it came from.
- Check who sits in the review for that work, and whether any of them have been in a session like this.
- Book the group that matches the blocker, and put the review people in the room for the last hour.
The course pages and the projects behind them are at onoffgroup.com.
More on Design thinking
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- What is design thinking and what a team does in the room
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- AI training for bank and insurance teams in the Philippines
- AI Prompting Essentials: what it costs and how long it takes
- Everything on Design thinking
Questions people ask
What is the difference between the teams and leaders versions?
The teams course puts people through the method on a live piece of work, so they leave able to run interviews, map a customer journey and test a rough version. The leaders course is about what to ask for, what evidence to accept and how to unblock the work.
Which should an L&D lead book first?
Usually the team, with one real customer journey as the material. If approvals and scope changes are what keep stalling the work, the leaders session first saves the team from being trained and then blocked.
How do you tell whether the training worked?
Pick one number before the session, such as turnaround time or completion rate on the flow the team will work on, and read it again a few weeks later. Attendance and feedback scores only tell you people showed up.
Is design thinking the same as a design sprint?
No. Design thinking is the broader way of working. A design sprint is a fixed week of it aimed at one decision, with something tested with customers at the end.
On-Off Group trains teams, tests products with real customers, finds where a transformation has stalled and builds what gets it moving, for banks, insurers and enterprises in the Philippines, since 2015. How we help with design thinking.
