Design thinking revolution

Every now and then we see a new way of doing things and undertaking tasks that lead to tangible improvements in both product and process. Take Agile task management for example recently or the Toyota Lean production methods that revolutionised manufacturing. It's blend of practical application, innovative insight and thinking applied to assimilate traditional process can be looked at as a collective social technology innovation regardless of sector. With shift in peoples work patterns due to the pandemic and a fast embrace of online working and communication tools better line project management, communication and real-time metrics we have seen in a leaning towards design thinking.

What design thinking aims to do is unleash everybody's creative energy and intern with their commitment and radically improve their decision-making process. Most exacted have now heard of design thinking and its tools such as ethnographic research, semantics, semiotics and most importantly strategic branding.?The creative process is also reiterated and reinforced by its often collective or team approach which further strengthens bonds and communication between team members or external third parties. General leaning towards creative thinking or thinking out the box as we have for a long time now and it has removes the usual behaviour or sector specific biases that non-creatives would usually possess. It's unlocking of the imagination and removal of restrictive parameters fires imagination, pushes innovation and strengthens teams.

Challenging innovation

And innovation process must deliver three things: better solutions, lower risk and cost of change all envelope in the most important employee buying. At the years businesses have developed tactics to achieve these outcomes but when applied organisations inevitably encounter obstacles.

Better Solutions

Teams can find superior solutions when they look beyond obvious, conventional ways of defining problems. By asking more interesting questions, they can come up with creative ideas. Though there is a risk of getting stuck exploring the problem, managers should take the time to figure out which question should be asked. This will ensure that the team can come up with the best possible solutions.

The common knowledge is that solutions are more effective when they are based on user-centric criteria. Market research allows companies to comprehend these criteria, yet customers can find it challenging to identify something that hasn’t been invented yet. Additionally, including voices from a variety of perspectives is acknowledged to enhance solutions. Nevertheless, discussions between people who have conflicting opinions can quickly become heated and counterproductive.

Lower Risks and Costs

Innovators must strive to lower risks and costs while maintaining a portfolio of options. To do this, they must be willing to jettison bad ideas and not be afraid to "call the baby ugly." However, it is often easier for people to discard the more creative, riskier ideas than the incremental ones.

Employee Buy-In

For an innovation to be successful, it is essential that the company's employees get behind it. The most effective way to achieve this is to involve them in the process of devising ideas. While this may lead to a chaotic and disorganized situation, this tension is based on a more essential contrast. In a settled setting, a business will gain efficiency by eliminating diversity. But in an unpredictable world, variation is advantageous as it opens up new opportunities for success. It is understandable why leaders, who must meet quarterly goals, focus on efficiency, logic, and centralized management. In order to reconcile the conflicting demands, organizations require a social technology that takes into account the human temperament and counteracts the negative biases. Design thinking is the perfect tool to do just that.

Importance of Structure

Experienced designers may deride design thinking as too structured and linear, but managers on innovation teams benefit from its structure and linearity. Kaaren Hanson, formerly the head of design innovation at Intuit and now Facebook’s design product director, provides insight on this, explaining that structure can help people change their behaviors. With its props and highly formatted tools, design thinking also provides psychological safety, helping would-be innovators move more assuredly through the process of discovering customer needs, generating ideas, and testing them. Ultimately, the seven activities of design thinking not only shape the customer experience, but also reshape the experiences of the innovators themselves.

Customer Discovery

In the design-thinking discovery process, some of the most commonly known methods involve recognizing the "task to be accomplished". These techniques, taken from ethnography and sociology, concentrate on analyzing what would make for a substantial customer experience as opposed to the accumulation and examination of data. This exploration necessitates three sets of actions: watching, interviewing, and experiments.

Immersion

Traditional customer research has been an impersonal process. An expert, potentially having established beliefs about customer preferences, reviews the feedback from focus groups, surveys, and available data on behavior, and then makes assumptions about needs. The better the data, the more accurate the assumptions. Yet, this keeps people confined to the stated needs that the data shows. They view the data from their own point of view. Moreover, they do not notice needs that are not verbalized.

Shaping the Innovator’s Journey

What makes design thinking a social technology is its ability to counteract the biases of innovators and change the way they engage in the innovation process.

Design thinking takes a different approach: Identify hidden needs by having the innovator live the customer’s experience.

Sense making

Immersion in user experiences provides raw material for deeper insights. But finding patterns and making sense of the mass of qualitative data collected is a daunting challenge. Time and again, I have seen initial enthusiasm about the results of ethnographic tools fade as nondesigners become overwhelmed by the volume of information and the messiness of searching for deeper insights. It is here that the structure of design thinking really comes into its own.

Alignment

The final stage in the discovery process is a series of workshops and seminar discussions that ask in some form the question, If anything were possible, what job would the design do well? The focus on possibilities, rather than on the constraints imposed by the status quo, helps diverse teams have more-collaborative and creative discussions about the design criteria, or the set of key features that an ideal innovation should have. Establishing a spirit of inquiry deepens dissatisfaction with the status quo and makes it easier for teams to reach consensus throughout the innovation process. And down the road, when the portfolio of ideas is winnowed, agreement on the design criteria will give novel ideas a fighting chance against safer incremental ones.

Idea Generation

Once they understand customers’ needs, innovators move on to identify and winnow down specific solutions that conform to the criteria they’ve identified.

Emergence

The first step here is to set up a dialogue about potential solutions, carefully planning who will participate, what challenge they will be given, and how the conversation will be structured. After using the design criteria to do some individual brainstorming, participants gather to share ideas and build on them creatively—as opposed to simply negotiating compromises when differences arise.

Articulation

Typically, emergence activities generate a number of competing ideas, more or less attractive and more or less feasible. In the next step, articulation, innovators surface and question their implicit assumptions. Managers are often bad at this, because of many behavioral biases, such as overoptimism, confirmation bias, and fixation on first solutions. When assumptions aren’t challenged, discussions around what will or won’t work become deadlocked, with each person advocating from his or her own understanding of how the world works.

The Testing Experience

Companies often regard prototyping as a process of fine-tuning a product or service that has already largely been developed. But in design thinking, prototyping is carried out on far-from-finished products. It’s about users’ iterative experiences with a work in progress. This means that quite radical changes—including complete redesigns—can occur along the way.

Pre-experience

Neuroscience research indicates that helping people “pre-experience” something novel—or to put it another way, imagine it incredibly vividly—results in more-accurate assessments of the novelty’s value. That’s why design thinking calls for the creation of basic, low-cost artifacts that will capture the essential features of the proposed user experience. These are not literal prototypes—and they are often much rougher than the “minimum viable products” that lean start-ups test with customers. But what these artifacts lose in fidelity, they gain in flexibility, because they can easily be altered in response to what’s learned by exposing users to them. And their incompleteness invites interaction.

Learning in action

Real-world experiments are an essential way to assess new ideas and identify the changes needed to make them workable. But such tests offer another, less obvious kind of value: They help reduce employees’ and customers’ quite normal fear of change.

Along the way, design-thinking processes counteract human biases that thwart creativity while addressing the challenges typically faced in reaching superior solutions, lowered costs and risks, and employee buy-in. Recognizing organizations as collections of human beings who are motivated by varying perspectives and emotions, design thinking emphasizes engagement, dialogue, and learning. By involving customers and other stakeholders in the definition of the problem and the development of solutions, design thinking garners a broad commitment to change. And by supplying a structure to the innovation process, design thinking helps innovators collaborate and agree on what is essential to the outcome at every phase. It does this not only by overcoming workplace politics but by shaping the experiences of the innovators, and of their key stakeholders and implementers, at every step. That is social technology at work.