Increasing Organisational Agility with Design Thinking

Last week I joined a panel for Hacking HR to speak with other HR thought leaders on increasing organisational agility with design thinking. 

Design thinking can be a fairly intimidating term for those who don’t practice it daily. Frankly, it’s the opposite, it boils down to solving problems by examining processes through different lenses. Importantly, design thinking requires us to develop solutions while keeping our end users front of mind..our Customers.

At SAP, the concept of design thinking is truly in our blood given our co-founder Hasso Plattner started the first design thinking course and school with Stanford. Plattner teaches us that we can solve problems and improve products best by understanding our end users’ needs.

We live this everyday at SAP because we centre our processes and technology around the “moments that matter” to our customers.

We look across customer area functions and work backwards from the customer stakeholder profiles, starting with the CHRO down to the practitioner. We work to understand how each profile uses the systems—how they operate rewards cycles, performance cycles, etc. At SAP, we use design thinking to enable our customers to provide an exceptional employee experience while solving our own organisational problems.

Why embrace design thinking?

Design thinking allows you to arrive at innovative solutions that drive business success. In doing so, you look at different perspectives, iterate broadly, and arrive at fresh solutions you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. Organisations can be transformed by design thinking as the process enables people to be flexible, responsive, and—most importantly—people-centred.  

How do you lead a team in design thinking?

In order to create people-centric processes, you have to shift your team’s mindset towards design thinking. Start by curating the support of the most traditional thinking person on your team; then, their momentum will lead the rest of team in the right direction. Besides convincing traditional thinkers, the most challenging hurdle to creating a team of design thinkers is making each team member comfortable with failure and with sharing their failure with the team. Create a culture of psychological safety and acceptance by being open with your own failures. Establishing a team culture of psychological safety enables the team to take risks when ideating creative solutions. 

Being open with failure does not come naturally to all leaders. But as mentioned in my article on Cloud Attitude, leaders must prioritise people-first ways of thinking, particularly in this new era of COVID, stress, working from home, and being disconnected from family, friends, and colleagues. It’s a lot to digest and leaders must be able to recognise and understand that.

How can you build a team of design thinkers?

When I’m building a team, I want to hear about how a candidate has solved a problem in the past. During the interview process, I ask them for a detailed retelling of the problem, a solution they tried that failed, and a solution they tried that worked. Those that know the nitty gritty details of the problem and solution will be strong additions to the team because they have experience with failure and continuous learning.

During these times, it’s important to build a team that is comfortable with failure, familiar with iterating new ideas, and open to thinking in new ways. We are surrounded by rapidly changing global, local, and organisational environments, so being a team that thinks with the end user in mind keeps you at the forefront of business needs. 

What I heard throughout the panel from these HR leaders is that design thinking is empathetically solving problems by tackling the end users’ needs from their perspective. After the year we’ve had, we know that we need to put people first and stay dedicated to solving needs by listening and learning. 

What do you think? Does your team use design thinking to solve problems?