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SOCIAL INNOVATION WITH X-IDEA
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Thinkergy got invited by UNICEF Thailand to run a X-IDEA Innovation Project aiming to create a more effective, productive and innovative UNICEF office of the future.
The social innovation project was part of a staff retreat in Hua Hin, Thinkergy had only 2.5 days to guide the 44 UNICEF delegates split into 4 project teams towards the desired results.
Due to the time limitations, Thinkergy conducted a series of pre-workshop staff interviews as well as preparation meetings to become aware of possible innovation challenges (relating to both issues and opportunities). We used the insights gained in the interviews to structure the overall flow of activities and pick those X-IDEA tools that we believed will help the project teams to become aware of their real challenge.
In the Xploration stage, the teams checked on their core assumptions and on the existence of “rules for fools”, walked a mile in the shoes of key stakeholders, looked at their challenge from different scales by examining the big and small picture, had to answer powerful —and at times provocative— Xploration questions, among others. The teams realized that compliance to audit guidelines and internal bureaucracy has made them too inside-focused, slow and passive. The teams consensually agreed to reframe their Final Challenge to reflect their real challenge: “How to make UNICEF Thailand fast, flexible and fearless?”
In the following, the teams produced over 3,000 raw ideas during Ideation, which built the ground stock to then design over 130 realistic, meaningful idea concepts in the Development-stage. In the Evaluation-stage, each team elected its 3 top concepts, which they then pitched in the final Action-stage.
Interestingly, while the Final Challenge was more internally focused, more than half of the pitched top idea concepts made meaning for UNICEF Thailand’s external stakeholders (e.g., local and migrant children, partners, and donors). Time for you to become fast, flexible & fearless?
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“The X-IDEA Innovation Project workshop with Thinkergy was an amazing energy boost for all of the UNICEF Thailand team. The 2.5 days was a real whirl storm of ideation which enabled the team to create over 3,000 ideas focused on ways to make UNICEF “Fast, Flexible and Fearless”, so as to make an all the more powerful impact in changing vulnerable children lives in Thailand. Both myself and the team were simply amazed at not just the number of ideas we created in such a short time span, but also of the depth and quality of the proposed innovations, as well as the level of energy, buy-in and innovation mindset shift that the workshop created for the vast majority of staff. Not for the fainthearted given the hard-paced approach and demanding rhythm of the Thinkergy team, but absolutely and totally worth it in terms both of team building impact as well as of the range and depth of innovation concepts that the workshop created in a tiny amount of time!”
