Design thinking is method, not magic
Empathize → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Evaluate → Iterate
If you are looking for better ways to solve problems or wonder what “design stuff” is, then keep reading. You will get an overview of what Design Thinking is and what it takes to get results with it. It is a philosophy and behavior combined with this method that makes it so powerful. It can reach beyond yourself and be interested in people to uncover insights. Armed with this, you can start designing what people want rather than trying to make people want what you’ve created.
It all starts with the culture.
“Culture eats process for lunch” -Peter Drucker
If you have the wrong kind of culture, it doesn’t matter what process you use, agile or design thinking. The culture will reject the process no matter how powerful it is. Self-imposed limitations, cultural bias in the company and organization politics cause this to happen. A culture of creativity with a problem focus and bias towards action is required. Most of all, the culture needs to build up resiliency to failure and a drive to achieve.
It means transforming from an operations and sales culture to a design thinking culture. It would be best if you changed the incentives for people. Venture capitalists have a hit rate of 1:10. If you aren’t willing to have this happen, you aren’t ready for innovation. Use the techniques designers have been using for years. Go out and observe your users rather than starting with a solution and then searching for users to increase your success.
Is it a mindset? A skillset? A toolkit?
It is all of the above. When combined, it is a method with a process. Like any process, it is subject to politics and organization, and individual limits. Create a curiosity through a culture of always seeking improvements: value prototypes and test results over debates. Ensure your people value the method and are mindful of implementing that process. Pursue RADICAL collaboration, what does that mean? Get the end-user in the room. Get the buyer in the room. Get the makers in the room. Get the sales and service staff in the room. You hopefully see the trend here. Engage, get active, make things and test them!
So how do you do all of this? Do you have to be “creative”? Creativity is not what we are after here. It is innovation. Innovation is applied creativity that creates a result.
Misunderstanding the framework, what makes it works, fear of failure or team composition will impose individual design thinking limits. Put humans at the center, adopting a culture of creativity and curiosity that values ideas and prototypes.
Empower the initiative
Suppose you are a leader the best use of your influence to set the team up with space, time, and money to solve the problem. Death by a thousand cuts is the most significant risk. To put a genuinely differentiated value on the table, the team needs to have the freedom to explore things far outside of past things the organization has done. Good creativity is about innovation that creates results. Entrepreneurs, startups, and more recently, the growing visibility of entrepreneurs are really who are needed to make innovation happen. You can’t have things “killed off” intentionally or unintentionally by dragging feet or passive-aggressive resistance. Entrepreneurship isn’t just a type of personality. It is a different form of management. These initiatives that will drive change need support from the top of whichever domain they are looking to impact. The key is air cover.
All too often, corporate top performers, or ones who have scaled the ladder of time, are put in charge, regardless of whether they have a passion to run a startup, the broad range of skills, required or the required relationships with industry players and outside partners. -Martin Zwilling
Assemble the right team
How can you recognize the "right" team? Here's a great list, they will:
- Be multi-disciplinary
- Have mutual respect, shared air space, and a focus on combining diverse views.
- Be aligned on deliverables, particularly their different deliverables.
- Have shared values
- Have a coach!
It can take time for the team to hit its stride. Build time required for the team to hit their stride into your timelines and expectations. They need to normalize and learn to trust each other. Trust is the necessary foundation of every healthy human relationship. It is the same with teams, so you have to assemble them carefully. You need to challenge the status quo and avoid conceptual blocks. We are all speaking the same language, aren’t we? Nope! It takes time to work through language and everyone’s interpretation and use of language as they communicate. Interaction is crucial and takes time to build up to remove social barriers.
Talk to people!
Start talking to people, most notably the end-users and the buyers, if they are a different person. You may be thinking things like, "I don’t have users or buyers." Although the terms used may seem foreign to your domain, you do have these. They can come in many names, such as stakeholders, beneficiaries, employees, and customers. Gather context, not just problem statements or ideas about solutions.
Start with need-finding, never what we already know we can make. Don’t assume customers know what they want. They most often don’t until you show it to them. They will usually focus on what they already have, but better rather than something different. The key is to observe how they are problem-solving and their attitudes and dig deeper for implicit meanings & values.
Need-finding is what leads to unique insights and big new ideas. It is about research methods. It is essential to be able to observe objectively. Check out Empathy Maps for the right starting place. The key is to watch what they do and the more profound thoughts or intentions behind what they say rather than what they say. It gets to the more profound impact, how people feel.
Invest in a clear definition
Now you have observed to create empathy with the issues; it is time to frame the issues. Start re-framing and iterating the problem statement itself. These are based on your insights. It is so tempting to formulate a solution rather than an actual problem to be solved. A problem has a way to measure how well you’ve solved it. It should have objectives and constraints. Careful not to let "solution-ing" slip in here! Avoid describing methods or means. This will be the focal point for your energy!
Ideate and go really wide
The goal is to avoid missing great solutions by generating a ton of ideas before choosing a path. This is a crucial step. Brainstorming is a process in and of itself. Be careful that it doesn’t become a competition. It is critical to have both individual time and group time in your brainstorming step. This will be the difference between tons of ideas and finding something unique or grabbing on to something quickly and limiting your outcomes and not really innovating. Resist the urge to move to the execution of a solution! The action feels good, and you must see brainstorming as action. This is where you search for the best idea. This is where you either will or will not maximize your opportunity. This process should be generative and emergent, and judgment-free. Create space for people by leading with wild ideas! Capture, capture, capture. You have to record the session. In the end, it is time to contrast and compare, group and select.
“If you don’t go beyond the normal you cannot come back to anything innovative.” -Tim Kelley
Prototype your solution
What does that mean? Don’t build it, and don’t debate the concept. Make something tangible to get feedback before you land on what you are going to develop. So what is a prototype? The question is, what did they try? You need to get reactions. Your prototype is a low-resolution, fast thing to make that allows you to observe how your users react.
“You have to “Fail Fast” if you want to “Succeed Sooner.” -David Kelley
Any change can be prototyped. The point is to create “cheap” mock-ups of your ideas to allow your users' reactions to determine what to build. This replaces debate. Typically these can be made in an hour or an afternoon. Another benefit of these is removing semantic challenges and getting to a common understanding within your team. Ah, that’s what we are talking about. Now I see it.
Working with the rest of the organization
Over-communication is always the best policy. Find those ways to enable people to stay in the loop as much as possible. Going back to something discussed earlier, you will work with your sponsor or champion very closely.
That gives you an overview of how Design Thinking works and what’s needed. It’s time to dig in and experience what human-centered design can achieve!