• Service Design
• Design Thinking
• systems thinking

Design Thinking and Service Design for Hiscox’s People Function Team

Experience Haus worked with the People Function team across London and York to design, build and deliver a six-day design thinking and service design programme, spread across three months, that equipped participants with an end-to-end toolkit for reimagining the employee experience at Hiscox.

THE TASK

The Hiscox People Function wanted to build genuine design and innovation capability inside the team, not just awareness of the terminology. The goal was to upskill up to 18 colleagues in design thinking and service design, and to have them apply those skills directly to a live business problem relevant to their day-to-day work. Leadership was clear that the learning needed to stick: participants should leave able to run the process themselves, facilitate workshops with their own stakeholders, and champion a more human-centred, co-creative way of working across the function.

ACTIONS

To meet these objectives, Experience Haus designed and delivered an immersive six-day programme for up to 18 members of the People Function, structured as two in-person days per month across three months. The curriculum was built around the Double Diamond — Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver — with each pair of days advancing the team’s live design challenge through a new phase of the process. A hands-on, co-creative approach was central throughout, incorporating:

• Systems thinking, process identification and current-state mapping anchored in a live Hiscox business problem
• Empathy mapping, persona definition, scenarios and the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to sharpen problem statements
• “How Might We” framing, ideation techniques, concept sketching and storyboarding to generate and refine ideas
• Experiential and paper prototyping, service blueprint design and future-state journey mapping
• Storytelling, narrative arcs and team playbacks to communicate concepts with confidence
• A dedicated facilitator toolbox covering the facilitator mindset, icebreaker design and how to structure workshops for any objective

By prioritising experiential learning and returning to the same design challenge session after session, the programme gave participants the reps they needed to internalise each method rather than simply meeting it once.

THE OUTCOME

By the end of the six days, the People Function team had taken a real business problem from opening brief through to prototyped concept and team playback, using the same tools and methods that product and design teams rely on every day. The longer, phased format also gave participants time between sessions to reflect, test and embed what they had learned. Key outcomes included:

• A shared language and structured approach for tackling People Function challenges end-to-end
• Practical experience applying the Double Diamond to a live design challenge, from Discover through to Deliver
• Confidence with core service design tools including personas, empathy maps, service blueprints and future-state journey maps
• The ability to design and facilitate their own workshops, supported by a facilitator toolbox built during Session Six
• Stronger collaboration, co-creation and pre-solutioning habits across the function

PROGRAMME PARTICIPANT

Spreading the programme over three months meant we could actually apply what we learned between sessions, rather than forgetting it the week after. We came out with a shared way of working across the team — and, just as importantly, the confidence to run these sessions ourselves for the rest of the business.