How do I run an HQ tour for Service Design learners?

In short:

• intro about the organization in advance through reading at home then a short introduction on site where learners can ask questions about the organization

• 30 min Q&A on the topic of the day with 3 questions:

  • who are you?

  • how do you do it?

  • any practical tips?

• bring in external experts to spice things up.

• eat in the cafeteria to continue the conversations

• make sure you don't spend the whole day inside

Context

There are some topics that can be hard to be practiced in a one day class setting. For example Organizational transformation. To keep a practical approach a nice alternative is to do a tour of the HQ of a large organization.

In such a tour people who are in the thick of it share their practice. In an HQ you get to see people from many different fields just by moving floors: HR, legal, IT, etc.

The schedule: 30 minute interviews

In such a day we had a very simple format: 20-30 minutes interviews with people from the organization. With breaks and time to move from one floor to the other. To spice things up I also scheduled two guests via video calls that are consultants who have a big expertise on the topic of the day with practice in many different organizations.

The questions

To make it simple we told in advance the questions to each professional and kept them the same for all:

• who are you and what do you do here?

• how do you practice [the topic of the day]

• What's a tip, a principle, a tool that you use for [the topic of the day] again and again?

Organization intro

One thing I would do better next time is to start the day with a general presentation of the organization. This could also be done with some reading and videos at home and then have the intro as a Q&A about the organization.

Backstage of this article

This article was illustrated and written by hand on a refurbished Remarkable II tablet. The handwritten text was converted into typed text using the connect service by Remarkable. If you are curious you can download the original note below.