Braskem: Training Design Method

Braskem's instructional team had no structured way to turn what a subject-matter expert knows into a training program that fits how learners actually work. The brief: design a method based on Design Thinking to help that team collect information and develop courses better suited to students and to Braskem's needs, then hand it off, piloted, to Braskem's Change Management team, the internal group responsible for how organizational changes get rolled out and adopted company-wide.

Underneath the training-specific language, this is Product Design work: user research through the learner survey and interviews, journey mapping for the learning experience (Canvas 10), and testing and iteration through the pilot and its feedback loop (Canvas 12), applied to an internal, unshipped product instead of a customer-facing one.

A four-person team ran this end to end: a Product Manager, an instructional designer who wrote the training content and UX copy, a mid-level designer who helped build out the canvases, and me as Design Lead. I designed the method itself, adapting the model from Design Thinking for Training and Development (Sharon Boller & Laura Fletcher, ATD) into Braskem's framework and defining every phase and canvas from a mind map I sketched of how the process should flow. That call leaned on my own background as a university lecturer for 16 years, teaching Computer Science and Design, plus a master's in Digital Design built around a usability-teaching methodology; it's part of why Braskem brought me onto this project.

Braskem is a Brazilian company with operations across the US and Europe, but this training center serves its Brazil-based teams, which is why the canvases and screenshots throughout this case are in Portuguese.

Before formalizing the four phases above, I worked through my own instinct for how a course gets built with Design Thinking and sketched it out by hand as a mind map, the actual origin of the framework's structure.

1. Define the Desired Outcomes. Understand the problem, then empathize with the learner:

• Canvas 01, Strategy Blueprint: frames the problem first, what training is being requested, why, and what content it needs to cover, worked through with all stakeholders and the design team before anything else starts.
• Canvas 02, SME Mindmap: captures what the subject-matter expert, or SME, whoever at Braskem holds deep knowledge of the training topic, knows about it as a structured mind map.
• Canvas 04, CSD Matrix: separates what the team already knows for certain from what's still assumption or open question.
• Canvas 05 to 09: map stakeholders, then run the learner survey and interviews (Canvas 06, Canvas 07). Responses get tabulated and turned into learner personas (Canvas 08) and empathy maps (Canvas 09), so the training gets built for who's actually taking it, not assumptions about them.

The survey and interviews for the pilot reached 14 people at Braskem, split evenly by gender and mostly between 26 and 45 years old. That data first produced two draft personas; the Product Manager then decided to consolidate them into one, Leticia, so the training had a single, sharper profile to design for rather than two competing ones.

2. Design the Complete Experience. Ideate the learning journey (Canvas 10), then prototype and test it (Canvas 11) before anything gets built.

3. Deliver for Application. Develop the training content, then distribute and promote it internally.

4. Evaluate for Continuous Improvement. Analyze and report results, then gather and analyze learner feedback (Canvas 12) to iterate on the training.

Each canvas runs as a workshop of roughly 2 hours. Run end to end, the 12 canvases add up to about 24 hours of structured work, from a bare training request to a brief the instructional designer can start writing content from.

I scoped and validated phases 1 and 2 in full, including the Understanding-the-Problem and Empathizing sub-phases that feed them. Distributing and promoting training (phase 3.2) and analyzing results (phase 4.1) were left for Braskem's Enablement team to define on top of the framework, since they depend on that team's own channels and reporting; the framework hands off a validated CSD Matrix, personas, empathy maps and a tested learning journey, not a shipped LMS course.

Braskem's instructional team had no structured way to turn what a subject matter expert knows into a training program that actually fits how learners work. Each course was built ad hoc, so the outcome depended entirely on who happened to run that project.

That person was rarely a trained Product Manager. At Braskem, whoever originates a project ends up leading it in a PM like role, without formal PM training. Most had never worked with a structured design method before, so a large part of the job was teaching the method itself, and every one of these informal PMs handled that differently: some were open to it, others were not always receptive to constructive feedback on how their project should run.

This came to a head during the pilot, when the project's informal PM pushed to run the workshops entirely on the team's own terms, nearly pulling the pilot away from the framework's structure. I raised it privately with the manager rather than pushing back in front of the group: "you know when you hold your hand and people want your arm? So, in private, I talked to the manager, and I said there are times when we need to take the reins, so it doesn't become a mess."

Sacrificed: Speed on the pilot project itself. Running the method properly, sitting with the SME, mapping stakeholders, interviewing and surveying learners, building personas and empathy maps, took a long cycle end to end.

To gain: A repeatable, teachable method. The goal was never to ship one training fast, it was to hand the instructional team a process they could run again on their own.

Reasoning: Based on the book Design Thinking for Training and Development (Boller & Fletcher, ATD), I adapted the Design Thinking stages into a four-phase framework with a canvas for each step, so the instructional team would have a concrete tool, not just a philosophy, to work from.

The clearest proxy for success was handoff, not a survey score: the Change Management team ran the pilot with me, then used the resulting artifacts (personas, empathy maps, learning journey) to build and launch their own training with no further design involvement from me. Recorded workshop sessions and pilot meetings document that transfer.

I moved to another client shortly after the pilot wrapped, so I don't have adoption numbers for teams beyond Change Management, or learner satisfaction data from trainings built with the method after that.

These are the actual canvases filled in during the Change Management pilot, not blank templates: the Strategy Blueprint that scoped the project, the SME Mindmap that captured the subject-matter expert's knowledge, and the Ideating Learning Journey that the team used to build its own training.

To make the method something the instructional team could actually pick up and run, not just a diagram handed over to them:

• A canvas per step: every phase of the framework has a ready to use canvas (Stakeholder Map, CSD Matrix, Learner Personas, Empathy Maps, Learning Journey, and more), each with its own instructions, recommended duration, and participants.
• Piloted before documented: the framework was tested end to end on a real training project before being written up as a method, so every step reflects something that actually worked in a live workshop.
• Run with the team, not for the team: I facilitated the pilot alongside the Change Management team instead of producing the training for them, so the handoff happened during the process itself.

Deliverables:

• A complete four-phase Training Design Method Framework, from defining desired outcomes to evaluating for continuous improvement
• 12 ready to use canvases, each documented with purpose, participants, and recommended duration
• A validated pilot: the Change Management team's training, built by that team from the framework's artifacts
• Recorded workshops and pilot sessions kept as onboarding material for future teams running the method

During the pilot:

• Near loss of control of the process: the project's informal PM pushed to run the workshops entirely on the team's own terms, resolved privately with the manager rather than in front of the group (see Conflict, above).
• A long cycle: running every canvas end to end, from stakeholder mapping to the final learning journey, made for a rich but extremely long process.

Learning: some sessions can run asynchronously instead of requiring the whole team in the room at once, and there is clear room to shorten the overall cycle without losing what makes each canvas useful.

The method itself is a human process. Sitting with the SME and extracting what they know is exactly what makes the framework work, and that part should stay human. But I already used AI, in a fairly basic way compared to what is available today, to help analyze the survey and interview data for this project. With today's tools I would go further:

• An AI agent for meeting transcripts: interpreting the SME and stakeholder session recordings to surface the outcomes that matter, instead of processing every transcript by hand.
• An AI agent to read the canvas artifacts: extracting the output of all 12 canvases into a structured markdown file the instructional designer could write from directly, instead of manually organizing the training structure from workshop notes.
• A short explainer video of the method: making the framework easier to introduce and breaking the ice with stakeholders in the first session, instead of relying only on a live walkthrough.