To use design for the better we need to stop asking ‘how might we’ and start asking ‘what if we’.

Let’s stop focussing on what we might do and let’s start looking a little more closely at what happens if we actually do it.

Love it or hate it, design thinking is helping to reinvent business, disrupt entire industries and fundamentally change the way we live.

Design thinking is defined as ‘a process for creative problem solving.’

At the core of that process are three pillars:

• Empathy — Understanding the needs of those you’re designing for.
• Ideation — Generating a lot of ideas. Brainstorming is one technique, but there are many others.
• Experimentation — Testing those ideas with prototyping.

To deliver against those core ideas, design thinking tends to initially focus on the creation of what it defines as ‘how might we’ statements.

How might we statements are simply a redefined problem statement with a clear reference to specific users, their needs and insights that have been gained through research.

How might we statements tend to follow a simple structure:

[The user] needs to do [the thing they need to achieve] so that they [the output, the insight]

A simple example:

“How might we help new customers feel, that by registering, they’ll get the information they need.”

This focus on customer centricity through ‘how might we’ statements has helped drive a revolution in customer service that can be seen everywhere, from healthcare to finance to retail to transport to agricultural to government.

And it isn’t just good for customers.

S&P 500 companies that invested most into design processes, capabilities, and leadership over the past decade, including Disney, Nike, and P&G, outperformed the rest of the index by 211%.

“Organizations in the top quarter of design performance are growing their revenues at  twice the rate of their peers, and their shareholder returns were growing  70% faster.’’ - Ben Sheppard, McKinsey & Co.

But at what cost?

As boardrooms, co-working spaces and cafes around the world echo with the question of ‘how might we…?’, private (and public) sector organisations have an increasing responsibility to understand what this continuous need to satisfy every user need has in terms of environmental, economic and sociological impact.

Instead of a focus on delivery through ‘how might we’ statements, the focus should move towards the more effect driven, future facing question of should ‘what if we’.

Corporate vision statements tend to follow the structure defined for ‘how might we’ statements — they focus on a user, they strive to deliver on a need and they often have an emotive insight at their core.

These statements are often equally aspirational, inspiring and ambitious but by reframing these through the lens of ‘what if we’ we can start to identify the potential impacts and effects on society and environment.

Look at Amazon…

“Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

?- Amazon

• What if we become the most customer centric company.

What are the privacy implications for the kind of data needed to drive that level of customer centricity?

• What if we become a destination for people to find and discover anything they might want to buy?

What are the environmental implications in offering that much choice? How literally do we mean anything they might want to buy? What are the social impacts on communities when we become the one source for everything a person could possibly need?

Facebook recently revised their vision statement from “making the world more open and connected”.

“ Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

- Facebook

Commentators had already started to explore this statement through the “what if we” lens — concluding that this statement didn’t push for any specific positive outcome from more connection, it could encompass digital voyeurism via the News Feed, trading in-person friendship for online acquaintanceship or the filter bubbles that have further polarized the United States.

But Facebook’s new vision raises yet more ‘what if’ questions…

What if we give people the power to build community?

• How do we police those communities? Where do we draw the line between vocal community organisations and right (or left) wing outlets for hate speech?

What if we bring the world closer together?

• What does that mean for the unique cultures of the world? Are we accelerating the homogenisation of culture and communication? How do we protect the worlds unique cultures but still give them the tools they need to benefit from open, shared knowledge networks.

As our world becomes smaller and our organisations become bigger we have an urgent responsibility to change our focus from what we can do in the world of today and look at the much bigger issue of our impact on the world of tomorrow.