Athennian gets “unstuck” with InceptionU

Generating Innovation Series | Fall 2021 | Margo Purcell & Greg Hart

The Challenge

Athennian, a legal software company in Calgary, was looking to adopt a design thinking approach to its product development. The product and engineering group (two teams consisting of 33 people) had become “stuck” in their thinking. They were having a difficult time collaborating and innovating.

Junior members of the team seemed reluctant to put new ideas forward, while more senior members fell back into old ways of thinking. 

Athennian had grown rapidly since it was founded  in 2017. It had gone from startup to scale up, quickly acquiring new investments, new hires and new users. Bigger and more costly decisions needed to be made to continue the company’s growth and profitability.

The Solution

InceptionU created a custom program of eight workshops called Generating Innovation.  Longer sessions mixed with shorter “lunch and learn” style sessions allowed the team to self-reflect on their individual personalities and behaviours. Then, as a group, it became evident where the team had strengths and areas where they lacked understanding and therefore communication suffered. The Lumina workshops helped to put a visual to this matrix.

The design thinking portion of the workshops challenged the group to spend more time thinking deeply about the actual problem, before jumping to solutions.

InceptionU introduced a framework for thinking about the problem which allowed the Athennian team to test solutions. The group was introduced to the concept of every idea having a “provisional life” until it could either be used or discarded. They were encouraged to create a “muscle memory” of using this design thinking approach to future problems.

The Impact

Key customer values were brought to market sooner. 

Created a safe space, especially for junior and intermediate team members, to begin to voice their ideas.

Entire team gained greater understanding of their personalities, communication styles and the energies they are putting forth in a collaborative environment.

Open and frank discussions allowed all ideas to be considered and tested, which prevented overspending in R&D costs.

Design thinking approach allowed stakeholder and customer feedback to be incorporated earlier in the process. The thinking was done up front and without pre-determining the solution.

Problem setting was prioritized before rushing to an expensive and ineffective solution.

Fostered a collaborative approach for smarter decision-making, specifically related to product and engineering.

  • “To be able to compete and not waste time or spend ridiculous amounts of R&D money, I would highly recommend it to any organization, especially if they’re entering the scale up phase.”

    Duane Wood, Chief Technology Officer, Athennian

  • “In a scale-up, bigger decisions need to be made, more costly decisions - not just in terms of money and R&D, but opportunity cost and lost time. On the product and engineering side, it’s important to have this framework to have the thinking up front and do it in a way that you are not pre-determining the solution.”

    Duane Wood, Chief Technology Officer, Athennian

  • “It was really enlightening for the senior folks that they needed to channel a bit more of that yellow/green energy to connect and consider when talking in the group dynamic.”

    Duane Wood, Chief Technology Officer, Athennian

  • “The concept of every idea has a provisional life - that was an idea the entire team really latched on to. It’s a different way of saying there are no stupid ideas. But, it takes the next step which is that every idea we can consider and talk about, it may not ultimately be the way we go, but let’s at least have a discussion about it.”

    Duane Wood, Chief Technology Officer, Athennian

  • “The level of collaboration on our team that’s happening right now is fantastic!”

    Duane Wood, Chief Technology Officer, Athennian