What is Design Thinking?
Many who come in contact with design thinking for the first-time search for help in applying it. New mindsets often overwhelm us because over the years we have forgotten how to solve problems with creativity on an ad-hoc assembled team without clearly defined goals. Design thinking is not a rigid concept. It should be used more playfully, that is, the sequence must be adapted to the circumstances.
People who have never dealt with design thinking often ask for simple analogies to help envision it better. We have had good experiences with taking these people on an imaginary trip to their childhood. Especially at the age of 4, all children have something in common – they ask many 5W+H questions in order to learn and understand situations.
Nor do children know any zero-error culture. For them, doing, learning, and trying again stands in the forefront. This is how children learn to walk, draw, and so on. Over the years many of us have forgotten this ability to explore and this type of experimental learning, and our education in schools and universities has taken care of the rest so that we do not question and investigate facts and circumstances in a big way. With the “beginner’s mind,” answers. Like an alien from outer space who sets foot on Earth for the first time and asks himself why we throw plastic into our oceans, work during the day and sleep at night, why we wear ties all the way to rituals that seem strange indeed to an outsider, such as looking for eggs at Easter time.
Why Design Thinking works?
Occasionally, a new way of organizing work leads to extraordinary improvements. Total quality management did that in manufacturing in the 1980s by combining a set of tools—Kanban cards, quality circles, and so on—with the insight that people on the shop floor could do much higher-level work than they usually were asked to. That blend of tools and insight, applied to a work process, can be thought of as a social technology.
In a recent seven-year study in which I looked in depth at 50 projects from a range of sectors, including business, health care, and social services, I have seen that another social technology, design thinking, has the potential to do for innovation exactly what TQM did for manufacturing: unleash people’s full creative energies, win their commitment, and radically improve processes. By now most executives have at least heard about design thinking’s tools—ethnographic research, an emphasis on reframing problems and experimentation, the use of diverse teams, and so on—if not tried them. But what people may not understand is the subtler way that design thinking gets around the human biases (for example, rootedness in the status quo) or attachments to specific behavioral norms (“That’s how we do things here”) that time and again block the exercise of imagination.
We will explore a variety of human tendencies that get in the way of innovation and describe how design thinking’s tools and clear process steps help teams break free of them. Let’s begin by looking at what organizations need from innovation—and at why their efforts to obtain it often fall short.
The Challenges of Innovation
To be successful, an innovation process must deliver three things: superior solutions, lower risks and costs of change, and employee buy-in. Over the years businesspeople have developed useful tactics for achieving those outcomes. But when trying to apply them, organizations frequently encounter new obstacles and trade-offs.
Superior solutions
Defining problems in obvious, conventional ways, not surprisingly, often leads to obvious, conventional solutions. Asking a more interesting question can help teams discover more-original ideas. The risk is that some teams may get indefinitely hung up exploring a problem, while action-oriented managers may be too impatient to take the time to figure out what question they should be asking.
It’s also widely accepted that solutions are much better when they incorporate user-driven criteria. Market research can help companies understand those criteria, but the hurdle here is that it’s hard for customers to know they want something that doesn’t yet exist.
Finally, bringing diverse voices into the process is also known to improve solutions. This can be difficult to manage, however, if conversations among people with opposing views deteriorate into divisive debates.
The Testing Experience
Companies often regard prototyping as a process of fine-tuning a product or service that has already largely been developed. But in design thinking, prototyping is carried out on far-from-finished products. It’s about users’ iterative experiences with a work in progress. This means that quite radical changes—including complete redesigns—can occur along the way.
Shaping the Innovator's Journey
What makes design thinking a social technology is its ability to counteract the biases of innovators and change the way.
Design thinking takes a different approach: Identify hidden needs by having the innovator live the customer’s experience.
