Purple Compass was invited to be a design facilitator to support this nine-day design challenge for senior officers. In addition, a design facilitation workshop was provided to teach visual storytelling, a tool to assist individuals and teams generate ideas, clarify visions, and move toward action.

Exercise Shifting Sands focuses on real-world contemporary, complex challenges relevant to the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). The aim of this design challenge was to enhance capabilities to address real complex challenges using design thinking methodologies in a team setting, and aligned with the Canadian Forces College’s education philosophy.

Our syndicate worked on a challenge specific to the ELSIE Initiative in West Africa, and explored opportunities to address the current barriers to women’s meaningful participation in peace operations in West Africa (military and police).

Our design approach consisted of three distinct components:

1. Understanding: to gain an understanding of the challenge space from a human-centered perspective, define and frame issues and consider potential opportunities
2. Anticipating: forward looking approaches to anticipate emerging issues and possible consequences
3. Deepening: to deepen our understanding from a systems and narrative perspective, both from the current state and potential solution using causal layered analysis

This structure provided the scaffolding to support the design of a solution prototype for consideration. Our syndicate pitched our team’s solution to a panel of judges and was awarded for ‘most feasible’ design.