Training of Occupational Health and Safety Professionals in Design Thinking

Within realistic time constraints we successfully trained six occupational health and safety professionals in applying a Design Thinking (DT) approach to solve complex musculoskeletal and psychosocial problems at work. DT may be defined by the double diamond model pointing to a non-linear and user-centred problem-solving process iterating through divergent and convergent phases A key characteristic of DT is the ability to frame a problematic situation in new and interesting ways. The training was done in a full-day workshop followed by a learning-by-doing phase in which they planned and completed design sprint workshops in companies. The professionals went from novices into advanced beginners according to the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. In the overall question of the usefulness of DT in OHS management, the average rating went from 6 before the training course to 9.5 after. In an evaluation of the DT approach on a 1–5 scale they rated design sprints at 3.8 to be more appropriate to manage complex problems than the methods they normally used. However, more experience seems necessary to adopt the DT mind set of an iterative process, in which they need to decide which tools to use in an emergent, nonlinear and iterative fashion.