DESIGN THINKING
Agile – Kaizen – Lean
Haven’t you made design thinking skill your culture yet?
If no, it is not too late.
- Do you want to make something different in your business to appeal your customers?
- Do you want to foresee ambiguous future to meet upcoming needs of your customers?
- Do you want to simplify your processes for best customer experience?
It is very easy to be creative and innovative,
It is so simple to find best solution for any kind of problem,
It is very efficient to have business process excellence,
It is very cognitive intelligent to predict trends and behavior patterns of customers,
If you have design thinking skill and knowledge.
What is design thinking?
It is possible to define design thinking in a variety of different ways.
a. d.thinking is a process for creative problem solving.
b. d.thinking is a powerful tool to reveal new ways of thinking and doing whatever the challenge is.
c. d.thinking is a way of establishing emotional connection between the people and your product.
d. d.thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
e. d.thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients.
f. d.thinking is an approach to get innovation and creativity.
g. d.thinking helps the organizations to create next big thing and shows a way for thinking outside the box. It provides simplifying and humanizing the problems, services, products and processes.
How to implement design thinking process?
I will simply explain this iterative process with 5 steps (Discover, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test).
1. Discover/Understand/Learn from People
First, we need to understand the problem, so we have to gather right data by listening to real people. We have to empathize with the people to understand their experience and motivation. We can have better perspective to understand what they think, feel, and behave, if we can gather sensitive and human-centered data from emotional people.
2. Define/Analyze/Synthesize/Find Patterns
Now, we need to analyze and to synthesize all data gathered in discover phase to define the real problem or problems. We can use any methods and techniques which are convenient for us (e.g. SWOT, 4W1H, PESTEL, Porter’s five forces, statistical analysis, root-cause, six thinking hats and etc.) It is essential to bring together all related people in the meetings to make 100% correct decisions for right solutions.
3. Explore/Ideate/Design Principles
Now, we have better view and understanding about our problems, so we can start discussions on possible solutions, new ideas and creative opinions. We need a series of meetings with all related people to reach to a common decision. At the end of these meetings, we will have a prioritized list of new ideas, creative opinions, principles, and solutions decided by contribution and collaboration of the people.
4. Develop/Prototype/Make Tangible
Now, we need to develop inexpensive prototypes of our abstract ideas and solutions to make them visual and tangible. Having solid and visual samples help us to test and understand better before implementing them in a real costly environment. By the end of this step, we will have a better idea of the constraints inherent within the product, the problems that are present, and have a better informed perspective of how real users would behave, think, and feel when interacting with the sample products.
5. Test/Deliver/Iterate
Now, time to test prototypes to learn success rate of solutions, principles and ideas. Test results can create a new vision and give a different perspective changing our thinking and understanding, so we might make some changes on decisions about prototypes and ideas. Design thinking process is an iterative process, so anytime, we can go back and redesign our principles and ideas until we are sure about we have right and correct solution. We can deliver final version of our solution whenever we can be sure and satisfied about the results.
After we delivered our solution with go live action, we can start discovering the results and defining new problems for next design thinking process. As you see, d.thinking process is so simple and understandable. That’s it.
Why design thinking?
If you can make it your culture, you can be most innovative, most creative, and most productive. You can also use design thinking process for solving your individual problems, e.g. career, finance, school, education, baby care, health care, interior design, and family issues. This approach can be applied for any part of our life, because it is so generic and customizable.
It is very easy to be creative and innovative,
It is so simple to find best solution for any kind of problem,
It is very efficient to have business process excellence,
It is very cognitive intelligent to predict trends and behavior patterns of customers,
If you have design thinking skill and knowledge.
Agile or Lean or Kaizen or Design Thinking?
All methods are not alternatives of each other. On the contrary, they are complementary of each other. In design thinking process, we synthesize the problem into small parts and we establish small groups working on parts of the problem like scrum groups and sprints in agile. We avoid wasting time and resources in each step of design thinking process like lean. We focus on small improvements which are possible and doable and we do it continuous process like kaizen. In essence, we can say that, design thinking approach gets benefits from kaizen, agile and lean approaches. I think that best way is to enrich design thinking process with agile, lean, and kaizen principles and capabilities to get best benefit.
Where to use design thinking process?
It is supposed that design thinking is used only in technology, but this is not true. This approach is used in automotive, finance, retail, travel, sports, education, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, insurance, families, individual issues, and any part of our life to solve any kind of problem. IBM, Apple, P&G, Nike, Coca-Cola, Stanford and MIT universities, SAP, and Airbnb are some good examples of design thinking process implementations. Yes, it is so simple to implement. It is applicable for any needs. It has many successful references from biggest companies to smallest companies, from organizations to individuals, and from schools to universities. It is so effective way to make difference in your business. So, why don’t you use it?
I would like to give three examples I used design thinking approach in my career. First example is from telecommunications industry. I helped one of the biggest telecommunication company to transform from state owned company to competitive private company by transforming all IT processes and capabilities aligned with business strategy and transformation. Second example is from finance-banking industry. I supported business strategy of one of the biggest bank to transform from old fashioned clumsy bank to agile and leading bank, by implementing core banking application with all other complementary applications like internet banking, phone banking and investment banking applications. Third and last example is from insurance industry. I, with a wonderful team, have transformed non-profit insurance organization to revenue generating profitable company by transforming all processes, organization, technology and all mind-sets of the people. In this insurance company I leaded, we collected most prestigious international awards (most innovative company, most innovative product, best innovation life cycle, executive of the year, CEO of the year 2016 awards, and etc.) by virtue of a perfect team who has design thinking mind-set and culture in 2016.
Finally, I strictly suggest that every company, every executive, every people and every person should use design thinking approach for their problem solving process to make everything what you do excellent.
Now, time to go, time to act, time to innovate, and time to achieve with design thinking process enriched with agile, lean, and kaizen methodologies and approaches.
Wish you all the best in your design thinking journey.