HOW MIGHT WE INTEGRATE AND APPLY DESIGN THINKING TO ENSURE THAT QUALITY PROCESSES ARE CUSTOMER CENTRIC, FIT FOR PURPOSE AND ADHERED TO?

If there is one KPI that quality organizations are not yet considering. It must be “Quality Processes Desirability”.

Nevertheless, for a solution to be successful and sustainable, it must be also feasible (tech.), viable (business) and desirable for the people who must implement it. It’s no surprise, then, to hear frequently and recurrently about “human error”, in industrial sectors that are expected to hire highly qualified professionals.

Fig.1: Value of balancing desirability, feasibility, and viability (Ref. Crowd Favorite)

As a Design Thinking enthusiast and facilitator, working in the healthcare sector supply chain otherwise known as the kingdom of data and performance management. I try to go beyond the mere Design Thinking “methodology”, to inspire my partners to visualize Design Thinking as a main thread of the continuous improvement/problem-solving rope, a mindset beyond the tool, a management culture. In doing so, there are some misconceptions to let go of:

Misconception 1: “It’s about Design Thinking versus other methodologies”

If this is your expectation from this article, I am sorry to disappoint you. I have my reasons not to support “X versus Y” frameworks. There is an intellectually stimulating framework, I prefer, which consists of pulling out the best concepts and mixing them into a best in class methodology that fits the situation. This is exactly how I believe that Design Thinking, when not used in its entirety, can be mixed with Lean (DMAIC), Agile, Kaizen (PDCA) and other methodologies. For sure this is not an easy task and can get you plainly into trouble with some rigid minds. Nevertheless, this is the price for an exciting and enjoyable work. So, do it anyway!

Fig.2: The Two Threads Rope, DMAIC + Design Thinking

Misconception 2: "Design Thinking is solely used to create innovative consumer goods, services and experiences."

If the Design Thinking trainings, certification programs and learning materials have succeeded in convincing you that the Design Thinking’s exclusive purpose is to come up with customer-centered products/solutions (in the sense of consumer goods, services and experiences), it is never too late to change your mind.

Design Thinking concept has been practiced by IDEO, since the late 70s, to uncover customers’ needs, through empathy-based insights and observations, in order to design innovative products and solutions that respond to those initially uncovered needs.

With that said, the application of Design Thinking was never strictly confined to the consumer goods, services and experiences space. Design Thinking can be perfectly applied in the supply chain quality alongside other process-focused problem solving/ continuous improvement quantitative methodologies (DMAIC, A3, PDCA), in order to solve sourcing, manufacturing, testing, staffing, reliability and management challenges.

Misconception 3: “Leaders’ and subject matter experts’ opinions are the ones that matter.”

Seniority and expertise correlating to time in function/ in business and technical knowledge, are great values in any company. Nevertheless, they unfortunately expose their subjects - via a process known as experience - to a chronic dose of biases, such as: confirmation, anchoring, analogy, etc., leading the ideas you own to end up owning you, regardless of the rapidly changing context.

Design Thinking, as a universal leveler, offers the opportunity to listen and gain empathy for what people need to do their “jobs to be done”, both extreme and mainstream individuals. It creates a change of perspective where we all gain many more possibilities by taking on a beginner’s fresh mind.

Misconception 4: “Design Thinking is a gamification of problem solving through fun ideation and Post-it contests, with limited follow-up. Not sure it produces measurable results in efficiency-focused businesses like ours!”

This misconception is the sum of two inaccuracies: A first prejudice correlates fun with lack of professionalism. The second reduces Design Thinking to the ritual of Post-its sticking.

On gamification, there are loads of studies that support the engaging power of gamification and its ability to help people stay focused, as well as lots of evidences of the lack of correlation between looking too serious and being competent.

When it comes to Post-its, Design Thinking is not about Post-its, just as continuous improvement isn’t about Pareto charts, and accounting isn’t about MS Excel sheets. The use of Post-its provides a visual sense of complex ideas, promotes collaboration and brings energy to the room. With that said, ideation is one out of five Design Thinking phases and is far from being the central one.

Misconception 5: “Design Thinking is the playground of cool and creative designers; I am not that creative.”

Everyone is creative in their own way. During problem solving workshops, we work with all sorts of employee groups that most people wouldn’t think of as “creatives”, such as quality assurance professionals, compliance experts, auditors, maintenance engineers, human resources professionals, senior executives, finance leaders, and factory shopfloor operators.

Behind factory walls stand extraordinary creative minds, who in their offices or production units enthusiastically contribute powerful insights and innovative ideas that help solving previously frustrating dilemmas and daily complex challenges. Nothing to shy of.

Misconception 6: “Design Thinking is more suitable for design firms and R&D/marketing groups than supply chain areas such as manufacturing and quality.”

Industrial environments are the birthplace and fertile soil for continuous improvement/problem solving methodologies. Most of these quantitative techniques dedicate significant effort and time to problem understanding via process-centered data. Thus, bringing Design Thinking into that space offers an opportunity to complement process-centricity with human-centricity. This ultimately improves problem understanding, and eases change management via inclusion. Can we not observe an operator interacting with a process control system, interview a laboratory analyst using a quality management tool, immerse ourselves in a gowning procedure, run an empathy map for a change management procedure, and test an audit reporting app. prototype with its target users? We certainly can so that we gather valuable insights and understand true challenges to propose better solutions by design.

Misconception 7: “Wouldn’t Design thinking derail us from our Agility focus?”

Definitely not!

Design thinking is an iterative approach to continuous improvement/problem solving. It incorporates the Agile mindset in each of its phases through continuous collaboration with the customer/user to gather feedback, pivot and improve the proposed solution. The Agile Scrum sprints, per example, could fit perfectly into the prototyping phase, where incremental fidelity witnesses the ability to change course in order meet the customer/user needs. Isn’t that the spirit of Agility?

Fig.3: How to integrate the Agile Scrum approach into the Design Thinking prototyping phase

Misconception 8: “We have the data, why should we care about feelings and opinions?”

Peter Drucker’s quote “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” is right. It is equally true to say that it is impossible to improve what you DON’T measure.

In the industrial environment, we always hear about human error. This cannot be realistically separated from the company culture, work context, and the solutions that are made available to the workforce. Nevertheless, typical remediations to such errors are retraining and awareness campaigns, which, in my opinion, have a limited and unsustainable impact. Human behavior and its conscious triggers cannot be exclusively understood through charts and figures. Thus, Design Thinking, via its empathizing key step, can help us gain insights from the workplace about the challenges and difficulties that could ultimately lead to mistakes or lack of commitment. Why do people end up doing adaptations and tacking shortcuts? Would quantitative measures answer this question? Probably not. What we know, though, is that engaged employees are those who feel that their voices are heard and their opinions matter. These employees are more likely to be ambassadors of processes being implemented. As a company, by adopting human-centricity, we could end up saving significant resources for investigating, mitigating, and remediating issues that we could have spotted earlier during process design.

Fig.4: Empathy Mapping (Continuous Improvement Model)

Misconception 9: “As we strive for excellence (Getting it Right First Time), is Design Thinking telling me `fail and iterate’?!”

Design Thinking offers an ideal environment for experimentation, a psychologically safe context in which the process designer/problem solver can experiment with several solutions without worrying about hitting the bull’s eye the first time. With that said, this opportunity must not be taken out of its context into routine operations. Similarly to a pilot trying (and failing) new solutions while training on a flight simulator, a design thinker won’t bring test experimentations into normal flight conditions (thankfully for all of us travelers!).

Fig.5: Do you know why the famous WD-40 is called so? ...Because it took 40 iterations before reaching the right formula

Misconception 10: “We don’t have internal customers!”

During the siege of Constantinople in 1453, rumor had it that the Byzantines were debating the sex of angels, instead of defending the fortress. The same principle applies to endless debates about “who is or is not a customer”, which does not allow us to benefit from the essential value of customer-centricity.

Of course, supply chain support functions (i.e.: finance, procurement, quality, HR, etc.) are key enablers to an organization’s success. Nevertheless, their activities need to be designed to support the efficient and effective delivery of organizational goals. Thus, for example, quality is an ally to operations in providing internal processes that ensure product safety, quality, and efficacy WHILE guaranteeing that such processes are fit for their purpose and create value from an operations perspective. In other words, operations are the customers of quality and the users of quality processes which are deployed in the operations space. Claiming that the only customer is the final consumer/customer is merely a way to dematerialize customer-centricity, leaving a significant part of the business with only words and jingles.

Supply chain professionals, including quality practitioners, are eager for experience with customer-centricity, empathy, iteration, creative confidence, experimentation, speak-out culture, breaking functional silos, embracing ambiguity and learning from failure. Nevertheless, beyond easy buzzing they are left struggling to identify tangible applications of these notions. Design Thinking humanizes continuous improvement and problem solving processes and can offer a human-centered, creative, collaborative, iterative and hands-on improvement vehicle that complements process-centered quantitative methodologies in creating a new foundation of trust and collaboration between business partners.

To deploy Design Thinking in supply chain quality, this requires a change of paradigm, minor lifehacks and some mind twisting, though achievable efforts. Nevertheless, the value is definitely worth taking this path.

I hope you enjoyed this article. But my greatest satisfaction would be if it helps you, even in some small measure, to explore the beauty of Design Thinking and to start trying some problem solving/continuous improvement methodologies shakes. Let me know what you come-up with.