Design Thinking at school (not business related but personal testimony about DT)

I have got a good news and a bad one !

The good news is that , a few week ago I did the best presentation I have ever done and the bad one is that this presentation was not for business purposes !

Indeed, a few years ago my company made a partnership with charity group 100 000 entrepreneurs that is dedicated to leverage the entrepreneurship mindset to the young generation

This charity focus on Entrepreneur mindset whose definition is larger than the current one in the sense that you do not have to create your company to be an entrepreneur , you can be an entrepreneur by doing something interesting with your  life, by becoming the real actor of your daily work and life , and it is something that anybody can succeed in not only as a business man but also as a teacher, or as an artist or as an employee company  

That the reason why, in order to promote this entrepreneur mindset, I was invited by 100 000 entrepreneurs  to share my career experience with young students at school in a suburban city

I was indeed exited by  the opportunity to help teenager to  make something with their life but on another side I don't like to discuss about my career and  I don't feel like a real entrepreneur

So I decided to use Design Thinking (Design thinking is  creative process and methods to help you design meaningful solution in many area whatever business or in your community) tools to help teenagers understand more the entrepreneurship concept and  therefore , before the meeting I prepared Design thinking tools like  the context map of the entrepreneur (what is the definition of undertake , give examples ....) and I prepared too the entrepreneur journey map

The result turned to be very interactive as the teenagers take over the meeting by themselves and put the post-it by their own on the paper . Unlike the other cession I have done in the past where a few polite teenager listened to me and asked few polite questions, all the students this time participated  ! with big enthusiasm ! It was amazing !

Have a look to first result of entrepreneur context map

 is that not good ? do you remark the rose they have added ? to be honest these students werefar better than my current customers ! With this entrepreneur context map they ended with their own entrepreneur definition and generated too a lot of ideas

Then we moved forward to the second step that is the entrepreneur journey map that represent the steps that an entrepreneur has to do  in order to pursue his project , the people he has to interact and the feeling he get at each action or interaction

it was very interesting ! during this cession I encouraged the students to get idea in the way "how might you " or "how can you make it" Often they get the idea like "to get a palace with swimming pool" and i answered them "ok but how you could make it ? "

At the end my students was very proud of them ! Oh I can prove it ! have a look to the following photos

Do you guess who is the accounting teacher ?

You are right this guy in the middle !


The next photo is a guy I remember very well as he came to me "eh man your session is great !!!

The lesson learnt : Design Thinking  is working, it helps you to create great meeting whatever the area by generating interaction and innovative idea with people

Thanks

Prototyping with sketching and design thinking approach

Below a nice document that explain how we help customers to choose and  experience our value solution by sketching and prototyping with the design thinking approach   inspired by the author Tim Brown  that you can follow a conference (from design to design thinking) under this link in youTube

With this solving problem approach, we make prototype for our customer that help them to make sure that the solution will work and to understand too the necessary steps they will have to do in order to make the things done. As a check out, the prototypes we do are rapid, quick and dirty in the sense we do not go deep into the system and the customizing in order to make a proof or testing some specific features or making a long and boring Proof of Concept (POC) Instead we just check that we have all the values, materials and technologies within our solution platform to achieve our customer goals and visions. So we use every material at our disposal to create convincing prototype in a few days :  pictures, telling story,  references, speed demo and sketching and post it techniques  ...    
So that our customers make the real interactive experience of our solution during the prototype presentation .

My contribution to the telling story that we did for the 25th years anniversary of my company in France


is it not too nice ! 

Nice story for sailboats customer

Telling story for beneteau

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Amaury Group Case or How to invite the emotional reasons at the sales cycle ?

We had last year in Q4 a very difficult sales cycles with our customer AMAURY Group (that contains Newspaper Le Parisien and Sport Newspapers L'Equipe as well as ASO,  a sport event company that organize for instance big event like Le Tour de France)
All along the cycle, we did our job which means : showing to the customer the value of our finance solution and our unique integration with the Business Intelligence platform in real time that would allow Amaury Group reducing the errors number and  taking the right decisions  (demo, references, value propositions...)
Howerver, early in the pre sales cycle we understood that the value and objective  reasons why to choose SAP would not be enough to win this deal  against our main competitor Qualiac .
The project team from AMAURY group had unfortunatly a big preference for Qualiac : less expensive and business driven solution, good media business speeches and messages... and we were told they did amazing demonstrations both in finance and BI/reporting topics !

So we came up with this idea to  focus on emotional  and personal reasons why they should choose SAP, the reasons why basically SAP is NOT ONLY  BETTER FOR THEIR COMPANY but also BETTER FOR THEMSELVES as human being ... and we found out a creative way to communicate about it :
Let's me explain : our customer Amaury ran  a  poster campaign one year ago  with the theme "The 50 reasons Why  to buy L'EQUIPE ? " and among these reasons there was a mix between objective and rational reason, funny reasons and emotional reason why to buy L'EQUIPE (the poster above)

So we decided to do the same as a kind of parody and we created a document called in french "Why to buy SAP ?" in which we put objectives reasons : because of the functional coverage, because of  integrated stuff...  and also funny and absurd reasons : because our sales account read L'EQUIPE, because our manager's wife is a press retailer...    and last but not least personal and emotional reasons : in order to improve my skills, in order to put SAP on my CV, to be able to say to my pretty roomate "oh I am very busy I am  involved now  in an SAP Project. !!!

So we distributed this poster (above) at the lunch break of our SAP  demonstration day and  we presented  this document as a nice parody of their very well known campaign "L'EQUIPE"

It was a clever and creative way to invite the emotional and personal reason at the sales cycle. Was it not ?
Tell me about that ...





  

My Personal Presentation "Meet_Xavier_Petit"

here my personal presentation  : the list of things i am good (because of hardworking) but i don't like and the list of things i am good (because passion) and I am crazy about....

Meet xavier petit (2)

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