Design Thinking Workshops for an Agricultural Lending Firm
Lesson Learned:
Stagnancy is not a state of being, it’s a choice.
Design Thinking Workshops for an Agricultural Lending Firm
In this article…
Project Overview
Type of Project:
Design Thinking Workshop Facilitation
Role:
Co-Facilitator
Client: Undisclosed (due to NDA)
Date: Dec 2017
Location: Midwest, USA
Project Details
If you know anything about me, then you know that I get absolutely hyped about projects at the intersection of agriculture and experience design. And truthfully, it’s because these opportunities are so rare. It’s not every day that an experience designer gets to work with farmers and farm-related projects. This project was such a fun opportunity to help a motivated team tackle the monumental challenge of cultivating a culture of innovation while straddling two highly-traditional, highly-regulated industries: finance and farming.
Finance brings with it legacy systems, legal requirements, and a culture of risk-aversion that can be quite difficult to overcome. Despite this, many financial institutions have already embraced design thinking to identify creative ways to stay relevant and profitable.
Agriculture, on the other hand, is a different story. While agricultural innovation is happening all the time at research universities all over the world, it’s also not uncommon to drive less than an hour away from a research university and see a tractor from the 1930s still in operation (I’m looking at you, Ford N-series tractors). Farming is capital intensive, and assets are often used for as long as they are functional.
This client was uniquely positioned in that it wasn’t just their team who would benefit from design thinking workshops, but also their clients: farmers looking to innovate and grow their own businesses.
Updated: Dec 2024
Project Goal:
Build design-thinking competency and establish a subset of design thinking champions to help foster a customer-centric, innovative culture.
Farming innovation
In 2020, the USDA found that family farms make up 98% of all farms in America, and provide 88% of the country’s food production, with small family farms owning half of the farmland in America and generating 21% of production. Additionally, as the average life expectancy increases over time, farmers are working longer into old age, which means farms remain multigenerational for longer periods of time.
Phrased another way: nearly all farms in the United States are family-owned and operated, and usually have to provide an income for two generations of farmers: the parents and the adult children now working on the farm with them. So, it’s unsurprising to see farmers resist investing in innovation when so much is on the line.
That said, if you’ve ever met a farmer, then you know: farmers are some of the smartest, and most innovative people you will ever meet. When things break, they can “MacGyver” the most incredible solutions, and are often ready to share their ideas to anyone willing to listen. While they might not want to invest, they’re often very willing to get creative, leveraging knowledge of an immense array of topics ranging from mechanical & electrical engineering, to soil and plant science, microbiology, and more.
The stereotype of the “dumb” farmer couldn’t be further from the actual truth. These folks are already deeply interested in innovation, and just need a supportive financial structure to get there.
Enter: our client and its services.
What our team provided
Our client hired us for a 2-day design thinking workshop with the following primary objectives:
educate as much of the company as possible on design thinking methodologies and facilitation techniques
refine persona artifacts and collaboratively map the user experience by while working with real end-users
gather data and prepare facilitators for upcoming workshopping and roadmapping initiatives
The agenda incorporated the following artifacts and activities:
Proto-persona development:
The client recruited several real customers to participate in the workshop. These customers were interviewed in real-time and the teams synthesized the findings into proto-personas (in the format of empathy mapping)Journey mapping:
Teams split up and tackled a few of the proto-personas’ primary pain points. Generally, the scope of these focused on project-based lending and financial literacy. Pain points were narrowed to more granular scopes and prioritized for ideation.Structured ideation:
We guided teams through structured ideation activities to help encourage more radical and varied idea generation.To-be vignettes/storytelling:
The top ideas were presented to the broader group as a series of skits or storyboards to help visualize new opportunities andFacilitation & implementation coaching:
After the primary design thinking workshop was complete, we invited future facilitators to join a kick-off session which identified design thinking “champions” for a community of practice, which would help the company continue to sustain future design thinking work beyond our initial workshop.
What I learned
This continues to be a workshop that I reflect upon years later for its many lessons. However, if I had to pick 3 primary takeaways:
Personas have the potential to become caricatures of customers rather than meaningful representations of real people, especially if they are created from assumptions rather than data. Having participants interview real customers can help further foster deep empathy and give employees a deeper sense of purpose and connection to customers in their work.
Innovation does not always need to look like “design thinking” as rote. Successful solution design comes from a thorough and well-defined understanding of the problem, a sense of curiosity to try strange things, and a willingness to commit to the messiness of implementation. The best innovation strategies will meet teams where they are.
Stagnancy is not a state of being, it’s a choice. As the proverb goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” and with enough insight (real data about your customers), that necessity will make itself known very quickly. Stagnancy, then, is a choice by omission: a choice to stay oblivious to those insights or to stay comfortable. But, luckily, stagnancy is easy to remedy, because once you aren’t oblivious… it’s hard to stay comfortable.
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