In  March 2020, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa asked its workers to start working from home. It was a time of uncertainty, fear and psychological fragility. Everything was new. Personal and professional agenda management, online meetings and knowing how to deal with digital skills. Despite this, it was the right time to innovate services and invest in new skills for civil servants.

The Training and Development Department invited me to start e-learning courses in areas of personal development. 

E-learning training

It was very important because I needed to invest in my own skills and get to know different tools like the Moodle learning platform, Miro: the visual collaboration platform, Microsoft Teams and video skills.

In five months, three courses were created, such as Design Thinking, Visual Thinking and Storytelling.

When we launched Design Thinking Courses in the organisation, several civil servants signed up immediately after reading the syllabus. Civil servants demonstrated that they needed to leave their comfort zone and think outside the box.

For two years, e-learning was the best way to train our colleagues and the results were excellent. The solutions they found for each challenge demonstrated their creativity, their ability to solve problems, take risks and work in multidisciplinary teams.

Face-to-face training

Since 2022, the Design Thinking course is face-to-face and the results are surprising. The syllabus of the course was slightly altered, making it now possible to work on the field for diagnosis and empathy (stage 1) and the prototypes are physical (stage 4). 

Design Thinking encourages building new solutions from sketches and prototypes, testing and asking others for feedback.

Design thinking problems

Different design thinking challenges are launched in each course so that trainees can think about and solve each of the problems. A trigger question is always the starting point for design issues. Here are several examples:

How can we involve students in school administration?

How can we improve people's use of public transportation?

How can we make public health centre spaces more pleasant and appealing, therefore increasing the patient experience?

A training for leaders, division heads, and city council directors is being prepared for this year.