My experience as a photographer instilled in me a knack for solving problems, an eye for technical details, and the ability to make quick decisions—all while building strong connections with people. These skills form the core strengths of my coaching approach.

Co-facilitating various projects allowed me to observe, collaborate with, and eventually lead teams through EDT exercises. This hands-on experience prepared me for further IBM contributions as a coach in planning workshops, creative collaboration sessions, mentoring new hires and leading cross-team retrospectives.

Over a two-and-a-half-year span, I coached a series of projects that allowed me to apply IBM’s EDT tenets. These projects enabled me to grow as a design thinking coach, demonstrate my expertise, and earn the EDT Coach badge.

Project: Workflows - Cross Team Retrospective

EDT Goal: Align Team on a Human-Centered Intent

EDT Goal: Align a Team on Delivery

Project: DataOps OKRs setting workshop

EDT Goal: Facilitate workshops

After being contacted to help spearhead this workshop, my first challenge came with not knowing much about this topic! To remedy this, I researched OKR workshops, quickly gaining a baseline for how this is done.

From here, I and the other facilitators met to plan a successful agenda. I took on designing the board, referencing my OKRs research discoveries, as well as pulling in the key points from IBM design’s business goals for 2022.

The team’s first meeting included an intro and review of the previous year’s process for pain points. We then gave the team homework to define collect perceived objectives into Mural.

Starting here, I co-led the team into iterative clustering and labeling, ending with these final labels to define our 2022 objectives.

The last work was done in 7 breakout teams which took charge of setting the final key results. These groups would also track success throughout the year, using Airtable to track and report progress.

The workshop emerged with 21 key results and the Data Ops team finished the year with 16% getting flagged as ‘at risk', leaving us with a focus for 2023 improvements.

EDT Goal: Leveraging the keys -

Two key things led to the success of this workshop: aligning with our user’s needs (IBM’s business goals), and defining a new method for tracking.

I helped coach the team in this workshop by bringing in IBMs 2022 design business goals to use as a north star for the workshop. Breaking these goals into topics, I co-led the team into using these objectives to help align their final Hills: which in this case were the final 2022 OKRs.

Next, the other coach and I led the workshop in a retrospective of the previous year, examining ways to improve the process. Accountability had been a roadblock the previous year, so this led to the squad choosing Airtable to better track success each quarter.

Coaching this workshop helped the team create a trackable set of OKRs for 2022 that successfully met IBM’s design goals as well as improving the tracking process for the team over the previous year.

EDT Goal: Enable and Inform others

This workshop included 13 designers, almost all experienced with EDT workshops, so the activities began with some homework. Participants were asked to read the IBM Design business goals and do asynchronous brainstorming into a Mural board.

I built this board to be an artifact, with links to internal business articles as well as external resources for anyone new to the process. An early challenge we encountered was that attendees didn’t fulfill the homework asynchronously, so we needed to adjust the workshop to accommodate for this.

We did learn that participants were excited about the activities. These included brainstorming, sorting, labeling and voting, iterating through this process twice. After three sessions, we then created breakout teams for each objective, to set final key results and track quarterly.

By starting as a large group, then downsizing into breakout groups, the teams became self-sufficient in setting key results. By also assigning them to track OKRs they decided to “own”, they recognized the assignment and followed this throughout the year..

The DataOps Design team ended the year with a 84% success rate, with a few OKRs becoming de-scoped and a few others cited for possibly being too ambitious.

Project: JumpStart Design Coaching

EDT Goal: Drive the Loop

The Loop is IBM’s way of defining the process: Observe - Reflect - Make and then iterate and circle back to repeat this process.

The 2021 Texas JumpStart Slam had the opportunity to meet and interview their stakeholders multiple times. Their project was to create an online environment for social gaming, their stakeholders were P-tech students. We incoporated this process through a series of activities:

• Assumptions/ Means to Resolve activity - I challenged the team to “assume” their users’ needs.

• Research questions - I led them to next create questions, based on areas they still needed to understand, to bring into their stakeholder Interviews

• Empathy Map - we used this to reflect, while looping this into additional Interviews.

• Personas - I encouraged the team to bring this research back to help define a “typical gamer".

• Hills - Lastly, I coached them into defining who/what/wow, based on their top two personas’ needs

Through this process of multiple interview sessions, the team was able to loop back and ask lingering questions relating to user needs. The team’s assumptions were validated, and their final project resulted in having a strong backbone of user input and was a success.

EDT Goal: Create healthy team conditions

JumpStart is a program geared towards developers new to design thinking. Each team brings a different dynamic of personalities, and while collaborating remotely it can be hard to engage each member. To remedy this, I employ a method I saw my early mentor do.

To quieter people on the team, I call them out and ask if they might have a perspective that hadn’t yet been voiced. This allows others to speak up and adds value to the discussions. I also note which members are quieter participants and privately urge them to contribute, if not always in discussions, then to add their notes to the remote whiteboard

EDT Goal: Evolve the practice

I recently joined a JumpStart session and discovered that the team was having real trouble with understanding the Roadmap “cupcake” vs “wedding cake” definitions. To help clarify, I cited an example my own team had encountered that week.

Having explored extensive solutions for a project, we were getting close to deadline and needed to scope our grandiose idea into a smaller “cupcake” delivery for this deadline. I described how having the “cupcake / birthday cake / wedding cake” analogy had become integral to us for breaking down a larger project that we wouldn’t see any success in, instead into smaller “cupcake” deliveries that would help break the cake into more bite-sized measurable achievements.

By giving the team a working example of how this method helped my team, they grasped the concept easily. The team now understood scoping. They had a large idea they wanted to build, but by paring it down into a bite-sized version for their JumpStart workshop they could complete their project successfully while also leaving a future goal for later focus.

EDT coach learning is never complete. What fascinates me is the chance to continuously learn from coaching, while also giving guidance. As new cohorts form and new projects come up, the variety and differing perspectives are inspiring.

As next steps, I look forward to trying out my new design coaching skills contributing to projects like a patent group, as well as reaching out to help mentor others interested in learning EDT coaching.

Enterprise Design Thinking continues into my off-hours and even percolates into my hobbies

My band Cape Fury was lacking focus and I coached an activity to reboot our passion. During a recent rehearsal I set up a mini EDT workshop to generate ideas and hone a plan for the upcoming year.

• I initiated us in a big ideas vignette: each person listing five goals

• I then led a clustering exercise of similar ideas, and labeling each cluster with an actionable summary.

• Lastly, we made a prioritization grid to examine which ideas bubbled to the top as having the highest impact and being most feasible.

The takeaway from this process was that we discussed each other’s perspectives, reinforcing the value of each person contributions. As the year continued, we did complete and publish two songs, played fewer gigs, but with better attendance and we lined up a recording session for the following spring with 5 new songs.