In-House Design
Thinking Training
A proven path into design thinking, applied to a problem you own.
We’ve spent 25 years making design thinking and service design work with real people, in real organisations.
Design thinking is one of the most established, proven innovation methodologies in the world. It's the same thinking taught in the engineering schools at Stanford and MIT, and used by some of the best-known product and service organisations on the planet.
Neil’s relationship with it goes back further than most. He started working with these principles in 1999, learning directly from the early pioneers of the field, well before “design thinking” was even the name anyone used for it. A quarter of a century of practice has reshaped that early grounding into something genuinely his own.
It works through four key steps. Discovery, listening and gathering directly from real users to find the actual heart of a problem. Insights, finding the difference that makes the difference inside everything you’ve gathered. Ideas, a genuinely collaborative process of prototyping and testing hypotheses against real readiness. And Create, building something fit for purpose that survives contact with the real world.
Most design thinking and service design work is delivered by outside consultants, parachuted in to run the process, then leaving the organisation with a recommendation it didn’t build itself. We do it differently. Your own team gets trained and certified, and they’re the ones who actually run the process on a real challenge your organisation is already facing. The people closest to the work are doing the work, not watching someone else do it for them.
That’s where the systemic and behavioural edge comes in. Most design thinking stays inside the boundaries of the product or the service in front of it. Neil’s systems-thinking background takes it further, into the structures, the politics, and the relationships surrounding the problem, not just the problem itself. And his grounding in NLP adds something most design thinking training never touches, real skill in reading people and behaviour, and in modelling expertise so it can genuinely be taught, not just demonstrated.
The result is a methodology with real academic pedigree, made considerably more practical by a quarter century spent inside the messy reality where most of the best ideas are born.
We’ve used this approach repeatedly, including with the Royal Artillery, where low pass rates in functional skills maths were holding back apprenticeship completions. The client team prototyped several approaches and rolled out the strongest: interactive online pre-work paired with an escape room that reframed maths training entirely, significantly lifting both exam results and learner engagement. It’s one example among several of how this plays out in practice.
This sits alongside the wider systemic and innovation work we do. These are genuine influences behind it, rather than separate disciplines competing for attention. Where it leads from here, deeper systemic discovery, sprints, the rest of what we do, depends entirely on what your actual challenge turns out to need. But it’s nice to know it bolts on if needed.
Who it is for:
Organisations wanting their own people to gain a genuinely proven, certified design-thinking capability that goes beyond the standard toolkit, while solving a real cross-functional problem at the same time, rather than practising on a hypothetical or theoretical challenge.
DATES, LOCATIONS, AND PRICES
Diploma of Systemic Discovery
London
12–14 October 2026
£1,450 + VAT
Practitioner Certificate
Diploma of Systemic Discovery
London
12–14 October 2026
£1,450 + VAT
Practitioner Certificate
Neil is a mapmaker for complexity, with a relationship to design thinking that goes back to 1999, learning directly from the field’s early pioneers before it even had its current name. Twenty-five years of embedding that thinking inside regulated, high-stakes organisations, including defence and nuclear, has reshaped it into something built specifically to survive contact with how real organisations actually work.
That depth, paired with systems thinking, constraints-based innovation, and an NLP background that most design-thinking trainers don’t bring, is exactly why this works as a certified, proven path rather than a generic workshop. Design thinking is a real, established methodology. Making it stick inside a specific organisation, with its own politics, its own people and its own history, takes a different kind of skill entirely.
CLIENT TESTIMONIALS
Real people. Real organisations. Real change.
Senior leaders reflecting honestly on what it’s actually like to work with us.
“Bringing Neil into my clients is something I don’t hesitate to do. He will come in and quickly understand the most complex and most critical issues for an organisation and very quickly navigate his way around with diplomacy and humour to help them reach their goals.”
Julia Days
Talent Acquisition Transformation Consultant and Strategy Advisor, RL100 UK 2026
Start here. On us.
Systems Thinking for Leaders:
Innovation & Change.
The clearest introduction we know to why complexity changes everything about how you lead change and innovation. Normally £69.99.
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