Reflection – Design Thinking Style!

I like the beginning of a New Year as it marks what behavioral scientists call a fresh start moment . It’s a time of reflection and planning for the year ahead.

Reflection is also an integral part of the design thinking practice. Throughout the process, we constantly engage in questioning, evaluating, testing, and refining our ideas based on observations and analysis.

A popular design thinking reflection method is the Rose/Thorn/Bud technique by which we identify things as positive, negative, or having potential. I use this method at the end of every year to reflect on the HR.Hackathon Alliance community .

In this newsletter, I will share scenarios and examples for how you can use various design thinking inspired techniques for personal reflection, program reflection, and strategic reflection to kick start your New Year planning process.

Personal Reflection

I loved this article by The Atlantic associate editor Faith Hill where she postulates that New Years resolutions don’t feel contemporary in this pandemic world. Instead, Hill proposes a much more reflective approach focusing on understanding the why behind your resolutions and then adjusting your plan accordingly.

I received the lovingly written and beautifully illustrated book Design the Life You Love by product designer Ayse Birsel as a gift for Christmas and it has inspired my personal reflection practice. As a first step in our life re-design, Birsel instructs us to visually deconstruct the life we have with a mind mapping approach. I created several versions for my own life following some of the structures she provides in the book. I am currently exploring how I might mash up Birsel’s mind mapping approach with the components of the Japanese concept Ikigai – a reason for living:

I love this mind mapping method for deconstructing my life. It helps to break a complex challenge (hello, a person’s life!) into its component parts which are more manageable to address. It’s a great visual aid to help reflect on various elements of my life and to use it as a starting point for re-imagining aspects or all of it.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

It’s one thing to conduct reflection once a year, but it’s much harder to turn it into an ongoing habit. I admire how Brose’s Innovation Director Tobias Leisgang makes himself accountable by posting his weekly reflections publicly on LinkedIn under the hashtag #reflectandlearn. Each week, he reflects on the past week – what he learned, what the highlights were, ideas he wants to share, and what he is looking forward to in the week ahead.

I think I will give Tobias’ approach a try this year, starting with capturing reflections privately in my journal, and then working my way towards public reflection.

Program Reflection

How does reflection get applied to a Human Resources project?

I am currently working with a client on the re-design of their performance management experience. We are lucky to be able to capture employee and manager reflections as the current self-review and review cycles are in progress. We asked participants to journal about their experience as they complete this process step via a rose/thorn/bud variation.

These are the reflection prompts we crafted:

We used the answers to these reflection questions along with insights from employee experience mapping and empathy interviews as part of the project’s discovery phase. Insights are being synthesized and articulated as opportunities which then will become the starting point for ideation.

How have you used reflection as part of HR program re-design?

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Strategic Reflection

Over the past year, I have been working with several Executive Leadership Teams to help them strategize around future of work and hybrid work models . This usually happens in a workshop setting. One of my favorite design thinking reflection techniques I use in these Executive workshops is affinity mapping .

After conducting a few discovery activities and reviewing additional data (e.g. employee engagement survey insights), I ask each participant to write 1-2 roses (working well), thorns (risks/concerns), bud (opportunities) capturing key insights from all the data we reviewed. Each Executive takes turns posting their stickies on a (virtual) whiteboard. I then ask the group to discuss and rearrange items as groupings emerge. Finally, they are instructed to label the clusters that take shape:

We then use these themes to cross-check our initial opportunity statement and use them as a starting point for crafting future of work/hybrid work guiding principles. It also provides a heat map overview around the topic.

What are your favorite strategic reflection techniques?

Want more design thinking reflection? Join me on January 27 for a live Talent Tales panel discussion on "Design Thinking for HR in 2022 - Predictions, Practices, and Pitfalls".

The Design Thinking for HR newsletter is a biweekly LinkedIn newsletter designed to inspire HR professionals to experiment with the design thinking method. The newsletter is curated by?Nicole Dessain who is an employee experience consultant, design thinking workshop facilitator, and Northwestern University instructor. Nicole is the host of the?Talent Tales podcast, where she interviews HR professionals who have pioneered design thinking in HR. Nicole is currently booking for speaking and interactive workshop facilitation for 2022. Click here to start the dialogue.