Design Thinking is a culture shift, not a tool

Like most worthwhile business practices, you can't just buy a carton of Design Thinking to sprinkle on your next project. Blindly using the tools won't work. Your whole product team has to embrace a user-centric philosophy. Understand your team's current receptiveness to user data and manage the move to Design Thinking practices accordingly.

Tools work best when you understand the rationale

Most talk of Design Thinking centers on a series of techniques that move your product team from user research through ideation and prototyping to product development. But these techniques are just the process that you use. They don't provide the reason or the motivation. Stepping through a process without understanding the rationale is never likely to end well.

A team that doesn't internalize the user-centric heart of Design Thinking is unlikely to gain benefit from the technique

Without a good motivation, why would your team embrace the tools? Without the correct mindset, Design Thinking is just another buzzword. A team that doesn't internalize the user-centric heart of Design Thinking is unlikely to gain benefit from the technique. When their project fails to deliver the expected gains, Design Thinking will be the scapegoat. That can sully the reputation of Design Thinking in your organization, making it harder to drive adoption in the future.

NN/g (where I used to work) surveyed UX and design professionals on how they define Design Thinking. Their results suggest that people talk about it in term of the process, not the culture. If even the self-selecting sample of design-focused respondents to this survey focus on tools rather than philosophy, then it's going to be much harder for most product teams in organizations to learn about the real reasons that techniques like Design Thinking succeed or fail.

It's telling that the most innovative and successful development teams I know are the ones who have embraced the iterative development processes of agile and the feedback loops of Lean and then moved on, slotting these tools into the relevant places in their toolkits but never getting hung up on what some book says they should do next. Likewise, the teams that I see struggling most are the ones who try to dogmatically enforce a certain structure on their work because "that's Agile."

That's how it is with Design Thinking too. Teaching an underlying respect for user data is more important than the specific techniques. For instance there are many ways to perform ideation, but the need to ideate from user data is non-negotiable.

Culture first, tools second

My workshops teach the culture along with the tools. I explain the reason why we're using a certain tool by showing its place in the broader user-centric design landscape. The focus of the whole process is reducing user pain, with the understanding that doing so creates a more competitive, more profitable product.

That’s why the workshop requires a whole product team to be present. Without the whole team (or at least the influencers from each discipline) the subsequent effort will fail because people who have just embraced the new culture will face too much pressure from others still in the old culture and will revert.

Without understanding of the purpose of each tool, and how it moves the team toward their overall goal, there's unlikely to be buy-in to the process or the deliverables.

Plugging these new tools in to the old culture is a recipe for failure. Without understanding of the purpose of each tool, and how it moves the team toward their overall goal, there's unlikely to be buy-in to the process or the deliverables. Indeed, the team's overall goals are likely to change in a user-centric world. There's typically a move from feature-centric goals to customer enablement; from output to outcomes.

How to foster the right culture for Design Thinking to work

If you're planning on using a user-centered approach on your next project, here are some suggestions for getting buy-in from your team and management so that you create a new culture rather than just introducing a confusing new set of techniques.

• Ensure everyone (team and management) sees user pain first hand, preferably on site visits in the user's own domain. This turns them into champions for users' needs.
• Create measurable goals based on user need, and make a clear link between user satisfaction and profitability. This allows you to justify and get sign-off for the team's new approach.
• Emphasize data over opinion, and build in frequent opportunities to check in with users that you're heading the right way. This solidifies the user-centric, data-driven approach to product definition and development.

How can you tell if you've created a culture shift? Pretty soon, the conversation on the team will change. Discussions will focus on data observed during user sessions rather than on personal opinion. Team members will challenge proposals that don't resolve user pain points. People joining the team will quickly adopt the language and process that focuses on user need.

More importantly, the techniques that the team uses to move through the Design Thinking process will begin to morph as team members start to own them and mould them for their own uses, all the time remaining mindful of the user-centered rationale behind each tool. Rather than dogmatic application of a strict set of methods, you'll start to see reasoned adoption of the right set of approaches to ensure that user needs are properly incorporated into the way that you develop products.