DESIGN THINKING: INDIA STATUS UPDATE

Design Thinking is probably done with the date that it had been on with the organizations across the globe. Multitude of online courses have mushroomed ranging from completely free to hundreds of dollars. MBA curriculum is now forced to incorporate tiny fragments of Design Thinking. Thousands are getting trained into Design Thinking every day in possible aspiration to catapult their careers towards more meaningful, creative and away-from-the-rut league. Every management consulting company, small or big, including McKinsey and ilk, is championing Design Thinking. Popularity is always good for a new category. The methodology, as Stanford originally propounded, itself appears so simple that it is almost impossible to believe that it may need any training at all. Contrarian voices have already started rising, that it is NOT a process at all. On the other hand, big promises have been made about ROI of Design Thinking, but is difficult to be put down in terms of numbers. Here is a short update on status Design Thinking in diverse industries I have come across.

Democratizing the ‘sense-making’

IT industry, the biggest promoter of Design Thinking in its current avatar read ‘EMPATHY’ from Design Thinking, in capital letters literally. The current upheaval in the industry due to ‘digital’, that is replacing CIOs with CDOs (Chief Digital Officer), necessitates reading the consumer/customer’s mind right. With AGILE and LEAN methods already popular with the industry, ITERATIVE PROTOTYPING is not new to them. They almost tend to ignore this part and the entire focus is on making sense of the customer context. Traditionally, ‘requirements’ team would be the one that interacted with the customer and then hands over the mandate to tech teams. Those hard boundaries are being challenged as DT is helping democratizing the ‘sense-making’ of the brief, right down to last tech-support level. And the result is — DT is likely to bring disruptive changes to the organization structure. Design Thinking initiative that a visionary HR team launches upon with an idea of changing the company’s culture to innovative one, ends up empowering people who become more vocal (for the better). Companies often ask ROI when they start exploring the DT paradigm. And they are quite disappointed that there are no established metrices and cases of tangible returns yet (yes, despite all the brouhaha, that is the reality!). There needs to be tremendous change management backbone for DT to bear fruits. And here lies a challenge for those who think that Design Thinking is a cake walk that ends with a few workshops.

Data is the ‘new molecule’

Pharma industry, is slow to move and difficult to replace. Molecule discovery was once the biggest miracle one could think of that would open the gold mine for several years to come. Today, with intense competition, strict regulations around trials, subsidy pressures indifferent geographies and the rise of alternative medicine, the molecule discovery is no longer the most sought after business model in pharma. On one hand innovations like ‘digital pill’ are coming up that can send a signal from your stomach to your wearable device and then to the doctor. On the other hand, ‘beyond the pill’ is becoming the new mantra to explore revenue streams from patient-care, drug-delivery and of course just data-mining. Data is the ‘new molecule’ here. Design Thinking is helping make the clinical trials shorter and positive outcome driven as control groups are now living normal lives with the help of wearables and better empathy from the drug discovery team. Focus on empathy methods is helping organisations explore more methods of revenue which are “beyond the pill”.

‘Empathy’ is not just a ‘market research’ technique

FMCG had mastered the brand of personae mapping, qualitative research methods and blind-proto-tests. They sometimes wonder at what is all this noise about Design Thinking. While many FMCG companies have taken a beating from emerging wonder-brand like Patanjali in India, and fumbling to find an appropriate response, they are yet to understand that ‘empathy’ is just not a ‘market research’ technique. It is not just a prerogative of the marketing team to realign with the fast-changing realities, but it’s about the cultural shift that must include all the stakeholders and pull them closer to the user context. So, in that sense, this industry seems to be rather stiff-collared and a laggard.

Rejuvenating the R&D teams

Recently, I had a close encounter with an R&D team engaged in molecular level research for a commodity consumer product. It was surprising for me to see how distant are they are from the market realties. R&D functions tend to become slow paced silos over a period and more so where research outcomes take a long time. The great humdrum of Design Thinking can surely give an organization a reason to infuse some rejuvenating action across the back-end teams.

Surviving the ‘digital’ glut

Media and entertainment industry has another story altogether. I met a clutch of India CIOs in a recent conference and was surprised to know that very few of them had heard about Design Thinking. One question that made the group split into a laughter was — “I keep hearing that print is dying (as in newspaper) and everything will turn digital…that I am hearing for the last 15 years, and every year I think, that the next year should be my forced retirement…but print only seems to grow in numbers”. That is an Indian reality. Media industry is reeling under the data glut that runs into several peta-bytes (each small video commercial shot in 4K definition, runs into several GBs of data). While tools and machines are becoming more powerful by the day and advance analytics tools are coming handy to decipher user downloads and other user-parameters, yet there is no objective sensing of will the user abandon print altogether or not. Millennial users are unpredictable for the current sensing tools. Human interpretation layer that Design Thinking offers is a must and can strengthen the analytics tremendously.

Recalibrate entrepreneurial ideas from the end-users’ perspective

Venture funds are like mass-blasters of this esoteric science. And the good news is that more and more venture funds are understanding the value of customer experience and early concept validation driven by Design Thinking. I know some design leaders are now part of the venture fund managing teams and they are helping the investees take their idea development through DT process. I facilitated a unique workshop for investees of a pan-Asia social impact fund where the investees flew from different corners of Asia to Colombo to attend this workshop. They were into diverse domains as coffee plantation, shrimp farming, crafts marketing and education. Participants across the domains and across the world, resonate with one note — DT is a great way to recalibrate entrepreneurial ideas from the end-users’ perspective!

And there are more stray cases like — a tobacco company asking for a workshop on Design Thinking to train their workers to ‘empathise’ with the end users to increase its sale. We gently refused, of course.

Overall, the engine is slowly getting heated up. From the haloed portals of global brands and IT companies, the narrative of Design Thinking is now finding a rising demand amongst diversified industries, SMEs, NGOs and governments. Newer versions and customized adaptations are also surfacing with increasing need to measure ROI. Next 3–5 years, we are likely to see Design Thinking in its full bloom. Stay tuned!