GGZ Nederland is the Dutch Association of Mental Health Care and Addiction Care. It has 100 member organizations, 10,000 employees, treated 1 Million people and benefits are estimated at 15 billion euro.

The challenge was attracting young people to work in the healthcare industry. They wanted to find out the reason why this is happening and come up with a solution. As well, they wanted to become a more adaptable organization with a more employee-focused approach.

Our approach, in collaboration with studio.why, was to organize a 2-day workshop with 40 of the employees of GGZ, on four different challenges that represented assumptions of the reasons the problem was created. By involving all these people in solving the challenge, they could go through the Design Thinking process and know how to deal with this kind of problems in their daily work as well. In between the actual workshops, there were theoretical masterclasses that gave the instructions for what needs to be done next.

The workshop was able to get out from people all their reasons for why they do not find their work attractive, as well as the reasons for which they like it. By prioritizing the insights we could formulate one big challenge that the team agreed upon solving. Next, the concept development stage followed, getting out as many ideas as possible.

The result was that all four teams developed one best idea for their challenge and pitched it in front of the board of GGZ. In total, there were more than 500 ideas generated from all teams and the winning idea became implemented in the following months across the entire organization. The participants went home with a real experience of solving complex problems in teams, which they can use further in their own projects.