Design Thinking – a way to get better results or just another way to do things?
It was about 8 months ago when I attended a design thinking workshop while visiting SAP headquarters. That workshop was just a short trip to get used to a new way for idea creation and evaluation but made me think about how could I use the technic in my projects. Actually it wasn't me who decided that we could use this approach in one our projects but I was happy to hear this is coming soon. I thought I should be more prepared and get some more information of the methodology.
I started my journey into design thinking by reading an article ”Design Thinking – An Interview with Roger Martin”. This article is a discussion between Roger Martin (a career as a dean of the Rotman School of Management and a director of Monitor Company) and Jim Euchner (career as a vice president of innovation at Goodyear and an editor-in-chief of Research-Technology Management). The main points in this article are that design thinking should be implemented inside a company and everyday life in it and also that this new methodology challenges traditional way of doing business and analytical, quantitive studies made before decisions. In the center of design thinking is understanding of customers, needs and solutions after ideation phase. Design thinking doesn't mean that you have to forget the analytical part of historical data but you must also challenge the data and make a combination of this and new findings during the phase of ideation. Why design thinking is seen so difficult? This is mainly because we learnt at school that we have to read a lot and remember the written truth – we were not asked to think ourselves a lot instead we should believe what is written by old masters. At school we easily forgive us for making our own conclusions or don't pay a lot attention on evaluating different possibilities.
I went a little bit further with my readings and found a book by Tim Brown ”Change by design – How design thinking transforms organization and inspires innovation”. This is a great book: it has the baseline of what is it to work with this approach and it also has a lot of examples. I don't reference to the examples in this article but make some statements after my readings and tell you what I learnt while reading.
After Tim Brown design thinking consists of 3 phases: 1. inspiration or finding a problem or opportunity that motivates you, 2. ideation or a process to generalizing, developing and testing ideas and 3. implementation or a path that leads from a project room to a market. This process of all 3 parts may go between phase, looping back and forward. Successful ideas and developing criteria must be as feasibility (is it functionally possible with foreseeable future), reliability (what is likely to be a part of a sustainable business model) and desirability (does it make sense to and for people). Design thinkers must think about projects, not problems and trough this they may see a starting point, realization and an end point. To my mind it's often difficult to let your ideas flow but you can learn it, you can make more ideas if you don't think too much. There can be a lot of silly ideas, sometimes they become diamonds later.
A very important part of design thinking is to learn from people: what people do and do not and what people say and not say. This is an intensive period of observation. I'm keen to watch people play: I like to know more about their working and how they make statements. A design thinker then translates an observation into insights and insights into products and services. During a ideation phase you have to analyze your ideas, synthetize and make groups of ideas and empthatize with others because trough this an idea of one person gets more value when someone else adds an extra part into it. The ideation phase may be seen as a diverge phase where choices are created and a converge phase where choices are made. It's true that you can also go back to another during your ideation.
An organization which uses design thinking must allow failure but it has to catch failures in an early phase. Some sort of freedom must be allowed and this means that an old way of management isn't an option. It's also important that innovative places exist where a project team may go to create ideas. It has been seen that if this is only a short part of a project team's life and they go back to a less innovative or inspiring surroundings, people may go back to old days. Sometimes people get frustrated and leave a company; they are insisted to get an inspiration but then they are forced to go back to old without it. In my opinion we might have too much to do in our working place and we don't have enough time to get inspired. But is this the problem of ourselves or the companies? To my mind maybe both, but if we want we should take our time to change our surroundings and let ideas flow.
Another important thing is to make prototypes in an early phase. This makes an idea tangible and easier to discuss, question and analyze choices. It is also possible to evaluate prototypes between others and make improvements. Do you remember when you was a child and liked to play and build things. Design thinking lets you go back to your childhood and build new space shuttles or something less.
Design thinking is human-centered: we use our emphaty and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation. Tim Brown wrote also a story of Bill Moggridge who told him when he was a freshman that ”Designing is verbs, not nouns”. To my mind this tells it all: a good designer thinks more about doing solutions than concentreting on just products and conclusions. Desirability – Feasibility – Viability triad or approach is after all a consumer-centered perspective. Old, established companies have a large customer base and it means that by learning from customers straight on, new ideas and products are easier to bring to market to the old ones.
Two of the workers in IDEO (the company Tim Brown works for) are Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Jacoby, both having an MBA. They have made categories of different ways to innovate. If you make improvements for existing users and existing offerings it means changes (incremental), if you make new offerings to existing users you make extensions (evolutionary). If the target is new users and only changes to existing offerings you make adaptions (evolutionary) and if you make new offerings for them you create something new (revolutionary). I found it rewarding to hear that innovation can be small steps and sometimes changing the whole game. This comes by examples (read from book).
How to start implementing design thinking in your organization? It's usually better to start with your own employees and maybe get an outside facilitator after Tim Brown. Usually this means that you have one demo project where you can count qualitative and quantitive measures. It worths while to let people know about this: the viral channels are incredible way to let people know. You must also think the whole system, it means bigger opportunities. Don't think too big, start with small steps.
Also in this book it was a finding that our education system doesn't encourage to design thinking. But we should change our way of doing business. The big benefits are that this approach is close to customers where the ideas actually come from, it encourages to fail early and fail often (prototype quickly to see if there's a business case) and you can use it to learn more of your extreme users (they're a creative asset for you). It's also important to mix groups (inspirations from others) and mix innovations (incremental, revolutionary and evolutionary innovations work all in different situations). A good thing is to give budget to ideas or projects that challenge the old ways. To start inside the company, let the buzz come and people talk openly on their findings and ideas. This will change the company. And don't forget to give honor to great thinkers, even if they come outside the company.
Have you ever thought what makes one team a dream team or what kind of persons should a great team have? I have. I was exploring at the library a couple of weeks ago and found Susan A. Wheelan's book named 