The notes can be thorough, and the sentence on the way out can still be the one the sponsor wrote on the way in. A wall of quotes is a record of what was said. It is not yet a reason to change the work.
Jon Kolko treats that missing step as the work. In Abductive thinking and the drivers of design synthesis, dated 2010, synthesis is what happens when someone organises, prunes and filters what was gathered until a structure appears. If you are about to book, the useful part is why that step disappears and what it has to produce.
An explanation that can be wrong
Kolko calls synthesis an abductive sensemaking process. He cites Charles Sanders Peirce: abduction is the step of adopting a hypothesis suggested by the facts, a form of inference. Deduction, as Kolko sets it out, cannot tell you anything that was not already in the premises. Induction expects the next case to resemble the ones you have seen. Abduction introduces a further claim that was not in that set, offered as the best account of what you saw. He is explicit that the conclusion can be false even when the premises are true.
He reports Roger Martin's phrase, the logic of what might be, and says it is not quite right. Martin is identified there as dean of the Rotman School of Management. The tighter account is an argument to the best explanation, and Peirce calls the insight extremely fallible. The new suggestion is putting together what had not been put together before. A theme that restates the brief is not that, and neither is a solution drawn first. The sentence you want is one the notes make plausible and the team will allow to be false.
Why the step gets skipped
His complaint is practical. When the sensemaking stays in one person's head, a sponsor sees the notes and then an idea, with no path between them, and soon discounts the notes. When the plan assigns no time and no artefact to the step, people are told to do it on their own time or not at all. The output should be a hypothesis the group can discuss, keep or reject. Until it is on a surface everyone can move, it cannot be rejected.
The actions he names are prioritising, judging and forging connections. He takes sensemaking, from Gary Klein, Brian Moon and Robert Hoffman, as the effort to understand connections so you can anticipate what comes next and act. Prioritising says one note matters more than another. Judging throws out what is not relevant. Forging a connection means saying why two pieces belong together. That reason is a story you add, and he says it is rarely checked when you write it. Write it in a form the room can argue with before anyone draws a solution.
What the agenda gives away
A weak proposal moves from interviews to solutions and calls the clustering a warm-up. Ask where the hypothesis will be written, who may say it is the wrong explanation and what would count as the notes failing to support it. A vote on favourite solutions means the step was not booked. Kolko's wall is how a group sees the whole set at once. A folder on a laptop will not, because the folders already decided the structure.
Collective Campus is building high-performance culture and teams for the AI world. The design thinking workshop is for a team that already has notes from the people in the problem and needs a sentence it did not walk in with. What else the agenda should cover is in what a corporate design thinking workshop should cover. When a service manager should book the room is in when a service manager should book. A feature that left the building before anyone asked is in the feature the customer never asked for.
What to bring
Bring the notes, not a solution, and the name of the person who can say an explanation is wrong. If the brief is not allowed to change, the notes have nothing to do.
