Customer-Centric Workshop Program To Advance UX Culture

In 2013 Honeywell Aerospace began its campaign of the Honeywell User Experience (HUE) methodology and launched a workshop program to facilitate application of design methods throughout the company. Workshops served as a delivery-vehicle for driving UX-culture into the company.

The Problem

The initial workshop’s were led by Maya’s Luma Institute to coach teams on Design Thinking and set to train attendees to evangelize the framework post-workshop: train the trainer. Whilst a proven framework, use of Luma fizzled and failed to latch-on:

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Cost: hard to swallow for teams that haven’t seen design-ROI

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Lengthy: the majority of teams couldn’t pause business commitments to send an entire team to 3-5 days of training

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Complex tools: not each tool in the toolbox needs to be used, but that knowledge comes with experience.

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Narrow Exposure: few teams could afford the cost/time and demand couldn’t be met for the 10k-person business and traning-degradation of in-house champions increased over time.

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Honeywell Culture: a 100yr old engineering company doesn’t adopt design over night and the training didn’t always resonate

My Approach

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Upon my hire at Honeywell Aerospace in2014, I set out to improve the workshop experience. I used Herbert Simon’s definition of design to create an engaging plan that would be inspirational, relateable, and repeatable.

My Plan:

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Inspire by helping attendees to define their preferred future. This is an open invitation for teams to solve problems differently; break ties with the past-anchors, define your future.

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Designers as Evangelists; Utilize design-leads embedded within teams to facilitate workshops, then sit with that team through successful deployment of the design process to drive cultural evolution.

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Invite repeat business. Create an intake and engagement plan that welcomes new teams and existing customers alike to request workshop help.

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An 8-hour agenda, chock full of learning-through-activities and modular to be customized to each teams’ goal and maturity.

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Onboard a Champion who can work with teams that do not have a dedicated UX lead; place a creative facilitator who can address workshop needs for wide-ranging business topics.

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Forget About Personas, Let’s Talk Empathy: what are the feelings, thoughts, and resulting needs of our users. Business and engineering attendees are uncomfortable here. Going through exercises that uncover the emotional and behavioral needs of customers leads to profound new insights, ah-ha’s, and the realization that humanity is always present in business.

 

The Workshop

An 8-hour/1-day gathering of team members to put UX tools to use to refine problem statements, under their CX, and develop new ideas that lead to their preferred future.

The Outcome

  • I was awarded a $100k/yr budget for hiring a dedicated creative facilitator on a yearly retainer (IdeaFarm/ Tamara Christensen) to augment UX staff bandwidth.

  • Workshop successes led to a 300% increase in demand from our stakeholders; workshops booked 3mo’s in advance

  • 80+ Workshops over 3yrs

  • In those 3 years, I personally conducted 20+

  • One workshop I ran earned Honeywell $154M. In a 12hr workshop I led, the team to craft a differentiated experience strategy for the HPW3000 helicopter engine (now T900) which directly led to Honeywell’s ability to compete for an Army contract award for the preliminary round of the Alternate Concept Engine (ACE) program.

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