Design Thinking: To Be or ...................?

Design thinking is an interesting option among an exciting set of methodologies and tools that an organisation has available for addressing the challenges & problems it may face. How does an organisation decide whether Design Thinking will work for their organisation as a dependable got to for addressing their most important problems? Does the Design Thinking Approach offer any clues on how this question can be answered? Can we use the Design Thinking Process itself to evaluate its usefulness for our situation? A Design Thinking Approach to adopting a Design Thinking Approach? Maybe not in a strictly puritan way but the iterative steps of the design thinking framework can possibly give a guiding mechanism.

The Selection of the right Methodologies has to be in the context of the Organisation and the Context of the type of problems to be solved. The choice and outcomes are heavily influenced by the organisation culture, skills, and capabilities and also the time & resources available. Any Methodology to be adopted has to be evaluated and understood in the right context, teams and stakeholders need to be trained, the capability to utilize the methodology gets developed in stages, and there is a need to apply the methodology multiple times to multiple problems to gain experience & expertise. It is only after going through all of these steps that the organisation can come to a level of maturity in utilizing these methodologies. An organisation can involve consultants & try to shortcut the process, but beyond one-offs, imbibing a way of solving problems broadly across an organisation will in most cases be through a gradual adoption curve. Going down the path of such an exercise is a significant investment & hence taking an initial view through an effective lens is a good idea.

As the wisdom goes, those who understand themselves & understand their enemy will win the wars they fight. To gain value from any initiative it is extremely important to understand whether it will be the right one for the most pressing problems we are trying to solve. Are issues of adoption, acceptance, user experience, and hand-offs more critical or are we trying to focus on scale, expansion, and efficiency? At this stage of the organisation do we need our most skilled & most versatile people to ideate new initiatives or do we need them to be focused on our extremely clear objectives? Do we need to foster more collaboration or is our business better served through tight control of matrices? What is our competitive environment, and where are the gaps in our customer, supplier, and stakeholder journey? Bringing in the mindset to say do we know what we think we know? Analysing these issues not just as facts & data or as prevailing perceptions but with a questioning open mind & a deeper cross-sectional people connect would be a great exercise that can be executed in the manner of the Empathise stage of the Design thinking process.

A former senior executive was quoted as saying that at Apple, problems were moving targets, not something that was to be solved once and for all. The journey is iterative & not a point-in-time snapshot. Also, the dimensions of problems change at different points in time. The empathise mindset serves the organisation well regardless of whether this leads to the next step in the design thinking journey.

The empathize & define phases will iterate, and the findings & exploration done becomes great material for the groups to come together in workshops to evolve the problems that need focus, the breadth of the impact, the cross sections, the handoffs, and the type of intervention required. Do market surveys & more focused penetration better serve our sales initiatives or is the customer contact to enable feature understanding and post-sales service the need of the hour? Do we have a very deep R&D requirement to solve some of the material science aspects or is it ergonomics we are looking at? Are we good with internal teams to take on our problem projects or do we need external consultants, what are the types of investments the organisation is willing to make? Akin to the definition stage in the Design thinking process, here we will start to get a profile of the problem types, the people (internal and external who could be involved), and the investments that would be required. This will allow informed decisions on whether to go forward & Ideate on the types of problems to take on. If yes then which team to involve & the expected objectives & outcomes? This in turn could lead to limited prototypes more as meaningful practice efforts which get the teams & the stakeholders interacting to understand the journey. The outcomes of a few prototype efforts help in the Test phase through which analysis, assimilation happens & future recommendations on the future course of action can be made.

The Design Thinking process is not a recipe, the spirit of empathy with a cross-section of people involved in the hand-offs, the collaborative, non-hierarchical effort between versatile experts and their interaction with domain, process specialists, the test small & fail fast, learn, recreate, don’t cling to notions mindset is more important than the actual sequencing & flows of the process. While a lot of this is sound like common sense, we do know that common sense is after all not so common.