Whether you want to introduce design thinking into a single management or test it in relation to a specific task, we recommend that you start by formulating a vision or motivation.

Describe quite briefly what it is you are striving to achieve, why it is important, and why you want to seek out methods other than those you have used so far. This ensures that you as a team have a common understanding and direction.

Also examine how you can secure the mandate for the initiative and how you can best anchor it both internally in the team and in the management. Create clear responsibilities, set milestones, and schedule regular meetings to ensure project progress and success.

It takes education and training to work with design thinking. Therefore, we recommend that the employees and managers involved have access to a shorter training course or course in design thinking. It provides a solid introduction to design methodologies and processes and a common starting point for further work.

Together with Design School Kolding, we have created the targeted basic course “Practice Design Thinking in Public Organizations”. The course is handled by skilled design teachers from the school Lifelong Learning Unit and helps ensure that your skills development is research-based.

The advantage of the course is that you can work on a current case. In this way, you will receive ongoing professional sparring in order to organize and implement your project. In addition, you typically work together with colleagues from other municipalities. It gives you a valuable network that you can enjoy far into the future.

It takes training to put design thinking into practice, but it's just as important to create a culture where it's okay to be curious and not know all the answers. Therefore, it may be a good idea to implement initiatives that remind everyone on a daily basis why you are working this way and what the goal is. This can be, for example, in the form of simple rules of conduct that guide your work, or initiatives that ensure that you continuously train and develop your methods.

In Kolding Municipality, for example, we have established a “training field” where we work with concrete citizen cases and practice everything from constructive questioning techniques to the development of prototypes.