ADHLAL DIALOGUES × SAUDIA

An introduction to design thinking

How Adhlal moved design thinking from reputation to a practised method inside Saudia, across a leadership pilot and a cross-functional accelerator within the Saudia Design Program.

Why

From early 2023 onwards, Saudia has steadily come to recognise design as a way of understanding customers, framing problems, and developing ideas – not only a way of making things look considered. That shift sits at the core of the Saudia Design Program, which set out to acknowledge the design skills already present across the Group's workforce and build continuous learning around them.

The question this engagement addressed was a practical one.

For most participants, the approach was known by reputation rather than by experience. Adhlal's role was to move that relationship from hear-say to first application.

This mattered for two audiences at once. Leadership needed to see whether the approach was worth supporting across diverse initiatives; staff in product, customer experience, marketing, and innovation needed a first opportunity to build the skills and confidence to apply it themselves. The engagement was designed to serve both.

What

A Learning & Development initiative for senior management and executives, delivered in two stages.

The two stages transformed the program from a single leadership-focused pilot into a repeatable learning experience. This allowed it to reach a wider multi-team audience, enabling them to directly apply their practice-based learnings in their own professional contexts and roles.

How

Adhlal facilitated the full design-thinking arc rather than a lecture about it. Participants worked through empathy (user interviews, insight mapping), definition, ideation (brainstorming and prioritisation), prototyping (storyboarding and building), testing, and iteration, closing each engagement with structured share-outs and reflection. The intent throughout was to let people experience the method by doing it, with enough structure to feel the logic of each stage and enough room to make it their own.

Two choices shaped the experience.

Reflections and insights

Across both stages, a few consistent observations emerged. Participants responded most strongly to working on a real Saudia challenge rather than an abstract one; that the work produced something Saudia could actually take forward gave the method something to prove itself against.

The cross-functional format of the accelerator surfaced perspectives that rarely meet in day-to-day work, which is much of where the value of a co-create approach lies.

And the most durable shift was less about tools than about posture – beginning with the customer and the problem before reaching for a solution.

Impact

The engagement set out to move Saudia from awareness of design thinking to first application, and across two stages it did.

Leadership gained direct, hands-on exposure to a human-centred approach and a clearer basis for supporting its use across the airline's initiatives.

A first group of staff built the skills and confidence to apply the method to their own work, forming the early core of an in-house community of design practitioners.

And the work produced something tangible: an ideas-sharing platform emerged as an idea from the December 2023 pilot training session and was taken forward as a prototype – not an implemented system, but a concrete concept the process produced.

Where the impact compounds