Captain’s Blog, star date -307557.1
 
On Thursday, June 11, Spaces Herengracht asked XPLANE to kick-off and host their first “Captain’s Lunch” in Amsterdam. Spaces is a company that offers dynamic working areas for mobile workers, established companies, freelancers, and entrepreneurs. They organise the “Captain’s Lunch” for all their members to create and grow relationships.
 
In planning the event, we used the same approach we take when designing full-day client workshops. Our goal was to give the diverse participants a platform to introduce themselves whilst also experiencing XPLANE’s core methods: visual thinking and co-creation.


We started with a short introduction and icebreaker. All the participants had to draw a visual that expressed the essence of their company’s service or product. We then broke the participants into groups of three and asked them to combine their individual icebreaker drawings into a concept for an entirely new business, product, or service with the goal being to introduce everyone to the power of co-creation and visual thinking. Participants finished by creating a poster that expressed their new idea, and used that to pitch their ideas to the entire group.


 
Not only did we have a great lunch, we also had a taste of visual thinking and co-creation feeding our brains and fueling clarity, understanding, and innovation. All of us got to know each other, what we do, and three new businesses were born within 60 minutes! 

All photos are by Saar Koopman.