What is Design Thinking
Robert Farrell
Program Director - Digital Transformation & AI, Non Executive Director, Lecturer, Trainer
Managers in innovative organisations use different tools/approaches to their traditional counterparts. Furr and Dyer, 2014 propose ‘The Innovator’s Method’, combining multiple approaches into an innovation process allowing organisations to capture an innovation premium. Design thinking is one of these methods.
What is Design Thinking
According to Kilian “Design Thinking is a methodology that we use to solve complex problems, and it is a way of using systemic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal future state. We do this with the end user or the customer in mind, first and foremost.”
According to Brown n.d “Design Thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success”.
Design Thinking Stages
There are several interpretations of Design thinking, the Interaction Design Foundation (n.d) summarise the stages as:
1:?Empathize:?Organisations should research their users' needs and painpoints which could be solved. Human empathy should be used and assumptions should be replaced with real insights from research.
2:?Define:?Organisations should accumulate stage 1 research and clearly state their users' needs & problems. This can be distilled to identify core problems and define problem statements. Personas can be created to add additional understanding.
3:?Ideate:?Organisations should challenge their own assumptions and develop new ideas to solve problems and/or pursue opportunities. Brainstorming and blue ocean thinking are just some of the approaches that can be used. “think outside the box”, thinking should be used to explore alternative solutions.
4:?Prototype:?Organisations should adopt an experimental approach. Rather than committing significant time/resources to a project, its efficacy should be quickly assessed by developing a less expensive scaled-down prototype and test marketing it to gain user feedback before moving on to subsequent models for testing. For example, wireframing can be used for website/app development.
5:?Test:?Organisations should create a robust assessment methodology to assess the value of prototypes before committing further resources to larger scale production or roll out.
Design Thinking Tools
According to SessionLab (2019), these tools can be used for Design thinking:
Design Thinking Enables Organisations To Become Innovative
Design thinking helps organisations to become more innovative by approaching challenges and opportunities differently. It draws upon talent from various disciplines and focuses on developing the best solution rather than the most profitable one. Design thinking changes the idea generation and evaluation process by focusing on developing an understanding of users. It?focuses on experimentation before a full solution is scaled.
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Challenges To Becoming A Design-Centric Organisation
According to Robosoft (2019), there are several challenge to becoming a design centric organisation, they include:
Short-term thinking
While many organisations implement Design thinking in new product development, it should be incorporated as a normal process used by many departments across many projects.
Challenges of scale and pace
Organisations interact with customers across many touchpoints online and offline ths presenting challenges how how to manay these interactions across several channels and maintain a positive & unified customer experience.
Building a design culture
Design thinking may be limited to design teams and not be leverage across the entire organisation. To reap all the benefits of Design thinking and foster collaboration, it must not be siloed.
Designers’ and product stakeholders’ perfectionist block
While Design thinking emphasizes an experimental or agile approach, this can be difficult for many people to adopt as some strive for perfection or are less able to accept feedback while others do not perform sufficient investigation in the empathise phase.
How Managers Can Address These Challenges
Brown (2008) propose the following ways for organisations to leverage Design thinking.
Begin at the beginning
Design thinkers should be included from the beginning of the innovation process to generate more ideas.
Take a human-centered approach
Human-centered design thinking should be used factor in human behavior, needs, and preferences. For example, personas and customer journey mapping can be used.
Try early and often.
An agile/iterative approach should be used for rapid experimentation and prototyping to identify flaws quickly or identify efficacy.
Seek outside help
Organisations should leverage open innovation, crowdsourcing and build an innovation ecosystem with external organisations to access more talent and opportunities. For example, Netflix held a competition offering $1m to the successful individual/team who improved accuracy of their recommendation engine.?
Blend big and small projects.
Innovation is not solely focused on top down strategic innovations. Organisations should see innovation as a portfolio approach blending large (long) and small (short) projects. This can support incremental innovations.
Budget to the pace of innovation
While disruption and organisational innovation may occur quickly, budgetary allocation and approval can be slow. Organisations should allocate budgetary resources and time considerations based on their innovations requirements.
Find talent any way you can
In addition to crowdsourcing, organisations should look past traditional hiring sources/criteria and resist the urge to hire from graduate business schools. Organisations like P&G have hired from other disciplines such as the arts or social sciences in an effort to hire creative talent with a new perspectives.
Design for the cycle
Staff retention can be a challenge as staff move organisation every 12 to 18 months resulting in loss of tacit knowledge and disruption to projects. Managers should speed up innovation projects allowing staff to quickly move from?to ideation to implementation before they leave. Additionally, retention of key staff should be prioritised.