Bhagavad Gita and my awakening to Design Thinking

Design thinking is a process, a philosophy and quite recently has become a way of life for many – both personally and professionally. It can be a tool, a framework or a fancy terminology depending on the context. In the past few years it has gained quite a prominence as its use has been found in business strategies and technology. For many it’s a process, for some it’s an art, for few it’s obscure voodoo and for a handful unfortunate souls it’s an L&D imposition.

For me this was something to not believe in because until about a year ago my life ran on numbers, formulae and frameworks. Then the stars swayed in a direction I didn’t expect and I found myself in an inextricable situation, a situation where I had to learn design thinking. Now that was also a time when I was trying to lose weight (not that I did) and so I used to take stairs to reach office, 17 floors, every day. If you know anything about an overweight person taking stairs to work, one thing is in aplenty for him - time. So I started watching videos on my way up. For the entire month that I tested the strength of my office staircase, I watched content on design thinking. I saw professors speak about it, I saw technology professionals laud it and I saw designers worship it. Yet there I was, the callous consultant who couldn’t understand the niceties of it. So like any intelligent professional, I memorized 4-5 important words related to design thinking and moved on.

Now there must have been a supernova explosion somewhere in the universe because the stars weren’t moving sober for sure. In a completely unrelated sequence of events, I picked up Bhavagad Gita in the eternal hope of finding an answer to the question, ‘what am I doing in this world?’ When I was about 150 pages into the 700 page book I had, there came a realization. It struck to me that the principles of a book that was written some 8000 years ago hold valid still today. No matter howsomuchever Darwin clamored about evolution, we humans appear to be pre-programmed for few things that have not changed for the past 8000 years. We had ego then, we have it now too. We were jealous then, we are now too. We were emotive then, we are now too. We had biases then, we have them now too. So I interpreted that we are programs at some level. In its own way, we have been programmed for certain things.

One of the main things that Bhagavad Gita tries to teach is that one needs to understand the core elements of oneself. Deep introspection. Effectively find the triggers, the motivating forces and the core construct of what makes us. Most of the preaching is directed towards the inner workings of us humans, things that we fail to understand directly. This is what I call as the preprogramed part of us. These are the hardcoded values in us that the Gita wants us to get cognizance of. Consequently it says that we need rise above them and not be driven by them. For example, in one of the instances the book preaches that one should not be driven by the inner need to feel that one can control things. From the book’s perspective this is the latent need that drives a lot of worry in humans because they feel they can control situations, people or other things. So the book attempts to help humans recognize that there are parts in us that have been hardcoded and that if we can realize them, it will make life easy.

Then I came back to design thinking and thought what it actually does. Design thinking too at the core of it tries to decode us as humans. Although it does so differently in various contexts but it does so in a decent magnitude. So when you use design thinking you understand a particular set of human beings in a specific condition for a defined purpose. But one may say that it’s not different from researches that have been happening for gazillions of years. It’s different in one aspect. It does not ask you what it is that you think you want but it tries to dig deep to see what it is that you really want. In my attempt to make it not sound like a self-help blog, design thinking tries to find the triggers beneath our skins that could help companies sell their products or get us to behave in a manner they want us to. Design thinking is about finding the latent triggers & desires and connecting them to the purpose at hand. So once you know what really triggers the people you want to target, it’s easy or rather it becomes a process driven technique using which one can really innovate for a defined purpose.

A lot of data scientists try to do a similar job and that’s not completely disjointed from the process above, rather data science can be a good complement (and in successful cases a good compliment too) to design thinking. Data science is limited in most cases because it tries to unearth patterns from a set of individuals who are already in the situation, for which the data exists; while design thinking can potentially cover the entire universe, the set of individuals who cannot yet be considered in the data science analysis set. And so in the language of business, design thinking can help to find the ‘non-linear’ ways of solving a problem – be it growth, be it cost reduction, be it new market capture, be it product launch or be it hiring a new individual.

The other thing Gita teaches is that one should not think of oneself as either an enjoyer or a creator. One should just do things. This is also evident in the famous line ??? ???? ?? ?? ?? ????? ?? ??  (Work without any expectations). This philosophy too is evidently manifested in the design thinking process. The stage of constant prototyping and iterating to find the solution underscores the same philosophy that if you follow the process and keep on making incremental changes to the prototype, the right solution will emerge.

So from then on, I have observed what design thinking can do. Being in the digital team has helped as I can learn further from practitioners at work. In my own professional life, I’ve seen benefits of it when any consumer researches are done. So when designing new products or services, if one can find the real triggers of the set of people one wants to target, it becomes very easy to make the strategies work. Once we wanted to help a food and beverage company increase its share in the market; various strategies were thought. But there was no definite answer. We then decided to use the design thinking principles and conducted research to analyze what the consumers really want. Many groups of consumers, as segregated by their triggers, were found. For some it was discounts, for some it was the happiness of their loved ones, for some it was a break from the routine and so on. And most of these triggers cannot be found using regular surveys or primary research. So once we had the information, targeting the right consumers was then easy because we just had to find a solution to serve their unstated latent needs.

Learning design research principles has significantly improved my efficacy to hire candidates or creating teams. In today’s age when specialization is losing its significance and the demand for generalists is on a high, it becomes quite tough to judge who the right candidate is. Inspired by the new concept that I have learnt, now my assessments are more oriented towards understanding what drives a person and whether he or she will be aligned to the core purpose of the team. One thing I now try to understand is which of the following four factors drives the candidate – money, knowledge, power or harmony. It becomes a bit easy to create winning teams this way.

There are myriad examples of the concept. Few very powerful ones too. I feel in today’s world adopting design thinking is very important for a few reasons. First, there is paradigm shift in the way we used to interact, partner, collaborate, strategize and serve. So the rules of the game are not the same, rather there do not seem to be many rules. The world was a much organized place when there were the Ten Commandments to follow, in life and business, but now it’s a different story. Second, the number of options we have today are far too many and they are only going to increase, so making a choice will become increasingly difficult. It was very easy when the choices were limited. In the parlance of mathematics, you can solve an equation when there are equal number of variables and constants but when the world is throwing more variables at you, how do you solve? Thirdly, with innovation happening at an unexampled rate it’s tough to maintain one’s business purpose and focus. So if a company has to prevail, it needs to be ingenious in its methods; methods that are easy, lasting and innovative. One of the ways to do this is design thinking.

This has been my journey with the concept and how I’ve become a believer. What’s your story?