Design thinking for enterprise teams

What this primer is

This is the primer we use to open Design Thinking T&E. Steal the framing questions. Ignore the icebreakers.

It is for the people in the room on day one: a service or product owner, a designer or BA, an operator, and the people who usually arrive late and kill the work (risk, procurement, comms, legal, clinical, credit). It is also for the sponsor who will not sit for two days but will read a board pack.

Collective Campus runs Design Thinking so a framed problem, a tested concept, and a decision owner who sat in the room leave with you. If your last workshop produced none of the three, you did not do design thinking. You did stationery.

Read this the week before the room. Fill the framing page. Invite the stopper. Prototype the paper trail with the same seriousness as the interface. Show the board the kill criteria before the concept.

How we open the room (and what we skip)

We do not open with a history of Stanford, a movie clip, or a two-hour empathy lecture. We open with the job of the two days:

1. Frame a problem a sceptical senior can repeat.
2. Treat risk, procurement, and comms as users.
3. Prototype a concept and the paper trail that lets it live.
4. Leave kill criteria, an owner, and a date.

Then we put the constraint on the wall. Then we talk to the people who do the work. Then we make something thin. Then we decide.

We skip:

• Icebreakers that steal the first hour
• Persona templates with no evidence
• Journey maps nobody will hang above a desk
• Twenty ideas and a dot vote as the product
• A "next steps" slide with no names

If you need a warm-up, use ten minutes on the framing questions below. That is the warm-up.

Framing questions (steal these)

Write answers in plain language. If a sentence needs a glossary, it is not framed.

The customer or desk

• Who is trying to get something done? Name a role, not a segment poster.
• What are they in the middle of when it fails (a call, a form, a matter, a bill, a claim, a login)?
• What have they already tried? What did the organisation already try?
• What does "done" look like in their words?

The constraint

• What will stop this if we ignore it: statute, licence, safety, credit, procurement threshold, industrial relations, comms embargo, partner leverage?
• Who owns that stop? Are they in the room?
• What is the thinnest test that stop will allow? Concierge, paper, shadow, letter, page.
• What must never happen, even in a test?

The decision

• What decision do we owe by 4pm tomorrow: go, iterate, or kill?
• Who can make it? Will they sit in the last afternoon?
• What evidence would change their mind in either direction?
• What will we stop doing if this lives?

The residue

• Who owns the next 30 days (a person)?
• What is the kill date?
• Where does aftercare live (heartbeat, forum, assessment window, practice meeting)?
• Who sends the one-page note today?

ANZ and NAB rooms can answer these in a product and risk conversation. Allens rooms answer them as a matter. AGL rooms answer them as a retail and risk conversation. Services Australia, NSW, IRD, NHS, and GDS-shaped rooms answer them as a service and a statute. Capital One-style rooms answer them as credit and conduct. Inkeros-style rooms answer them as a shortlist a line lead will fund. If the room cannot answer, you are not ready to ideate. You are ready to reframe. Reframing is the work.

Risk, procurement, and comms are users

Design thinking fails in enterprises for a boring reason: the workshop ends on Thursday and the governance cycle starts on Monday. The sticky notes were never the problem. The method was taught as a customer ritual and then asked to survive a legal memo, a risk committee, a procurement threshold, and a comms embargo it was never introduced to.

Interview these users before you prototype the customer. Give them the same dignity you give a citizen or a client.

Risk (operational, credit, clinical, information)

Job to be done: say yes, no, or not yet without pretending the workshop understood their world.

Interview prompts:

• What would make this test illegal, unsafe, or uninsurable?
• What capped cohort and expiry would you sign?
• What evidence do you need on the page (not in a 40-page appendix)?
• Where have "innovators" burned you in the last two years?

Prototype with them: the one-page risk note and the kill criteria. Not a heat-map poster.

ANZ operational-risk and NAB credit counterparts will mark a tight page. NHS IG and clinical safety will mark a tight page. Capital One-style credit and conduct will mark a tight page. They will not mark a mural.

Procurement

Job to be done: buy a test without pretending it is a platform, and refuse a platform dressed as a test.

Interview prompts:

• What threshold turns this into a tender we will lose a year to?
• Can we split discovery plus a 90-day test from scale?
• What supplier residue should the statement of work demand?
• What must we own on day 31 (data, prompts, play, code, none)?

Prototype with them: the buy path for the test (internal time, existing panel, capped statement of work). GDS-shaped and NSW-shaped rooms already know split asks. Banks and energy companies forget and then act shocked.

Comms (and ministerial or brand offices)

Job to be done: have a sentence before a journalist, a FOI, a customer, or a staff channel does.

Interview prompts:

• What sentence would you be willing to say if this test leaks tomorrow?
• What must never appear in a prototype in public?
• Who has to see a letter or a page before a customer does?
• What is the embargo, and is it a design input?

Prototype with them: the public sentence and the letter or page. NSW clusters and UK departments lose months here. Telstra-scale and Canva-scale brands lose weekends here. Write the sentence in the room.

Legal and partners (Allens-shaped rooms)

Partners run a portfolio. They feel seams in intake, scoping, and knowledge handoff. If you run a workshop without a partner and an operator in the same room, you will get a mural the practice will not fund. Interview the partner as a user of time and risk, not as a sponsor of "innovation."

Prototype the paper trail

A clickable demo that nobody can approve is still a sketch. Prototype the decision pack with the same seriousness as the interface.

Paper trail kit (build these as artefacts, not homework)

1. One-page risk note. Problem, test, cohort cap, data rule, human check, kill date, named stopper. AGL retail risk, NAB operational risk, NHS IG, GDS-style assessors, Allens GC-shaped reviewers: they can mark this.

2. Kill criteria. See the board section below. Put them above the concept in the pack.

3. Procurement path. How the next 30 days are bought. How scale would be bought later. Two envelopes, not one lie.

4. Comms sentence. One paragraph. Written in the room. Marked by comms.

5. Ops runbook slice. Who does what on Tuesday if the test lives. Roster, not a vision.

6. Owner and aftercare. Name, heartbeat, date of first review.

Infinitev-style rooms still need a claims rule on the paper trail before the landing page. Inkeros-style rooms still need names on the shortlist. Atlassian-style rooms still need a backlog path. The interface changes. The paper trail does not go away.

Time-box disagreement

Give the stopper 25 minutes to mark the page. Give the owner 15 minutes to accept or rewrite the kill. If they cannot, the concept is not the problem. The permission is the problem. Stop ideating. Fix permission.

Do not wait for the steering pack to discover that the concept requires a privacy impact assessment nobody scoped. That is how Services Australia and NSW programmes stall. The constraint arrived in week nine as a surprise.

Board kill criteria

Boards and executive committees do not kill design thinking. Un-prototyped governance does. Show them the stop before the dream.

What a board pack must let a non-specialist do

Say yes, no, or not yet in ten minutes on a phone. If you are a Head of Design, a CDIO, or a programme director at ANZ, Services Australia, or a NSW cluster, you already know this. Design for that.

GDS made the questions boring on purpose. Steal them:

• Who is the user?
• What is the need?
• What have you learned?
• What will you do next?
• What will you stop?

Add four lines a listed-company board also wants:

• What is the capped downside in dollars and in customer harm?
• What is the kill date?
• Who is the named owner?
• What licence, act, or policy did we treat as a design input?

Kill criteria you can print in the pack

• Stop if the capped cohort cannot complete the paper or concierge version by [date].
• Stop if the stopper will not sign the risk note by [date].
• Stop if procurement cannot buy the test without a platform tender.
• Stop if comms will not sign the sentence.
• Stop if the metric (hours, completion, cycle time, complaints) does not move enough to fund the next window.
• Stop if the test requires a core or spine change on day one.
• Stop if the owner is a centre of excellence with no desk.

If every idea graduates, none of them were experiments. Put that sentence in the pack if you need courage.

NSW and UK department patterns that stall are usually sequels. The committee asked for more analysis because the choice was not framed. Frame the choice (go / iterate / kill) and the sequel dies.

Public-sector variant (GDS, NSW, IRD, plus Services Australia and NHS)

This is Design Thinking for agencies, remounted without the theatre. Same physics: legislation, volume, identity, comms, industrial relations, and a public that will not applaud your mural.

Permission page (fill before day one)

• Service seam in one sentence (citizen or frontline officer).
• Act, policy, or standard in one sentence.
• Operational owner.
• IG / privacy / payments / clinical safety: who marks the test.
• 90-day window and kill date.
• What we will not pretend (no "the act will be rewritten by Christmas").
• How we will publish the learning internally if the test dies.

NSW cluster work that moves has this page, even if they do not call it that. IRD NZ work that moves treats the customer (a taxpayer, a small business, an intermediary) and the legislation as the same brief. Services Australia work that moves names privacy, identity, and payments on day one. GDS-style assessments already ask who the user is and what you have learned. NHS-shaped rooms add clinical safety and IG to the constraint. Steal the questions. Put them on the permission page.

Split the ask

GDS spent years making the opposite of fiction normal: start small, show the thing, assess against a standard. Departments still drift back to fiction when the spend threshold hits. The steal for NSW, IRD, Services Australia, and a UK department that just tendered for design-thinking T&E: split the ask. Discovery and a 90-day test get a small envelope and a kill date. Scale gets a different envelope after evidence. If procurement cannot split the ask, the theatre is in the panel, not in the workshop.

Public-sector two-day accent

Day one. Frame the problem in the words of a citizen or a frontline officer. Frame the constraint in the words of the act, the privacy team, or the payments owner. Interview both. NSW Service NSW-style "make it easier" work dies when only the citizen is in the brief. IRD work dies when only the act is in the brief. You need both sentences.

Day two. Prototype the service slice and the decision pack. A paper script for a claims conversation at Services Australia. A redesigned letter at IRD. A referral concierge in a NSW health or transport adjacent service. A GDS-style transaction path in a UK department. An NHS pathway script that does not need a new spine. Plus the one-page risk and comms note.

UK tenders that buy sticky-note tourism produce a cohort photo. Tenders that write residue into the statement of work produce a service owner who can run a 90-day test. If you are writing the SOW, demand the artefacts this primer names.

Legal variant (Allens-shaped)

Legal service design fails when it is taught as a customer-journey poster and asked to survive a file.

Frame: intake, scoping, or knowledge handoff on a matter type a partner cares about. Not "the future of the firm."

Users: the partner, the operator (EA, paralegal, knowledge, intake), the client contact, and the GC-shaped risk on that matter type.

Paper trail: a scoping note, a first-client email, a knowledge handoff checklist, and a time recording reality. If the new path cannot be staffed on a live matter, it was a sketch.

Kill: the practice will not put a live matter on the path by the kill date, or the partner minutes on intake do not move.

Do not: run the room without a partner. Do not treat knowledge as a poster. Do not invent a quote from Allens or Linklaters. Steal the seam.

Energy variant (AGL-shaped)

Energy retail and generation cannot "move fast and break things." The thing you break is a household bill, a hardship conversation, or a generator.

Frame: an offer, a bill explanation, a hardship script, or a connection promise. Constraint: AER-shaped retail rules, claims, and operational risk.

Users: the customer, the retail lead, the hardship or care operator, retail risk, and comms.

Paper trail: the script or offer one-pager, the claims rule, the kill criteria, and the comms sentence. Lean inside this business is a test licence, not a new product in the stack.

Kill: risk will not sign the paper version, or the script fails a hardship or claims mark.

NAB-shaped banking rhymes (conduct, operational risk, core gravity). Use the energy variant when the harm is a household. Use the banking rhyme when the harm is a decision, a decline, or a document chase. Do not mash them into "utilities and banks are digital now."

Two-day run of show

Two days. One problem. One room. A decision in the last afternoon. You can stretch to three only if framing is genuinely missing. Do not stretch to five. Five is how a primer becomes a project.

Day 0 (ninety minutes, remote is fine)

• Confirm problem, constraint, decision-maker, test channel.
• Owner sends a draft framing page.
• Stopper marks the constraint.
• Operator brings three artefacts and a timed step list.
• If any of the four (problem, constraint, decision-maker, test channel) is missing, do not book the room.

Day 1 morning (frame)

• 20 min: job of the two days. No icebreaker.
• 40 min: framing questions on the wall. Constraint first.
• 40 min: interview the stopper and the operator (they are users).
• 20 min: rewrite the problem in four lines. Kill any sentence a board cannot repeat.
• 30 min: choose the thinnest test the constraint allows. Kill platform talk.

Day 1 afternoon (make it thin)

• 30 min: paper trail kit assigned (risk note, comms sentence, procurement path, ops slice).
• 90 min: prototype the service or product slice (script, letter, concierge desk, clickable, throwaway page).
• 30 min: first marks from stopper and comms.
• 20 min: list what you still do not know. Book one conversation for tomorrow morning if you must. Not twelve.

Day 2 morning (test and tighten)

• 60 min: put the slice in front of real users or real operators (three is enough). Public-sector rooms: a citizen and a frontline officer if you can.
• 45 min: rewrite the slice. Kill decoration.
• 45 min: finish the paper trail. Risk note and kill criteria above the concept.
• 30 min: owner names the 30-day plan and the aftercare home.

Day 2 afternoon (decide)

• 20 min: residue page drafted in the room (problem, test, owner, stopper, kill date, metric, dollars).
• 40 min: decision-maker present. Go, iterate, or kill. If they send a delegate who cannot kill, you scheduled applause.
• 20 min: write the board sentence.
• 20 min: send the residue note. Book the first aftercare heartbeat. Stand up.

Atlassian can hang this inside an existing cadence. Capital One-style orgs can hang it inside a design week. Inkeros-style rooms already run a two-day shape. Infinitev-style rooms swap the slice for a claims-safe page. GDS-shaped teams hang the last afternoon on an assessment question. Allens hangs it on a practice meeting. AGL hangs it on a retail and risk forum. Same run of show. Different letterhead.

Don'ts

Don't start with the customer and hide the constraint until week nine. Put the stopper in hour one.

Don't treat risk, procurement, and comms as blockers to be managed after the mural. They are users.

Don't prototype only the interface. Prototype the paper trail.

Don't show the board a concept without kill criteria. They will invent a sequel.

Don't run public-sector Design Thinking as a lab offsite. Use the permission page. Split the ask. GDS, NSW, IRD, Services Australia, NHS: same physics.

Don't run legal Design Thinking without a partner and a file. Allens-shaped work lives on a matter.

Don't run energy Design Thinking as a startup weekend. AGL-shaped harm is a bill or a generator.

Don't invite a gallery. One problem. One room.

Don't skip users because a model "sounded like" them. Talk to three. Operators count.

Don't leave residue until Friday. Same day. One page.

Don't invent quotes or scores for named accounts. Steal the pattern.

If the prototype cannot survive a one-page risk note, it was a sketch, not a bet. If the room cannot name an owner and a kill date, you facilitated stationery. Steal the questions. Book the stopper. Decide.