DLA Design

Do you want to interact with your business in a different way? Or find more innovative solutions to business problems? Issues can range from encouraging collaboration between teams, to how to get the best output from your supply chain. Often, when we look at a problem, people focus on the surface level and only get a surface-level solution. The solution works, but not as well as it could.

There are various ways we can apply DLA Design in-person or virtually:

• Design Workshops: An interactive workshop bringing people together to brainstorm and dig deeper into a specific challenge.
• Away Day: DLA Piper will host an away day, allowing teams to come together in a creative environment. You and your team will challenge underlying assumptions, explore the problem, and suspend judgement to create solutions. 
• Design Sprint: Design sprints are about identifying the solution to your business challenge. Using the DLA Design methodology, we then help you to create solutions, making sure you're at the center of the building process. 
• Capability Building: We can deliver training to build design thinking capability in your team and organization. We cover the fundamental phases of the design-thinking framework, share practical applications you can apply day-to-day, and teach you how to reframe the way you approach problems and create solutions.

In partnership with HKA, a leading global risk mitigation and dispute resolution consultancy firm, our team ran a roundtable on gender balance in construction. The participants included senior stakeholders from construction companies across the Middle East. They took away two main solution areas to develop.

The first key takeaway was the importance of empowering women already in leadership positions to enable other women to progress. The second key takeaway was the importance of inspiring the next generation of women in construction in the early stages of their education. With two key solutions identified, we wanted to continue the conversation, and facilitated a design thinking session on the idea of empowering women in leadership to be advocates for other women in achieving gender balance.

The design thinking session set out tangible next steps, allowing the initiative to be carried forward through the new gender balance in construction committee. This committee has pledged to meet quarterly, to check in on agreed actions, and share results, successes and best practice.

Through individual and collective pledges, the team identified numerous actions. These included creating a healthy environment where people aren't afraid to speak up, reading literature from different cultures, transparency around promotions, mentorship programs, and social media campaigns sharing success stories.

Using DLA Design to help shift employees’ mindsets

A client in the energy industry was facing the challenge of not only shifting to renewable energy sources, but also changing the behaviours and mindset of its employees.

The client wanted its workforce to be more curious, to create and explore new ideas, and to challenge its traditional ways of working. Both its legal and marketing teams were tasked with achieving this change. But they didn’t know quite where to start.

So we introduced them to DLA Design, our design thinking methodology. We created a day-long workshop for 12 people from the two teams. The purpose was twofold: to help them get to the root of the challenge of the change project, and to train them as design thinking facilitators. To support that, we coached them in the following months as they set about tackling and leading on their change projects using design thinking techniques.

The result was a core team of people with the confidence and skills to introduce design thinking across their organisation, facilitate design thinking sessions across multiple business areas, and drive forward change across their organisation

Get in touch to learn more about how DLA Design can support your business.

Streamlining global contract drafting

When drafting contracts, a global toy production company previously had to consult multiple guidance documents. It was complicated and time consuming for the legal team, and their internal stakeholders felt the turnaround times were too slow.

We ran a DLA Design session with members of the global toy production company to understand why the process was so complicated, what their pain points were, and brainstorm what a solution would look like.

The result was Sidebar: an add-in for Microsoft Word that displays all guidance the legal team needs to create a draft contract. Guidance can be turned off when the contract is sent to a third party – and back on again when it’s returned.

Sidebar means the business can create contracts quickly and seamlessly, and by being hosted on their own system it removes the need to search multiple guidance documents.

Get in touch with our team to learn more about DLA Design.

Design thinking is suitable for everyone and every organization, particularly those who want to:

• be more creative
• solve a problem a different way
• learn new skills, tools and techniques needed for innovation
• bring their team together by doing something fun and different to create change