Design Thinking Workshops: How GCCs Co-Create Corporate Values

Most corporate values statements get written by five people in a conference room, printed on a poster, and forgotten within a quarter. The problem usually isn’t the values themselves. It’s how they got made. The teams who actually live their values are, almost without exception, the ones who helped write them.

Pairing design thinking workshops with co-creation inside Global Capability Centers (GCCs) rests on that same idea. Instead of values being handed down from headquarters, they get built, session by session, with the people who’ll be expected to act on them every day. This page walks through what that looks like in practice: how the workshops actually run, what co-creation means beyond the buzzword, how to define values that hold up under pressure, and how GCCs keep them alive once the initial energy of a workshop wears off.

What Is Co-Creation, and Why Does It Matter for Corporate Values?

Co-creation is the practice of building something together with the people who’ll actually use it, whether that’s a product, a process, or a set of values. The alternative is designing it for them in isolation and hoping it lands. In a GCC context, that usually means employees, team leads, and sometimes clients sitting in the same room, or the same virtual whiteboard, as the people who’d otherwise have written the values statement alone.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A values list written by leadership and announced to the organization is a communication exercise. A values list built with the organization is a commitment exercise, and people tend to defend what they helped build far more than what they were simply told to accept. That single difference is the whole argument for running this as a workshop instead of a memo.

What Happens Inside a Design Thinking Workshop?

A design thinking workshop borrows its structure from product design. Understand the real problem before trying to solve it. Generate a wide set of options before narrowing down. Test your assumptions before committing to them at scale. Applied to corporate values, that structure plays out in four rough stages: surface how people actually experience the organization today, not how the org chart says it should feel; define the gap between that reality and where the company wants to be; ideate and prototype language and behaviors that close it; then test those drafts with a wider group before anything goes on a poster.

This isn’t just a soft-skills detour from real business work, and McKinsey’s design research backs that up at scale. Looking across public companies in medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking, McKinsey found that top-quartile performers on its Design Index posted 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher total returns to shareholders than their industry peers over five years, nearly double the rate of the rest of the field. Design-led process, including how a company defines and embeds its own values, correlates with outcomes that show up on a balance sheet, not just in an engagement survey.

What Are Some Common Design Thinking Workshop Activities?

The activities themselves are kept simple on purpose. The goal is lowering the barrier to participation, not impressing anyone with facilitation technique. A few show up in almost every session. Empathy mapping has small groups sketch what a typical employee actually feels and encounters day to day. “How might we” prompts turn vague complaints into specific design questions. Rapid value-statement prototyping has groups draft and redraft short value phrases against real scenarios instead of abstractions. Dot-voting is a quick way to surface which drafts actually resonate across a mixed-seniority room, rather than just whichever draft the loudest person in the meeting championed. None of this needs special tools. A whiteboard, some sticky notes, and forty-five minutes of undivided attention cover most of it.

What Are Core Values, and How Do You Define Them for a Company?

Before a GCC can co-create anything, it needs a shared answer to a deceptively simple question: what are company core values actually supposed to do? The honest answer isn’t to describe the company as it wishes to be seen. It’s to give people a working rule for the moments a policy document doesn’t cover.

What Is a Core Value, Exactly?

A core value is a stated belief about how decisions should get made when there’s no rulebook covering the situation. “We value excellence” is an aspiration. “We ship an imperfect version and improve it in public” is a decision rule, and the difference matters. The second version tells someone what to actually do on a Tuesday afternoon. The first one doesn’t tell them anything.

What Are Core Values at an Organizational Level?

Scaled up to a company, core values are meant to do the same job. They give thousands of people, often spread across several countries and time zones, a consistent way to make judgment calls without checking in with headquarters every time. That only works if the values were built with enough real input to reflect how the company actually operates, which is the entire case for building company culture through structured, inclusive sessions instead of a top-down rollout. Employees across functions and geographies who help shape the language tend to produce values that describe the company that actually exists, not the one leadership wishes existed.

What Do Good Corporate Values Examples Look Like?

The weak version of a values example is generic enough to belong to any company: “integrity,” “innovation,” “excellence.” The stronger version is specific enough that you could actually tell if someone violated it. Take “we value collaboration” versus “we default to sharing work in progress instead of waiting for it to be polished.” The second one gives a GCC team lead something to actually coach toward. This is where workshops earn their keep. A room full of real scenarios, debated and voted on by the people who’ll live with the outcome, tends to produce the second kind of statement far more often than a leadership offsite does.

Why Does Design Thinking Training Matter for GCC Employees?

GCCs have spent the last decade moving well past their original cost-arbitrage mandate, and both the scale and the analysts tracking this market back that up. Dun & Bradstreet’s Decoding India’s GCC Ecosystem report found that GCCs contributed roughly USD 182 billion in Gross Value Added in FY25, equivalent to about 2% of India’s GDP and 4% of its services GDP: a genuine driver of economic growth, not a cost line on someone else’s balance sheet. Everest Group, the analyst firm most closely tracking this market, puts the underlying shift plainly in its 2026 GCC market outlook: GCC mandates are evolving beyond traditional cost-arbitrage objectives toward more strategic, innovation-led, and higher-value functions. Centers that were built for execution are increasingly holding global strategic ownership instead, a shift covered in more detail in rethinking the GCC mandate around innovation rather than cost control.

That shift changes what GCC employees actually need to be good at. Technical delivery skills got teams to “Portfolio Hub” status. Problem-framing, user empathy, and structured ideation are what get them further than that. Design thinking training, in this context, isn’t a nice-to-have workshop series bolted onto onboarding. It’s the skill set that lets a GCC team credibly own a product decision instead of just executing someone else’s spec.

What Do Real Design Thinking Examples Look Like in a GCC?

Two patterns show up often. In the first, a GCC’s internal service desk team runs an empathy-mapping session with the employees who actually file tickets. They discover the real complaint isn’t “the tool is slow” but “I don’t know if anyone’s looking at my ticket,” and redesign the status-update flow instead of the tool itself. In the second, a GCC product team prototypes three versions of a client-facing dashboard in a week using paper sketches and employee feedback, rather than building one polished version over two months and finding out in the client review that it solved the wrong problem. Neither example needs a big budget. Both need the discipline of testing an assumption before scaling it.

How Does an Innovation Culture Take Root in a GCC?

An innovation culture shows up less as a slogan on the wall and more as a set of visible, repeated signals that experimentation is actually safe. Leadership has to protect people who try something that doesn’t work, not just publicly reward the ones who happen to get lucky. That’s a harder habit to build than it sounds. It’s covered in more depth in how GCCs function as incubators for cultural innovation: centers that pilot new processes precisely because leadership treats a failed pilot as data, not as a black mark.

Cross-functional exposure helps here too. Employees who only ever see their own function tend to defend the status quo, mostly because they’ve never had to explain their process to someone outside it. Rotating people through design thinking sessions with other teams, engineering sitting in with support, finance sitting in with product, creates exactly the kind of friction that surfaces better ideas faster than any innovation-culture memo ever could.

How Do Design Thinking Workshops Drive Cross-Functional Collaboration?

Most GCCs already know their departments speak different internal languages. What “done” means to engineering isn’t what it means to finance, and neither matches what it means to the client-facing team. A design thinking workshop forces those groups into the same room around the same user problem, which does more for cross-functional collaboration than a shared Slack channel ever will. It’s a structural fix rather than a communication tip. Put people from different functions in front of the same evidence, and the conversation naturally shifts from defending turf to solving the actual problem in front of them. This is also part of why GCCs increasingly position themselves as talent and innovation ecosystems rather than isolated delivery units. The collaboration has to work across the whole ecosystem, not just within one team’s four walls.

What Makes a Cross-Functional Team Actually Work?

Not every cross functional team that gets assembled actually functions as one. Three things tend to separate the ones that ship real work from the ones that mostly produce good meeting notes. The first is clear ownership of decisions: someone has to be able to say “we’re doing this,” even in a consensus-driven room. The second is a shared artifact everyone can point to, a prototype, a journey map, a draft values statement, instead of competing verbal descriptions of the plan. The third, and the one most often missing, is a manager who can translate between functions rather than just referee between them. That gap is explored in more detail in why GCC middle management is the layer that matters most when cross-functional initiatives stall.

How Does Design Thinking Support Organizational Change Management?

Traditional organizational change management tends to work top-down: announce the change, explain the rationale, manage the resistance. Design thinking flips that order. You involve the people affected by the change in defining it before you announce anything, so there’s less resistance to manage in the first place, because the change was never a surprise to begin with. That’s a meaningfully different approach to organizational change than even a well-written communications plan.

It also builds in a feedback loop that most change programs skip entirely. Instead of rolling out a new process company-wide and hoping it sticks, teams prototype it with one group first, watch what breaks, and adjust before the next rollout. Change management done this way is slower to announce and faster to actually stick, which is usually the trade-off worth making.

What Role Does Corporate Culture Play in Value Creation?

Values and culture get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Values are the stated beliefs. Culture is what actually happens when nobody’s checking. A company can have admirable values on paper and a culture that contradicts every one of them, and that gap is usually where employee cynicism about “corporate values” comes from in the first place.

Closing that gap is a longer project than any single workshop can pull off, which is the argument made in more detail in a mid-market guide to building a strong company culture. Foundational values and honest communication come first. Then come the reinforcing systems: recognition, leadership behavior, how promotions actually get decided. Only after that does it make sense to measure whether any of it moved the needle. Skipping straight to the measurement step, without doing the first two, is exactly how “culture initiatives” turn into another poster nobody reads.

How Do You Build Genuinely Strong Workplace Values Across Locations?

A GCC’s hardest co-creation problem usually isn’t getting people to participate. It’s getting people spread across five time zones to participate as equals, instead of the head-office group deciding and everyone else simply ratifying. A few things actually move that needle. Be explicit about what each location’s role is in the process (input, review, or final say, not all three at once, and never left ambiguous). Give distributed teams the same source material and the same space to work with it as anyone at headquarters gets. Treat a shared virtual workspace as seriously as an in-person one, rather than as the fallback option nobody prepared for. Strong workplace values aren’t the ones written most eloquently. They’re the ones every location actually helped write. That idea runs through ANSR’s look at human-centric leadership in high-performing GCCs too: the centers that get retention and engagement right treat local teams as co-owners of the experience, not recipients of a global template.

What Are the Real Benefits of Team Collaboration in Embedding Values?

The case for team collaboration here isn’t abstract. It shows up in specific, checkable outcomes. Problems get solved with fewer blind spots, because more perspectives are in the room before a decision ships. Communication gets more transparent by necessity, since cross-functional work exposes assumptions that a single-department process would never surface. Values stop being a slide in a deck and start showing up in how daily decisions actually get made, because the people making those decisions helped define the standard in the first place. Engagement tends to follow ownership, too: employees who helped shape a value are far more likely to hold their own team to it than employees who were simply told about it in an all-hands.

How Does Human-Centered Design Turn Values into Daily Behavior?

Human centered design is the underlying discipline that makes everything above actually work, rather than just feel good in the workshop room. It means starting from what people actually need and how they actually behave, not from what a process document assumes they need. Applied to GCC operations, that means checking whether a new workflow, a new values statement, or a new escalation process actually reduces friction for the person using it day to day, and being genuinely willing to redesign it if it doesn’t, rather than mandating adoption anyway.

That discipline compounds over time. Teams that get comfortable testing their assumptions about what employees actually need in one process tend to apply the same scrutiny elsewhere: to onboarding, to how feedback gets collected, to how a value gets reinforced six months after the workshop that introduced it. Sustainable operational change usually starts as a habit in one team long before it becomes a policy for the whole center.

How Do You Sustain Co-Created Corporate Values Over Time?

The honest failure mode for co-created corporate values isn’t a workshop that goes badly. It’s the energy from a good session fading out within two quarters because nothing was built to keep it alive. A few things separate values that stick from values that quietly become wallpaper. Revisit the language on a set schedule, not only when something’s visibly broken. Keep the communication channels from the original workshop open instead of closing them once the statement is finalized. Build the values into how decisions actually get evaluated, in performance conversations and project retros, not just onboarding slides. Keep investing in the same design thinking training that produced the values in the first place, so new hires get the same grounding the original group did. None of this is glamorous work. It’s also the entire difference between a values statement and an actual operating standard.

Design thinking and co-creation, used together, do something a values memo never can: they make the people expected to live the values responsible for writing them in the first place. For any organization building or scaling a GCC, that’s not a soft consideration. It’s the difference between values that show up in daily decisions and values that show up in a PDF nobody opens twice.

ANSR has spent more than 20 years helping organizations do exactly this: building and scaling GCCs with the talent, workspace, and business operations foundations that let a center’s culture and values actually take root, across more than 150 global centers to date.