The Gensyn Client Experience Part 4- Wrap-Up

In Parts 1 through 3 of this series, we broke down the details of Collaborative Facilitation, Design Thinking, and Systems Thinking. In this post, we’ll connect the dots, and show how the three components individually connect with one another.

Design Thinking with Systems Thinking

• Design Thinking helps teams deeply understand the needs, challenges, and motivations of the people they serve—whether that’s customers, employees, or partners.

• Systems Thinking helps you see the whole system - how people and parts work together-so that you can create solutions that make a big difference.

The result is “actionable impact”, solutions that truly work and create strategic and significant impact.

Collaborative Facilitation with Design Thinking

• Collaborative Facilitation ensures that the issues and solutions come from the voices and wisdom of those who already experience those issues and will experience the solutions. In Part 1 we discussed how Collaborative Facilitation “brings people together”.

• Design Thinking enables a wide diverse look at possible issues, then identifies the most important ones. Taking a wide diverse look at possible solutions ensures we find the best solutions.

The result of the connection is that the wisdom of the organization’s people and its stakeholders is both well-leveraged and tempered to highlight the best ideas.

Collaborative Facilitation with Systems Thinking

• Collaborative Facilitation ensures that the solutions that get built are put forward by the people who will implement them. That ensures that solutions are more likely to work in practice (and that they make doable sense).

• System Thinking focuses implementation ideas on solutions that work across all people and parts in the systems – customers, staff, and other stakeholders.

The result is creation of a whole system, complete with objectives, goals, and metrics that work for each chosen strategy.

Gensyn Pulls All Three Elements Together

Think of us as the orchestra leader. Just like the symphony doesn’t play itself, none of this just spontaneously works on its own.

• Our client chooses the theme (broadly what they want to address strategically).

• We choose the music (the various work methods for bringing the people together).

• We rehearse the ensemble (orchestrating the working sessions with our client and rehearsing techniques with dry runs).

• Our client acts as the “music” critic (they review and approve the work and its direction).

• We conduct the performance (facilitate the collaborative working sessions).

• We debrief the performance (cast the results into actionable form, review the results with our client, and make changes where they feel it is appropriate).

The Result

At the beginning of an engagement, neither we nor our client know what all the issues are or what may emerge. But, through Collaborative Facilitation and by using the methods we’ve practiced for years, we will uncover the issues. The same is true of solutions for those issues.

• Our clients are often surprised and thrilled by the new ideas that are discovered via Design Thinking and Systems Thinking.

• They are also often surprised by how these three techniques, blended together, bring their staff to a level of engagement that is noticeably refreshing.

• Staff feel ownership and commitment to implementation and understand their role in the bigger picture.

When we combine Collaborative Facilitation, Design Thinking, and Systems Thinking, we get the sum of the definitions you’ve seen in earlier parts discussed in this blog series. And it summarizes Gensyn’s work:

“Bringing people together to help organizations make better decisions and design solutions with parts that work together for all the people who interact with them.”