“This is a new beginning. We are one. Fly and open your mind to new trends.”

These were the thoughts that the recently incorporated Retail Director of JLL Spain wanted to transmit to his team.  He arrived to our small, but tiny Design Thinking room thirsty for innovation and he asked for our help to redesign their annual seminar.

The Spanish retail team is composed by several departments and they are responsible for the operative management of shopping malls all over Spain. They realized that the universe of shopping malls is changing and they have to be prepared for it. People need and demand real experiences and not only fancy stores and bars in the same building. At the same time they wanted to improve the provided services to their clients, the owners of the shopping malls.

We proposed to design an immersive experience where they were the superheroes and they had to save the shopping mall experience. As part of this experience, we conceived a two-day workshop for the retail team in which they were taken through the whole creative process and could try different DT tools in customized workshops. As Katja Tschimmel says in Design Thinking as an Effective Toolkit for Innovation, the aim of the training was to familiarize the participants with all of the stages of the creative process and the techniques which support collective creation.

“Learning how to move in creative processes through the application of Design Thinking tools is useful to everybody who wants to identify new human needs.” (Katja Tschimmel, Design Thinking as an effective toolkit for innovation)

Cool, but…What is the tangible benefit of making everyone a design thinker? How do employees take DT in their daily work? How could the retail team be prepared for the management of shopping malls of the future? What did they learn in these two days?

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