01
Discover.
Build the foundation of truth. The room investigates the actual problem through customer research, stakeholder maps, and context maps, suspending all assumptions about what the answer might be.
Divergent
Workshops & Masterclasses
Built for teams that need
to think differently
Half-day and full-day sessions for marketing teams, leadership groups, and cross-functional organisations. Practitioner-led, not theory-heavy — and designed to leave the room with something it can actually use.
Available Workshops
Masterclass
Everything is a Signal — The Status Economy
A deep-dive into how modern consumers assign value and why brand signals matter more than brand messages. Developed for Istituto Marangoni Dubai and available for luxury, hospitality, and premium consumer brands.
Team Workshop
From Cost Centre to Growth Driver
For marketing teams that are undervalued inside their organisations. A structured session that reframes how the function presents itself commercially — and gives participants the language and frameworks to change the conversation with leadership.
Leadership Workshop
Brand vs. Performance — The False Choice
A senior marketing and leadership session that dismantles the brand-versus-performance debate and replaces it with a more useful question: what time horizon are you actually building for, and is your organisation structured to hold both?
What you leave with
01
A shared strategic vocabulary across the team — so conversations stop circling the same misunderstandings
02
A tested framework or tool applied directly to a real brief or challenge from your organisation
03
A documented output from the day — whether a strategic position, a brief, a plan, or a structured diagnosis
04
Honest external perspective on where the team is aligned and where the gaps are hiding in plain sight
05
The confidence that comes from having tested your thinking in the room, not just read about it in a book
06
A clear sense of next steps — with accountability built into the session design, not bolted on afterwards
Design thinking workshops
Facilitated thinking, built to ship.
End to end design thinking workshops for marketing teams, leadership groups, and product organizations facing brand, category, or customer problems. Designed and delivered by a certified facilitator from MIT Sloan and Design Thinkers Academy, grounded in the UK Design Council Double Diamond methodology, and built to leave the room with prototypes and decisions rather than just a deck of post it notes.
Status Economy masterclass · Istituto Marangoni Dubai
The methodology
The Double Diamond
Two diamonds, four phases, one decision.
The workshop sequence follows the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond, a globally recognized framework for innovation work that alternates between divergent exploration and convergent decision making. The first diamond opens the problem and closes on a sharp definition. The second diamond opens the solution space and closes on a tested direction. Every workshop is designed against this rhythm so the room knows where it is and what it is producing at every stage.
The four phases
02
Define.
Reframe the brief. Insights from discovery are clustered, prioritized, and translated into a sharp problem statement that the team can stand behind, with personas and a customer journey to anchor it.
Convergent
03
Develop.
Generate, build, and stress test. Ideation, service scenarios, rapid prototyping, and storyboarding bring the redefined problem into concrete form, with multiple directions explored in parallel rather than committed to early.
Divergent
04
Deliver.
Test, refine, and ship. The strongest prototypes are validated, the team commits to a single direction with a clear minimum viable version, and an honest plan to scale it out into the business.
Convergent
Tools deployed in the room
Discovery & Empathy
- Design research
- Stakeholder mapping
- Context mapping
- Persona building
- Customer journey mapping
Definition & Ideation
- Insight clustering
- Reframing exercises
- Ideation sprints
- Crazy eights and analogous worlds
- Priority and effort mapping
Development & Delivery
- Service scenarios
- Rapid prototyping
- Storyboarding
- Minimum viable concepts
- Scale up roadmaps
Workshop formats
Introductory
The half day session.
3 to 4 hours · single team
A focused engagement on one defined problem, ideal for teams new to design thinking or for senior groups who need a structured ideation session around a specific brand, category, or customer question.
Standard
The full day workshop.
8 hours · cross functional team
A full Double Diamond cycle in a single day, ending with prototypes and a tested direction. Best for marketing organizations working through a customer or category problem with the right people in the room.
Programmatic
The multi day program.
2 to 5 days · executive level
An extended program embedded inside an innovation initiative, brand restructure, or product launch, with proper customer research between sessions and a roadmap that ships beyond the workshop room.
What you leave the room with
01
A team aligned on a single, sharply defined problem statement instead of five competing interpretations of the brief.
02
Customer insight grounded in actual evidence rather than the senior team’s assumptions about who the audience is and what they want.
03
Three to five tested prototypes ranked by potential impact and effort, with an honest discussion of which one to ship first.
04
A clear minimum viable version with an owner, a date, and a measurement framework attached to it before everyone leaves the room.
05
A shared language and a repeatable discipline for the next time the organization needs to think through a customer problem properly.
06
A facilitated experience the team actually enjoys, which matters more than people admit when you want them to do this kind of work again.
Certifications
Bring a workshop to your team
Available in Dubai and remotely. Custom workshops can be built around a specific challenge your team is working through. A brief conversation is usually enough to scope the right format.
Start a conversation