The Human Side of Design Thinking - 7 Principles to Make it Truly Work

In 2015 I attended a class at Microsoft around Design Thinking. Frankly, I didn't want to go. It was on a Saturday, and I'd already had a long week. But a friend of mine from out of town was going, and bribed me with the promise of dinner if I joined him for the day. So I reluctantly joined about 80 people who seemed a lot more enthused than me and sat down grumpily for the training.

The day started slowly. After all, I had years of experience in solution and enterprise architecture, along with a background in consulting. I was pretty doubtful that I had anything to learn. But as the day unfolded, I felt that familiar sense you get when parts of your brain you don't normally exercise are getting tugged at. In the course of just a few hours, I was going through my own Dunning-Kruger experience. By lunchtime, I was questioning much of what I thought I knew, and by the time dinner arrived, I was wondering why anyone had ever paid me to design anything.

In the following years, I became a fierce advocate for design thinking, and was excited to see its influence spread in a variety of different domains, including leadership (more on that later). But the more I learned, the more I became troubled by the feeling I had that Saturday, am I qualified to do this?

Design Thinking - A (Very) Quick Primer

Design thinking (which is largely analogous to human-centered design) is an approach to innovation that integrates the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. In the "classic" version taught at d.school at Stanford, there are five (overlapping) stages:

1. Empathize: where you understand the experiences and motivations of the people you're designing for.
2. Define: where you synthesize the information gathered during the empathy stage to define the core problems you have identified.
3. Ideate: where you brainstorm a wide range of potential solutions.
4. Prototype: where you create scaled-down versions of the product or specific features found within the product.
5. Test: where you put the prototype solutions in front of users and receive feedback.

What's Great About Design Thinking

Ask any design thinking practitioner about the benefits of the approach and you will probably be overwhelmed with answers. They will probably share examples of how it leads to meaningful solutions that are actually fit for purpose, how it promotes collaboration, how it can foster a deeper understanding of others, and how it allows you to solve problems often seem completely intractable beforehand.

These advantages are real, but for me there is another, sometimes more meaningful benefit. Most of us most of the time put very little structure around our thinking, period. Whether we like it or not, our thinking is often a messy collection of loosely connected thoughts. Sometimes when we should be thinking like a beautifully co-ordinated orchestra, we are instead a messy jazz ensemble. Design thinking adds some structure back in, forcing us to at least attempt empathy, forcing us to evaluate our ideas against alternatives, and forcing us to gather at least some data to show that our ideas are likely to work. In a sense, it's a way of productively slowing down the thought process (which is after all by far the cheapest part of solution design), and encourages us to "think about thinking". That's one reason why when my company runs innovation masterclasses with our clients, we commonly combine Design Thinking with Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats. Doing so give you the opportunity to not just think in a more structured way, but gain a deeper understanding of what style of thinking you are using when you do it.

Powerful Tool, or Dangerous Weapon?

If design thinking comes with all the benefits listed above (and there are many examples that demonstrate it does), are there any downsides? Minal Bopaiah's amazing new book Equity - How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives clearly shows that there are. Now to be clear, Bopaiah doesn't dislike human centered-design approaches - she actively uses them in her practice. But in the book she shows examples where design thinking approaches that worked well on paper, led to designs that did not work as intended, and actually created significant negative outcomes.

I sat down with Bopaiah recently for our Humanity Working podcast (the episode will be released in November 2023) and she elaborated on the theme for me, explaining how great designs of any sort - products, services, even internal organization designs - need to meet the disparate needs of all they people they serve. That means we need to be really good at discovering the audience for our designs, and really good at empathizing with them.

But are we? Unfortunately the answer may be no, and perhaps more alarmingly, we may be getting worse.

Being Human

Work has changed massively in the last 20 years - affecting the what, when, where, why and how of work. In that period, employee engagement has steadily ticked down, work related mental health challenges have increased, and burnout has officially been recognized as an occupational phenomenon by the WHO. Meanwhile, thanks in part to social media, the decentralization of work and the rise of rugged individualism, we are increasingly tribal, ruder and lonelier than ever. I'd argue that the rise of technologies designed to bring us together is slowly but steadily driving us apart and subtly reducing our worth.

That's a real problem if we want to build solutions that are human-centred.

For any process involving humans to work, the process itself must be sound, but the people executing it must have the skills to do so. Layered underneath the processes of design thinking are a set of essential soft skills - skills like active listening, empathic understanding, collaborating, communicating, problem solving and open-mindedness. And unfortunately, these are the very skills that are degrading through lack of practice.

If we want to build solutions and environments that meet the needs of our employees, we need to fix this. Urgently.

The Solution - Build a Human-Centred Organization

Design thinking is not the problem. In fact, it almost certainly forms part of the solution, because it highlights the need for all of us to develop our soft skills more effectively.

I believe that the key to becoming great at design thinking is to build an organization where human-centered behaviors are developed actively to the point where they become intrinsic. To accomplish this, you need to pay attention to seven principles:

Principle One: Build awareness - even many experienced design thinking practitioners have not thought deeply about the underlying soft skills needed to do design thinking with excellence, and our research at BillionMinds shows a massive delta between perceived and actual soft skills maturity. Almost all of us think we are better-than-average drivers, and the same applies to soft skills.

Principle Two: Actively prioritize soft skills development - CEOs routinely agree that soft skills are severely lacking in employees, and the number of jobs needing advanced soft skills is estimated to quadruple by 2030. Yet, most managers don't even have conversations with their employees about soft skills. If organizations are going to actually prioritize soft skills, they will need to get good at measuring them, and rewarding employees and managers as they improve.

Principle Three: Engage Leadership - One of my favourite design thinkers Karen Zeigler focuses on design thinking for leaders. Her practice highlights that applying design thinking internally to organizations can yield tremendous results - but of course if this is going to work fully, leaders must be actively taking part and they must have well practiced soft skills. Unfortunately, the largest gap we see between perceived soft skills excellence and the reality is in leaders, but when leaders CAN be persuaded to actively and publically take part in developing their soft skills, it can make an enormous difference.

Principle Four - Simplify the ask - when at BillionMinds we ask employees in client companies why they have not previously worked on developing their skills, it's usually because they don't know where to start. A self-selecting course catalog might sound like a good idea, but very soon employees get as lost as a family trying to decide what to stream on Netflix on a Friday night. Get simple about the ask, make development activities guided, and tie them to certification so the employee gets rewarded for working on their skills. Here's a five-minute presentation where I talk about this in more detail.

Principle Five - Emphasize Regular Practice - the skills needed for great human centred design are not cultivated by reading a book or attending an offsite. Instead, they are developed and embedded through regular practice in simulated and real-life scenarios. We have found this essential. When we began teaching soft skills, we focused heavily on theoretical learning and found that within a month over 80% of new behaviors were lost. Today, every concept we teach has a corresponding practice exercise and behaviors are retained far better.

Principle Six - Foster Team Development - many of the soft skills needed in human-centred design processes involve effective teamwork. But our ability to work well in teams is becoming diminished as our work environments are getting more asynchronous and distributed. Simply put, we are doing more on our own and less work collaboratively, so we are degrading our teamwork muscle. Fix this by actively prioritizing work done as a team, at least for those people who are going to be focused on human-centric design activities.

Principle Seven - Create the Right Organizational Environment - As the book Equity highlights - it's extremely difficult to design equitable solutions when the people working on it do not represent the audience it's created for. More broadly, it's very difficult to be empathetic, open-minded and receptive to others if those values are not lived internally in an organization. Mission-driven organizations are not exempt from this -in fact they may be even more prone to internal organizational challenges. At this point we've discovered dozens of mission-driven organizations that struggle because of an ego-driven zeal that fails to practice internally what it preaches externally.

If you execute on these seven principles, you will rapidly move from an organization that tries to be human-centered to one that creates meaningful human-centred designs for its employees and customers. And you will discover a great side effect - employee engagement will dramatically improve.

About Me

I run a company ( BillionMinds ) that helps employers build human-centric organizations, centered on employees with highly developed soft-skills. I LOVE talking about these issues, so please comment on this article and I'll respond to every one I can. If you are interested in creating or being part of a human-centric workforce, check out my Humanity Working Newsletter, and my Humanity Working Podcast.