Design Thinking Facilitator

The Event

The SHIFT(s) B3 Hackathon is an annual cross-school innovation event organized by OMNES Education, one of France's largest higher education groups. In its third edition, over 1,000 students from five schools joined forces around one question: how do you make AI more responsible?

The client was real: Craft AI, a French responsible AI pioneer. The stakes were real. Students from engineering, business, communication, and international relations had two days to go from zero to pitch.

Designing the Sprint

My role was to lead a class through the full Design Thinking process, from the first empathy exercises to the final delivery. Five phases, two days, one coherent arc.

Each phase had to be designed as an experience in itself: the right warm-up, the right tools, the right constraints to push creativity without overwhelming. A sprint format is not a checklist. It is a rhythm.

In the Room

Facilitating students is a different discipline from facilitating corporate teams. In a corporate workshop, professional norms create a baseline of attention. Students don't carry that. Every exercise has to be viscerally engaging. Every transition has to be earned.

You lose a room of students in thirty seconds if the energy drops. The challenge is not the methodology. The challenge is keeping every person genuinely invested, every minute, for two full days.

At this scale, facilitation is a team sport. My co-facilitator and I had to read the room simultaneously, signal each other in silence, and adapt the plan in real time without breaking the group's flow. Divergence and convergence had to happen on schedule, but never feel forced.

On the Jury

After two days of facilitating, I switched roles and joined the evaluation jury. That dual perspective is unusual, and clarifying: you have helped create the conditions that produced these solutions, and you now evaluate whether those solutions are strong.

What I looked for: clarity of problem framing, ambition of the solution, and above all the coherence of the methodology. A great pitch makes the design thinking visible. You can trace the insight that led to the idea.