Design Thinkers: Are you Thinking (and Leading) Enough?

The tidal wave of design thinking puts trained designers in a predicament: We waited years to be valued in strategic conversations; We invested blood, sweat and tears (not to mention time and money) to develop truly creative skills; We formed unique professional identities, manifest by unique artefacts, which morphed into immutable personal identities. Designer researcher Nigel Cross describes the chasm in even more mythical terms. Despite his 40+ years of design research, the journey from Neophyte to Master “…remains rather obscure.” (Design Thinking, p.144). Now, amidst claims that anyone can be creative, becoming a “designer” and contributing to innovation is merely a design thinking playbook, video or online course away. As HBR proudly proclaimed last year on a front cover: “….design thinking is no longer just for products. Executives are using this approach to devise strategy and manage change.” This should be the moment we designers have been waiting for!

For a design educator like myself, the predicament is even more problematic: For the record, I am dedicated to educating my clients and students in applying the ways of design to achieve meaning. However, I harbor a sentiment that they cannot be designers, because they have not been trained as such. They have not spent long nights in the studio, faced public critique, nor explored art as an indelible character trait. As the Fall semester comes to a close for both of my graduate student cohorts, I began to see patterns of behaviors, revealing a madness in the method which reinforces my intuition. By asking the question: Are We Thinking Enough? I hope to encourage Design Thinkers to Think and Act not like a designer, but as Donald Sch?n`s embodiment of good professional practice, the Reflective Practitioner.

To explore how we can use Design Thinking to encourage these practices, let`s reflect on the words we love. Given the ever expanding universe, I group the reflections under categories which reflect design behaviors. While they do resonate with design concepts, they are primarily for convenience. The result may seem to simplify and even misrepresent the Design Thinking corpus. While this is not intentional, it does reflect how the concepts are interpreted and applied by many students (mine, and I suspect others). Lastly, I will refer not to designers, rather practitioners, in the spirt of Sch?n and to emphasize his call for reflective practices in professional contexts. So let’s explore the opportunities to encourage our clients, our students, and ourselves, to design and think.

Design Space: Are you exploring the outer limits and deepest caverns of your design space?

1.    Challenges: All professional interventions start with an initial request “… to change an existing situation into a preferred one” This famous paraphrase of Herbert Simon can also be referred to as the Design Challenge. To realize the practitioner’s largest potential for impact, seek to reframe challenges rather than merely rephrasing them. Many initial challenges reflect narrow interests – either functional, organizational, or personal. Our job is to explore and expand to ensure eventual solutions will be holistic, sustainable and even transformative. Seek to understand the words used, unearth the associated assumptions, and identify relevant tangents to legitimize a reframing discussion.

2.    Needs: A common device to explore challenges is to collect needs. Whether conducting interviews, ethnography, or more innovative workshop methods, striking the right balance between stated vs unconscious “needs” is critical to impactful interventions. This dichotomy is best characterized in the overused Steve Jobs comment, quoted by his biographer Walter Isaacson, “People don't know what they want until you show it to them.” There’s no doubt in my mind that human centered experiences do benefit from knowing conscious needs. However, never underestimate your ability to predict or shape what is meaningful for users.

3.    Finding: Because need-finding is inherently a biased endeavor, ensure your team is listening for insights rather than hearing with intent. All too often practitioners bring preconceived concepts or solutions to the conversations, which filter out potentially valuable data. As behavioral economics show clearly, our rationality in this critical stage can never be assured. Seek diversity and encourage divergent opinions to protect against the bias of human nature. Give yourself and the team Time to reflect on the evidence rather than running to solutions.

4.    Ecosystem: A design space has boundaries, initially from the challenge itself, and then from the propositions that emerge. Too often, either due to time, budget or mindset, a truly outside-in perspective is missed, sending the practitioner down a less than meaningful path. Essential to the “rightness” of a design space is informing those boundaries with adjacent vectors: the industry, the market, competitors, analogous solutions, stakeholders, etc. Let the broader design landscape reshape your design space, and open opportunities to increase the relevancy and impact of design propositions.

Design Inspiration: Are you inspired to design differently and create meaningful experiences?

5.    Vision: The mind is ostensibly a problem-solving machine. When faced with uncertainty, or a problem, we naturally tend to seek an explanation or resolution. Rather than paint a new future, design thinking tends to overemphasize prototyping solutions. This short-circuits the imagination, inhibits creating visions of what could be, and ultimately reduces the inspirational potential of designing. Essential to your vision is creativity – the ability to represent those visions. When you explore possible worlds, and represent them in compelling ways, you release the latent potential of design to stimulate meaningful experiences and your ability to inspire others as well.

6.    References: We all carry in our minds images, stories, and experiences that may or may not be related to the design challenge at hand. These should become conscious, celebrated rather than stifled for the sake of the method. By drawing upon your references, serendipitous connections and creative metaphors can take a design beyond the prosaic. By connecting to cultural references, you will also inspire the collaborative effort and facilitate change across the ecosystem. As Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” By enriching your reference bank, and explicitly celebrating it, creative inspirations will come naturally.

7.    Digital: A wellspring of inspiration can be found in the ever expanding application of new technologies. The new experiences, new economies, and new social value digital sparks is unprecedented and will continue to exponentially open new vistas on old problems. Just by looking for ways to “digitalize” will also introduce inspiration. Being aware of digital, and being digital, places a wealth of tools at your disposal to create inspirational solutions to wicked problems. As you seek insights, look for how digital is changing the world around you. Bring them into your palette, in creative, yet credible ways.

8.    Meaning: Design should not just establish “preferred situations”, but meaningful experiences. A design proposition that fulfills a need, fulfills a functional requirement. However, good design can stimulate new experiences, infused with emotions and most importantly, with meaning. Creating a desirable outcome for an individual, an organizational objective to realize value, and a contribution to a grand societal challenge (or wicked problem), imbibe designs with impact. Although not always attainable, aspire to design for meaning, while also fulfilling the basics.

Design Artefacts: Who are the design artefacts you are creating?

9.    Visualization: The representation of ideas is the essential difference between design and other disciplines. The intent is to encourage the dialog towards building shared understanding. Bringing ideas into reality can occur in many ways – sketching, modeling, copying, collage, etc. Prepare yourself to quickly and easily represent your ideas. Remember that you are intrinsically limited by your visualizations, so always ask yourself how our representations expand or limit the intended messages. Most interestingly, explore what was misinterpreted. The learnings should not only provide insights on the next iteration, but your practices as well.

10. Prototypes: Although this is just a more detailed visualization, I am still learning about the nuances of design thinking prototypes. Funky, Dark Horse, etc all clearly have different purposes for specific stages in the methodology. What I have seen is the tendency of prototypes to lean towards demonstrating a product and/or service. To fully understand the risks, what is the intended purpose of prototype? It is a design artifact which aims to communicate in physical form ideas and stimulate a design dialog seeking shared understanding. With this broad definition, we can expand the application of this powerful tool to also illustrate broader concepts, such as a strategy, a business model, and most importantly, an ecosystem. This perspective may not be news (I refer to it as Strategic Design). However, my intent in calling it out is to avoid the natural tendencies towards solutioning, and the potential misunderstanding in a process requiring stakeholder alignment and strategic/system thinking.

11. Criticality: Understanding what should be accomplished (aka design brief) is not the same as defining how to achieve a function. In the early phases of exploration, defining the critical requirements is more important than the critical functionality. Later on, defining how it will work becomes more important, particularly as the design cycle moves from divergence to convergence and solutioning. The lesson here is to always ask what is critical at this point in time, to reinforce the meaning and validity of our propositions. Keeping an eye on the end game will help to avoid going down rabbit holes that may compromise your impact.

12. Feasibility: Due to the physicality of design artefacts, propositions will inherently raise technical questions. Too often we tend to either overlook technical requirements, or let it constrain ourselves. For practitioners, the challenge is not to demonstrate expertise, rather credibility. Never forget that the renaissance designer does not exist in our contemporary world. The competent and confident practitioner acknowledges when expertise is required, and engages experts as required. Awareness of the realities should contribute to the legitimacy of inspirational ideas, and appropriate actioning lends to the credibility required for stimulate shared understanding.

Design Learning: Are you learning about your challenge and yourself, while designing (or innovating)?

13. Iteration: The strongest sign of learning by reflecting-in-action, iteration encourages innovators to invent. Ingenious propositions emerge – even serendipitously – out of the inflection caused by a previous experience, related object, or tangential idea. In fact, the “design debris” – those discarded ideas, artefacts, discussions and experiences - establish an empirical trail for learning about the challenge, and yourself. Practitioners who remain conscious of their iterations, either by formal tracking or observing design debris, reshape propositions to increase their “rightness”. More importantly, the iterations emerging from a collaborative process create shared understanding and augment the collective commitment to transformation.

14. Reflection: By definition, the reflective practitioner reflects as she practices her profession. The designer even more so - she is immersed in reflection, because as Sch?n writes, “Design is a reflective conversation with the situation.” In the midst of designing, it is essential that practitioners identify what has influenced design decisions, and consciously assessed the value of those inflection points. While time is always precious, orthodoxy too often provides an illegitimate rationalization to move on. Missing out on physical manifestations of choices, conjecture, and event conflict, conceals points for reflection and dialog. Always be attentive, raising these for discussion and debate (internally and externally), in order to accelerate the iterative process and amplify the impact.

15. Failure: One prominent mantra of Design Thinking is “Fail Fast, Fail Often”. The reality in the professional world is there is limited tolerance for failure, so the practitioner should consider carefully what context they reside within before pursuing paths laden with potential failure. Regardless of the realities, the learning potential should not be negated. However, in my experience, the mantra is overused to justify investing time and effort to explore ill-conceived ideas. Because failure is not only accepted, but expected, practitioners tend to avoid any rigor, particularly in ideation. This tendency actually negates learning how to develop hypothesis and select them for testing, because of their validity. Although heretical, my view is we can encourage a bit more thinking, and a bit less doing, to fully exploit the learning potential of a design process.

16. Critique: In his HBR article The Innovative Power of Criticism, Roberto Verganti writes: “Whereas ideation suggests deferring judgment, the art of criticism innovates through judgment.” Critique implicitly contains an emotional message. In many cases, practitioners are not receptive, which entrenches an anti-critical cultural. However, even more damaging is the fact that most colleagues, leaders and educators are just not good at giving pointed, insightful, and constructive feedback. The majority of feedback I hear focused on what ifs - additional functionality or disruptive blind spots, and not about meaning, impact and sustainability. Another reality often misunderstood is the inherent conflict between consultant and client, between designer and user. While objectives may be shared, the differences in references, language and styles make conflict an inevitable occurrence. See all social interactions, including creative conflicts, as an accelerator for both proposition and personal development. To realize this potential, practitioners simply need to develop their capability to engage in constructive criticism and creative conflict.

Design Leadership: How are you leading the design process and leveraging its transformative potential?

17. Design: Design (capital D) is not just a method, nor just an aesthetic outcome. It is a discipline. Those who seek to lead by designing, your creative confidence would increase immensely by exploring the richness of this discipline. Begin with the modern designers (Bauhaus, Bass, Eames), then design researchers (Simon, Cross, Lawson, Norman), and finally to exploring your professional role model design process (Gehry, Ives and Bowie are mine). These avenues will accelerate building a design mindset, that will significantly amplify your leadership potential and potency. Rejuvenate your design sensibilities of observation and representation by engaging in any creative endeavor. From these departure points, you may even be able to move your definition of design from a discipline to a raison d'etre.

18. Language: The words you choose to circumscribe evolving experiences is essential to conveying the right leadership stance. In design thinking, too often the words used are self-referential, the lexicon becomes a closed jargon. One area I have seen this occur often is when presentations emphasize the method (personas, interviews, prototypes, ….) over key messages that engage an audience. Design, particularly collaborative design, is a powerful means to create a shared language. Although this is fraught with challenges, the competent design leader is able to describe her process to the right audience, and the right time, with the right messages. Practice your pitches using one of the design thinking tenants – emphasize with your audience, and use meaningful language to achieve the strategic objectives of your intervention.

19. Creativity: In my recent observations, creativity is the elephant in the design thinking room. The capability to be creative is a potent source for design leadership. Plastering the wall with post-its is not a substitute for creative skills, which include sketching, model-making, or any aesthetic representation. Creativity contributes to your design mindset, as designers continually seek artistic experiences and expression. You should have a creative curiosity to inspire their creative expression, interpretation and representation of multiple realities. You should develop a love of craft, how materials feel and are connected to create form. If you aspire to be a design thinker, then amplify your creative confidence and bring a spark into your designs by expressing yourself artistically.

20. Transform: A leader, not just a designer or reflective practitioner, should “…change an existing situation into a preferred one”. All the actions practitioners take to solve ambiguous situations - framing, researching, proposing, making, exploring, and iterating – require the transformation to some extent of ideas, words, concepts, users, organizations and ultimately, communities. As you lead a design process, think and be reflective to leverage its transformative potential. Shared understanding is an evolutionary, and in many contexts, a revolutionary, occurrence. Navigate the complexities, keep a steady course to realize your vision, and the transformative rewards will be available for all to enjoy.

Are you a Reflective Practitioner?

In summary, the majority of observations I raise echo the fundamental professional predicament Sch?n eloquently describes in his opening chapter of his book, The Reflective Practitioner:

“Many practitioners, locked into a view of themselves as technical experts, find nothing in the world of practice to occasion reflection. They have become too skillful at techniques of selective inattention, junk categories, and situational control, techniques which they use to preserve the constancy of their knowledge-in-practice. For them, uncertainly is a threat; its admission a sign of weakness. Others, more included toward and adept at reflection-in-action, nevertheless feel profoundly uneasy because they cannot say what they know how to do, cannot justify its quality or rigor. “ The Reflective Practitioner, p69.

There is no doubt that Design Thinking continues to contribute a significant toolset to the reflective practitioner. So much so that Don Norman recast his original article entitled Design Thinking: A Useful Myth to Design Thinking: An Essential Tool. However, like any holy writ, Design Thinking is dependent on the disciples. To avoid becoming a “technical expert” of design thinking, adherents should reflect more about its application. Given our penchant for turning methods into madness, I re quote Norman`s concluding sentence from his original post: “Act as if you believe it. Just don't actually do so.”