In design thinking workshops we'll often run an activity where the group comes up with design ideas. To get the best out of this, you want everyone to be actively involved and contributing. But, folks often haven't done this kind of activity, are afraid of drawing, and feel left out.

In this mini workshop in a workshop, you'll learn how to get the best out of everyone, and come up with great ideas.

Needed: 1 marker (like a fine sharpie) and 3 sheets of A4 paper.

Donna is an expert in user experience design, user research, information architecture, facilitation, design thinking, service design, digital product design, and product leadership.
She has worked in many industries, including government, telecommunications, insurance, retail, not-for-profit, higher education and many more.

Donna has also written three books: on information architecture, card sorting and writing for the web. She’s currently writing two new books for A Book Apart and Sense and Respond Press.

Donna was a founder of UX Australia conference, running it for nine years.

Note: this session replaces Laura Summers who has withdrawn due to illness. Get well soon, Laura.

Divergence Is Easy, Convergence Is Hard – In exploratory work, leading teams out of navel gazing and into customer delivery is hard. I'll share some ways to maintain research quality whilst getting the good stuff out the door.

Liam Brobst's purpose is inhelping organisations deliver something of value to someone who cares. How? Mostly through humanising the work, evidence-based decisions, shortening the feedback loops and influencing an adaptive culture willing to experiment.

He pulls from Agile, TPS Lean and Service Design principles yet remains flexible to whichever practices work for the team and the situation. He leans towards qualitative research to inform decisions with the 'why' behind the 'what'.

Systems Thinking Bingo for Uncertain Times

It was around the same time last year that Australia experienced one of the worst and most uncontrolled series of bushfires in its history. It resulted in major environmental, economic, institutional, and social impacts. Just before we recover from the bushfires, the Pandemic hit. However, like the bushfires, it took our institutions, companies and society a long time to respond, and like Australia, most countries organisations, communities, families and individuals were caught off-guard.

The interdependence of our world has now been experienced by so many, so directly, so rapidly and so simultaneously.

A systems lens can help us learn essential lessons. Covid-19 has provided many clear examples of effective systemic action, and stark lessons in the consequences of non-systemic thinking.

Coronavirus and the bushfires illustrate the need to bring systems thinking out of the clouds and into the mainstream. We don’t claim that it’s simple, but what is clear from past few months is that ‘business as usual’ is no longer available for many and systems approaches are no longer optional. Systems are not external. We are part of them, and we influence them.

In this interactive workshop, you will have the opportunity to gain awareness and practice number of systemic lenses, habits and strategies to better understand and act in interdependent situations.

We will focus on the Habits of a Systems Thinker that help you make better sense of systems and how actions taken can impact results seen over time. They encompass a spectrum of strategies that foster problem-solving and encourage questioning.

We are creating a community of systems thinkers in Australia, we hope you can join us.

Alidad E Hamidi

Currently working as an organisational change coach, after over 20 years of applying analytical thinking on the systemic problems, I realised few years ago that our approaches to change including most agile approaches are ineffective and at best a local optimisation. I started my deliberate systems thinking journey few years ago and have since helped organisations, teams and individuals gain insights and achieve significantly better outcomes with a fraction of the effort that was perceived as required for the change. This has been only possible with applying synthesis and system thinking approaches as oppose to analytical ways of thinking. Still a student of the Systems Thinking, my passion is to work with the community to create more awareness of these approaches and their applications in the day to day life.

Dave Witney

For the last 20+ years Dave has been learning and forgetting how to help people and organisations respond to change, and provide valuable outcomes, both as an IT professional and as an agile coach. Learning more about systems thinking and behavioural sciences has also lead to a realisation of how an understanding of their principles and practical application is crucial to the work he does.

Mihail Sestakov

Mihail is a Digital Transformation Consultant with over 11 years experience in transforming teams and large Enterprise organisations to new ways of working. Based on sound organisational development principles from MBA studies, his current focus is on helping large Organisations to accelerate and sustain Customer value delivery. A persistent professional people leader with over 30 years of software engineering and IT management background, he has a passion for innovation, continuous transformation and team capability growth at sustainable speeds. He uses Pattern Recognition and Systems Thinking in solving complex organisational and behavioural problems.