Design Thinking: Empathy phase and Wicked Problems

Design thinking: Cusp of a design revolution, a necessity and importance to every business

Let’s first separate the phrase “design thinking” and think about both word “design” and “thinking”. Design is at the same time noun and verb. Design as noun refers to an outcome. Thinking refers to what the person think, what is in his mind. So design thinking means to outcome what is in our mind. Design thinking is a mindset. It means making an impact on the world. The most important thing in design thinking is to be creative and come up with creative ideas. Design thinking is the way of thinking about problems with a different approach and creating ideas that are new, unique, and creative to the world. Debi Parizek explained design thinking and said that design thinking was around us a long time ago. Design thinking is just like sitting at the table with lots of stick notes. Design thinking involves several activities, but it is a complicated process activity, she added (Parizek, 2020).

David Kelly believes that design thinking is not only important but also necessary in all businesses of all types and sizes. In his speech, he said: "design thinking helps us to paint a picture of the future with a new idea in it."

Design thinking is considered important in all businesses to product development (Brown, Tim, Wyatt, 2009). Companies struggle to adjust to globalization through respecting design. Many organizations succeeded because of their improvement. Businesses are sensing an increased demand for product development, design cycles, and more. Through time, businesses integrated design into their company. For instance, McDonald's became huge by creating an algorithm[1] out of a heuristic[2]. This move from heuristic to the algorithm has been repeated and used by a plethora of companies during the 20th century, such as Procter & Gamble, Walmart, Dell, Ford, and others. Each of the companies cited before moved from heuristic to algorithm in a different way. (Martin & Christenses, 2013)

As Martin and Christensen said in their book "Rotman on Design," nowadays companies must become like design shops and transform their work from a traditional firm to a design shop. Instead of using deductive and inductive as a mode of thinking, these companies can think using deductive, inductive, and adductive mode. Concerning the dominant attitude, the traditional firm thinks that they can only do what they have a budget to do. Whereas the design shop thinks like nothing can't be done.

In his article, Buchanan said that design thinking highlights the value of early engagement with stakeholders in businesses. This could defy some existing orthodox policymaking styles. Noting that conflict is not unavoidable. The managerial briefs to manage policy development and policy consultation so that everyone encompasses under-stands why they are being consulted and how consultation is being sequenced. (Buchanan & Richard, 1992)

Integrating design thinking in businesses, companies, or organizations will create lasting value for the consumer through the design thinking process. Design thinking is useful in companies because it aims to solve a concrete human need, tackles problems that are difficult to define, leads to more innovative solutions, and makes organizations run faster and more efficiently. Design thinking is not addressed to a type of business, it can be used by any company. “Keep the change” is a program launched by Bank of America. BOA wanted to get more people to open bank accounts. The bank used the design thinking process and made the “Keep the change program”. This initiative was considered as highly success and came out of the IDEO[3] team in 2004 where they found savers were intentionally rounding up when writing checks (Voltage, 2019).

Empathy: important role in design thinking process

In her speech, Debi Parizek defined empathy as understanding the world or situation, what they need, what they feel. She added that empathy is the core of decision making. It is all about understanding. (Parizek, 2020)

Some theorists describe empathy as a decisive factor of design thinking. Empathy includes an involuntary act of feeling toward someone else in addition to a cognitive act of placing ourselves into the place and position of the other person in a way to adapt their standpoint and perspective. Empathy is the first phase of the design thinking process, which let us comprehend the situations of other people. (Plattner & Meinel, 2015)

For better decisions, we are in need to understand the business consequences of the actions. As humans, we have a subtle brain to use to understand other people's feelings and thinking. The idea of using empathy is to build and proliferate human information. When the information is collected of what people need, it is how the company will solve those needs. We all think that we do not have time to think and look at what other people needs. When we go out for a lunch break, we say we do not need to think and work; we only want to break. This way of thinking is very wrong because open-empathy organizations do not make their employees work hard to develop empathy for their customers; the open-empathy organization provides a plethora of ways and, not anyways, easy ways to interact. (Martin & Christenses, 2013)

In addition to that, employees must use their customers' language to succeed with the empathy phase. The following is a straightforward example. Just use your customers' language, feel that you are in his place, behave like him, and talk like him. For example, say "car" instead of "C-class Vehicles." By doing this small thing, the company or the organization will be closer to their customers. Another important point is to dress like your customers. If you go shopping at Target, you see all the employees wearing casual dress codes just like the customers. Target is considered a middle-class shopping store, so the majority of its customers are wearing casual dress. In that way, customers feel more comfortable because changing the dress code creates some obstacles. First, Target employees will not look like their customers, and secondly, they will go shopping in another store just to be suitable for work. The important thing is to know customers' problems regarding the company products; the company must ask its employees to use its own products. In that way, the company can explore its weakness and try to perform it. (Martin & Christenses, 2013)

To collect information about the customer’s problem, the Empathy organization encourages employees to meet their customers regularly. This step is not an option but compulsory and mandatory because data cannot be gathered only through observations and interviews. This will be done through the empathy map[4]. An empathy map is created to show all about what we know regarding the customers or users. It let us explore the persona of the users or customers. An empathy map is about understanding what users or customers feel, think, seeing, and saying. These 4 information contribute to build am empathy map with 4 quadrants. (PlaybookUX, 2019) For instance, in 1993, the CEO of IBM asked his 50 top managers to visit customers not to sell products in their homes but to meet them. They listened to the needs of the customers and wrote a short report. In that way, IBM started to grow and generated profitability. The idea of this step is to bring the outside in, which means bring from outside to inside the company. (Martin & Christenses, 2013)

Wicked problems: concept and insights

Wicked problems series looks at tools implicated in solving problems that cannot be tackled through traditional processes of problem-solving. As a team and employees, we have to harness our creativity and knowledge to shape the world for the better. Since 45 years ago, the idea of wicked problems has grown and developed. Horst Rittel[5] talked about wicked problems. He believes that all the problems that exist around us can be divided into tame and wicked problems. During that time, people used to work and behave with problems as if all problems are the same. Before reacting to the problems, nowadays people start asking themselves: is this problem tame or wicked? Rittel believes that wicked problems are not the same as the tame problem. To support his idea, he identified ten characteristics of wicked problems. He added that wicked problems is a problem but can never be truly solved. He added that this type of problem is found whenever people come together and try to make things better. For instance: regulatory headlocks, traitorous employees, food and water security, pollution, overpopulation, global warming, pandemic influenza, etc. These problems are considered wicked problems because they require many people to change their mindsets and behavior to solve these problems. (Bentley & Toth, 2020)

Ten characteristics of wicked problems according to Ritttel:

• Wicked problems have no specific formulation. For example the poverty in Texas is different from poverty in Nairobi.
• It is hard to measure our claim success with wicked problems.
• Wicked problems’ solutions can only be bad or good, not true and false.
• When tackling a wicked problem there is no sample and template to follow.
• Wicked problems has more than one explanation.
• Each wicked problem is a symptom of another problem.
• No mitigation strategy for a wicked problems.
• One shot design effort is considered as an offered solution to a wicked problems.
• Wicked problems are not similar, they are unique.
• Designers must be responsible for their actions while addressing a wicked problem.

Many author and theorists talked about the wicked problem, Keith Grint[2]gave an example in his book “Leadership: Limits and Possibilities” about tame and wicked problems. He said tame problem is like teaching your children to pass their driving test, but a wicked problem is how to remain successful parent to them. Another clear example is the following. A tame problem is winning the war in Iraq; on the other hand, a wicked problem is securing peace in Iraq after the war. Wicked problems do not exist only in society but also in any workplace or industry, such as stakeholders' disagreements, a lack of precedent for the problem, complex roots, etc. Wal-Mart also faced a wicked problem when it tried to grow faster. During that time, stakeholders were watching the: employees and trade unions, the US government, and others where the retailer operates and locates, suppliers and customers. The stakeholder of that big company had different interests, and of course, not all of the stakeholders share the company's same goals. In 1962, Wal-Mart faced a slowing growth in the USD due to the low income of its customers, saturated market, and the competition from rivals such as Costco and Target. Adding that the company faced resistance to imports and criticism about the wages. Some of the advantages have turned into disadvantages, such as "the low-cost sourcing practices rendered it vulnerable to the health and safety concerns surrounding products made in china." To face these problems, Wal-Mart has a plethora of choices. The company can increase sales through raising processes and expanding into the urban market in the US in a way to boost its revenues and profits. It can also boost its revenues by creating new store brands or even forecasting better. Nevertheless, to work on these options demand capabilities, and they are risky, and for sure, it will generate conflict between employees, and even these strategies conflict with one another. The company did not increase its price because nowadays low process helped Wal-Mart to den off rivals. Because Wal-Mart thought that if consumers resist the high price, the sales and profit will definitely drop down sharply. So Wal-Mart prevented that way and decided to modify its value proposition, develop a brand persona that warrants higher prices, etc. At that time, Wal-Mart thought to enter a foreign market and chose India, but the local laws do not allow foreign companies to operate multi-brand retail outlets. To avoid this problem, Wal-Mart develops a special business, which is a cash-and-carry wholesale store.

In this case, we know that going upmarket could generate big profits for sure, but it is not easy for a discount chain to build and develop a relationship with higher-income customers. Simply Wal-Mart cannot ignore its existing consumers because they come to Wal-Mart to look for inexpensive products. When the company entered India, it was a good step, but at the same time, it is risky because it is not easy for a company to share expertise with local partners, and of course, it will lose some of its competitive advantages. Growth is not just a problem for the company. It is considered a wicked problem. Wal-Mart case shows us the challenge bears all the signs of wickedness. (Camillus, 2008)

Wicked problems took a large and important place in our readings and lectures. The first insight about wicked problem said by Jeff Conklin[1]: “Wicked problems demand an opportunity-driven approach: they require making decisions, doing experiments, launching pilot programs, testing prototypes, and so on.” (Martin & Christenses, 2013) P.53

After reading this sentence, it seems that a wicked problem is similar to a design thinking definition. Both require making decisions, but the decision cannot be made before doing experiments and even launching pilot programs. Before spreading the results of solving the problem it is mandatory to launch a pilot program and try the tools we have invent it before make it in a plain sight. This sentence was important to me and let me understand how resolving wicked problems start and what we shall do when we face wicked problems, whether in our lives or at our job.

“While problems of all shapes and sizes can benefit from creativity, it has become an article of faith that wicked problems, in particular, require highly creative solutions that spam boundaries and organizations.” (Martin & Christenses, 2013)

This sentence is taken from Rotman on Design book page 146, explained us wicked problems clearly. Any problem can indeed be solved whenever it is the sizes and the shapes of the problem because when creativity exists, problems are solved. However, this is not the case of wicked problems. Wicked problems required high creativity from us in order to solve it. This sentence makes me think more about the relationship between design thinking and wicked problems. Both of them require high creativity from us. Do you not think that design thinking is addressed to solve wicked problems and not a simple problem?

“When wicked problems are involved, making sure we understand the decision environment, and then adapt the decision-making process, can help leaders in the dynamic and complex 21st century business environment to not only make better decisions but also to ensure that those decisions maintain a focus on the humans at the heart of the issue.” (College, 2020)

For me, this insight meant a lot just because “maintain a focus on the humans at the heart of the issue,” in another way, always take into consideration the social responsibility. We always repeat that wicked problems are not only a normal problem. Wicked problems refer to the whole society or a huge population, such as pollution, poverty, and more. Just think about eradicating poverty in Africa or solving the water pollution by inventing tools or machines that are bad for health in any way… from my readings and these 3 insights, I understand that wicked problem is not normal. It refers to society. To solve it, it is mandatory to follow the decision-making process and use our high creativity, but at the same time, we have to ensure that our decisions maintain a focus on the humans at the heart of the issue and maintain social responsibility.

[1] The algorithm is a method containing a finite set of instructions used to solve a problem. The method has been proven mathematically or scientifically to work for the problem. There are formal methods and proofs.

[2] A heuristic is a technique designed for solving a problem more quickly when classic methods are too slow or for finding an approximate solution when classic methods fail to find any exact solution.

[3] IDEO is a global design company committed to creating positive impact.

[4] Empathy map is formed with four quadrants, it about understanding what users or customers feel, think, seeing, and saying.

[5] Is a director if CogNexus Institute and worked with the World Bank on shared understanding.

[6] Is a professor of public leadership at Warwick University and also he is a former director of research at Oxford.

[7] Was a university professor and a design theorist. He is known for introducing the term wicked problem. In addition to that he is the one of the influencer on design theory.

References

• Bentley, J., & Toth, M. (2020). Exploring Wicked Problems: What They Are and Why They Are Important. Bloomington, Indiapolis: Archway Publishing.
• Camillus, J. (2008, May). Strategy as a Wicked Problem. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2008/05/strategy-as-a-wicked-problem
• College, W. (2020). Using Design Thinking to Address Wicked Problems. Retrieved from Walsh College: https://moodle.walshcollege.edu/mod/url/view.php?id=848005
• Martin, R., & Christenses, K. (2013). Rotman on Design. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
• Parizek, D. (2020, January 4). Introduction to Design Thinking. (K. Bush, Interviewer) Retrieved from https://moodle.walshcollege.edu/mod/url/view.php?id=847971
• Plattner, H., & Meinel, C. (2015). Design Thinking Research: Building Innovators. (L. Leifer, Ed.) Switzerland: Springfer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-06823-7
• Walsh. (n.d.). Look Before You Leap … to the Solution. Retrieved from Walsh College: https://moodle.walshcollege.edu/mod/url/view.php?id=848004
• PlaybookUX. (2019, March 8). What is an Empathy Map? [video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwF9a56WFWA