How to Use Experiential Learning to Teach Design Thinking

Design Thinking workshops are great for unlocking creativity, encouraging collaboration, and finding solutions to real-world problems.

And while plenty of guides cover the basics - the five stages of Design Thinking, structuring standard workshops etc - few go beyond the surface-level overview. This guide is for facilitators who want to bring the model to life by deepening understanding of each stage.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Define what success looks like in Design Thinking sessions

  • Spot the behaviours and group dynamics that can help or hinder progress

  • Use experiential learning activities to overcome common challenges 

  • Use experiential learning activities to bring each stage of Design Thinking to life

  • Structure your workshop with effective and engaging session flows 

After reading, you’ll have the tools to teach Design Thinking more effectively. You’ll help individuals and teams move from theory to action, with greater confidence in applying what they’ve learned.

What is Design Thinking (DT)?

Design Thinking is a problem-solving approach drawing on principles from design, psychology, and business. The goal is to understand the needs of the people you're designing for, generate ideas for a solution, and test the ideas quickly. There's an emphasis on creativity, collaboration, and experimentation.

The approach has its roots in industry and product design. In the late 20th century, IDEO and Stanford’s d.school began to formalise these practices into a repeatable methodology that could be applied beyond traditional design in non-design areas like business. 

Hallmarks of Design Thinking:

  • Empathising with users

  • Rapid prototyping and iteration

  • Collaboration across disciplines

  • Willingness to challenge assumptions

  • Emphasis on action

Design Thinking is typically split into five key stages, although it is non-linear in practice meaning teams can jump ahead, loop back, repeat stages, or work on multiple alongside each other:

  1. Empathise: understand the users and their needs through observation, engagement, and immersion

  2. Define: gather insights to clearly articulate the problem to be solved

  3. Ideate: generate a wide range of possible solutions, without narrowing the focus too soon

  4. Prototype: create simple, testable versions of potential solutions

  5. Test: try out prototypes with users, gather feedback, and refine

Learn More About Design Thinking

This post focusses on helping facilitators to use experiential learning to teach Design Thinking. If you want to learn more about the approach itself, there are many comprehensive resources available including:

Who Design Thinking Works Best For

Despite the name, Design Thinking isn’t just for designers. It’s a methodology that can be applied across a wide range of roles, industries, and workshop formats.

Design Thinking works best when participants are facing challenges without a clear solution, especially where empathy, creativity, and iteration are key. It’s particularly effective for:

  • Cross-functional teams solving customer experience, service, or process issues

  • Managers and leaders looking to foster innovation or drive change

  • Educators and trainers building creative confidence in students or staff

  • Consultants and facilitators working across sectors to unlock team potential

  • Product teams, strategists, and marketers aiming to understand user needs and test ideas quickly

According to Harvard Business School, Design Thinking is widely used in fields like healthcare, finance, and education, and valued by professionals in roles such as UX/UI design, innovation strategy, business analysis, project management, and service design.

What Success Looks Like in Design Thinking Sessions

Design Thinking is about transforming how individuals and teams approach challenges, rather than just generating a list of ideas, and leveraging this transformation to arrive at meaningful solutions to the stated problem. 

A successful session should move towards a solution, with participants being open to uncertainty, curious about user needs, and willing to test and learn rather than jumping straight to solutions. 

Here are some signs of success to look for:

  • Energy and engagement: participants are curious, enthusiastic, and willing to experiment

  • Good communication: participants ask goodquestions, listen more deeply, and show comfort with ambiguity

  • Balanced contributions: input is shared evenly across the group, with quieter participants having the confidence to contribute and dominant voices making space

  • Exploratory thinking: fixed ideas give way to exploratory thinking

  • Collaboration over competition: participants build on each other’s ideas and focus on shared goals rather than competing 

  • Team outcomes: groups generate concepts that reflect real user insights, not just internal assumptions, and begin to align around actionable next steps

Common Challenges When Facilitating Design Thinking Sessions

There are several common blockers that can get in the way of success during Design Thinking sessions. Later we’ll explore how experiential learning activities can build the skills and understanding to help participants avoid these..

Here are some signs your sessions might need troubleshooting:

  • Energy drops early on: participants may struggle to engage with the empathy or problem-framing stages, or jump too quickly to solutions

  • Things feel rushed or forced: time may feel unbalanced across stages, or participants might feel pressured to progress too quickly

  • Ideas are safe and familiar: rather than exploring new directions, participants might fixate on existing assumptions or overly practical suggestions

  • One or two voices dominate: some team members may talk over others or push their ideas forward without group consensus

  • Feedback feels uncomfortable or avoided: the group may hesitate to test assumptions or challenge each other

Theory-Specific Challenges

Even with a well-designed session and motivated participants, you might come across some arising from how people understand (or misunderstand) the underlying mindset.

Here are three common pitfalls to watch for:

  • Treating the process as strictly linear: participants may feel compelled to “complete” one phase before moving onto the next, which is based on a limited understanding of the non-linear nature of DT. This can lead to missed opportunities for refinement as new insights emerge, and to attempts to tick boxes rather than exploring the problem in depth.

  • Jumping to solutions too quickly: wanting to help or push things forward can lead participants towards ideation before they fully understand the problem. This can mean that empathy and definition stages aren’t given enough attention, leading to solutions that may be efficient but not effective.

  • Struggling with truly divergent thinking: lots of people are more comfortable evaluating the ideas of others than generating them. During the ideation phase, participants may hold back or get caught up on what’s feasible too early. This can lead to narrower ideation and a risk-averse approach.

These challenges aren’t signs that Design Thinking doesn’t work or that there’s something wrong with your workshop. They can suggest that participants might need more practice navigating uncertainty, shifting perspectives, and embracing open-ended creative thinking. 

Broader Facilitation Aspirations for Problem-Solving Sessions

As a facilitator, your role is to create the conditions where participants can develop the confidence, behaviours, and mindset needed for effective problem-solving, whether in a Design Thinking session or any collaborative environment. Having clear facilitation goals helps you focus on what participants take away from a session.

Here are a some facilitation aspirations and the common difficulties that can get in the way:

  • Grounding discussions in real-life experience: it’s easy for groups to default to abstract ideas, hypothetical examples, or generic business-speak, especially if they don’t feel fully invested. A great session helps people connect the framework to their lived experience, which leads to more practical, relevant outcomes.

  • Encouraging balanced contributions: uneven participation is one of the most common challenges in group work. Whether caused by personality dynamics or varying confidence levels, certain voices can dominate while others hold back. Design Thinking works best with diverse thought, so it’s important to create space for quieter voices.

  • Fostering confident, motivated learners: participants often arrive with varying levels of confidence. Some may be afraid of contributing ideas in case they get it “wrong”. A successful workshop nurtures a sense of psychological safety where experimentation is encouraged and curiosity is rewarded.

Whether you’re running a session focused on problem solving, teamwork, or leadership, the same underlying challenge often applies: how to move from passive participation to active, reflective engagement.

Our experiential learning activities are built around these facilitation goals, and designed to surface desired behaviours and create space to explore them constructively. 

Experiential Learning Activities to Strengthen Design Thinking Sessions

These activities weren’t designed specifically for Design Thinking, but they map naturally to its stages and are effective in helping participants understand and internalise the Design Thinking mindset. They can help facilitators to teach the principles of Design Thinking in ways that are engaging and memorable.

Over the Bridge - from MTa Team Kit

In this activity participants have to design a wheeled vehicle and a method of getting it across a river, under competition conditions and with limited resources. The task unfolds in distinct phases: planning, ordering materials, and construction, with plenty of opportunities to spot miscommunication, assumption-making, and group dynamics in action.

  • Best for: exploring the full Design Thinking experience (Empathise through to Test)

  • When to use: this activity works best when introducing the full Design Thinking process. It’s useful for helping participants understand how the stages connect, where iteration matters, and how assumptions and team dynamics can shape outcomes.

  • Pain points addressed: poor problem framing, skipping empathy, weak team collaboration

  • Why it works: Over the Bridge simulates an end-to-end cycle of Design Thinking, including time for ideation, prototyping, and real-time testing. The optional inclusion of ‘customer’ criteria helps teams confront real-world complexity and ambiguity.

The Hoist - from MTa Insights

In this three-part activity, teams first design a hoist, then instruct another team to build it based solely on their directions, before ultimately watching their design come to life. It reveals how clarity, motivation, and collaboration influence successful implementation.

  • Best for: Test stage, and developing communication and collaboration 

  • When to use: when teaching the challenges of handoff and execution in the Design Thinking process. It’s useful for showing what can go wrong when ideas are passed between people or teams without shared understanding or motivation.

  • Pain points addressed: poor communication, lack of clarity in later stages, disengagement

  • Why it works: participants design a solution, then hand it off to another team to build, mirroring what often happens between design, dev, and delivery teams. Highlights breakdowns in instruction and knowledge transfer.

Artifacts - from MTa Insights

Teams are asked to design striking ornaments for a customer—but only after negotiating a short, high-stakes Q&A session to uncover the customer’s real needs. They must then pitch their creations back, balancing creativity with constraints like shipping requirements and flat-pack design.

  • Best for: Empathise, Define and Ideate stages

  • When to use: to help participants practise early-stage Design Thinking, especially questioning and interpretation. It’s ideal for reinforcing the importance of listening, not assuming, and designing for real user needs.

  • Pain points addressed: assumption-led thinking, weak user understanding, superficial research

  • Why it works: teams must interview a customer to uncover needs, then design and present solutions based on what they learn - perfect opportunities to practice user-centred inquiry and value proposition design under pressure.

Sample Session Flow for Teaching Design Thinking Through Experiential Learning

There’s no one-size-fits-all flow for a session exploring Design Thinking, but here are two examples that incorporate MTa activities to support different goals:

Option 1: Introduction to Design Thinking (half-day)

Facilitation goal: to help participants build a better understanding of  DT and explore each phase of the model through guided experiential learning

  • Welcome + intro to Design Thinking (15 mins)

  • Experiential activity: Over the Bridge (90 mins including debrief)

  • Break + reflection (15 mins)

  • Mini framework recap: mapping activity phases to DT stages (20 mins)

  • Discussion: Applying the mindset at work (20 mins)

Option 2: Focused Skill Development (90–120 mins)

Facilitation goal: to deepen and reinforce specific skills like empathy or testing through targeted activities

  • Welcome + intro (10 mins)

  • Experiential activity: Artifacts or The Hoist (25–45 mins)

  • Small group review (20 mins)

  • Discussion: How this relates to our work (15 mins)

  • Wrap-up and next steps (10 mins)

These flows are flexible, modular, and ideal for building out full-day workshops or short interventions depending on your audience and objectives.

Effectively Reviewing Design Thinking Sessions 

Facilitated reflection is where much of the deep learning happens in an experiential learning session. The activities may reveal insights or challenge participant assumptions, but structured review lets them name those insights, share their thoughts, link them to the model, and develop them into behaviours.

A good review process should do three things:

  1. Surface what happened: encourage participants to describe not just what they did, but how it unfolded and why

  2. Interpret the experience: guide discussion around the assumptions made, how challenges were handled, and what dynamics were at play

  3. Apply the learning: make time for each participant to consider how what they’ve learned might apply in real work contexts, especially around problem framing, collaboration, and user focus

Questions to guide a strong review

  • How were user needs identified and used (or ignored) in the process?

  • What assumptions were made, and how did they affect the outcome?

  • To what extent did everyone contribute to the outcome? What helped or hindered that?

  • Where did the group diverge or converge? What was the impact?

  • What would you do differently next time?

When Design Thinking Doesn’t Work Well - and What to Try Instead

From our experience supporting facilitators, we’ve found Design Thinking works especially well when:

  • A real-world problem needs a solution

  • Teams have enough autonomy and confidence to take ownership of and action on the ideas they generate

  • The group includes a mix of roles or perspectives, with everyone feeling able to contibute 

  • The group is willing and able to explore new approaches rather than just rehearsing existing solutions

There are situations where it isn’t a good fit, though, either because it’s not well-suited to the context or because the group isn’t quite ready for what the process demands.

When Design Thinking Might Not Work Well

Design Thinking is less likely to be effective when:

  • The problem requires technical expertise rather than broad ideation

  • The group lacks the psychological safety required to contribute, or personality dynamics limit open participation

  • The timeframe doesn’t allow for reflection, iteration, or meaningful user engagement

  • Participants are confused or disengaged by the ambiguity and flexibility of the model and find themselves needing more structure

What to Try Instead

In these situations we recommend considering other methodologies and tools, such as:

  • Six Thinking Hats to encourage balanced contributions within a structured framework. Read our blog post about the model with activity recommendations for facilitators.

  • Lean processing and root cause analysis for linear, process-based problem solving where clarity is emphasised. Read our Lego Stockless Challenge blog post for an example activity.

  • A3/8D for when participants need to break down problems systematically and build evidence-based solutions. Find out how to use experiential learning to prepare teams for A3/8D here.

  • Paper Bridge Challenge or Broken Square for entry-level problem-solving sessions where you need to explore and build core dynamics like collaboration, role clarity, or communication under pressure. 

  • Lego Serious Play for exploring identity, vision, or abstract thinking in a fun, hands-on way. Read our post about LSP and experiential learning.

Teaching Design Thinking with Confidence

Design Thinking is a powerful model, but like any theory, it’s only as effective as the understanding behind it. By using experiential learning to teach the mindset, stages, and behaviours underpinning the model, facilitators can help participants move beyond surface-level knowledge and develop the confidence to apply Design Thinking in real situations.

Our experiential learning activities are designed to make this facilitation process easier and more impactful. Whether you're introducing the full model or focusing on one specific skill, helping participants to live the learning will make the lessons stick.

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