Driving disruption through design THINKING

Envision this: Coffee shop on a sunny, spring Sunday afternoon. A bunch of us have gathered here as part of a writing group to work on our projects. An hour into the activity, we take a short break to discuss what we are working on and the following conversation ensues

“I am writing about design thinking”

“Oh! Are you a designer?”

“No, I am not a designer and that is exactly what I am writing about. I am writing about design THINKING, which is so much more than design.”

Design thinking has become a buzzword today. A quick google search on “design thinking” yields nearly 23 million hits. Popularized by IDEO’s Tim Brown and the Kelley brothers, and embraced by Stanford and Harvard, design thinking is becoming an essential skill for the employee of the future. Large organizations are adopting various aspects of design thinking and the Design Management Institute states that companies that effectively implement design thinking are outperforming their peers by 200%. But many companies are struggling with the effective implementation of the process, because they are focusing on the “design” aspect of design thinking, rather than the “thinking” aspect of design thinking.

Let’s flashback to early 20th century: Industry 2.0 has arrived and it is a revolution in manufacturing that is leading to the implementation of processes and optimizations like six sigma, stage gate, just in time and lean manufacturing. It is also bringing us the 9-5 work life and assembly lines are starting to become common place. This era required us to optimize worker efficiency to increase productivity.  And that has served us well for the last few decades.

Fast forward to present day: Industry 4.0 is here and it requires different skill sets. Robots and AI are set to replace the assembly line. Yet, we are still using practices and rules of Industry 2.0!

Companies today need to be agile, customer-centric and empathetic. Today’s customer does not ask for a product, today’s customer asks for an experience that delights and satisfies. Today’s customer is well-informed, well-networked and will not make decisions without due diligence. This is a major shift in the market and companies that have thrived in the industrial era are struggling to pivot and pivot fast.

Businesses that excel today are those that are investing in strategic decision making, customer experience and providing value. They have embraced design thinking, lean innovation, rapid prototyping and customer engagement and have successfully implemented these practices into their business.

Implementing design THINKING requires us to embrace some fundamental changes to managing and running organizations. In order to effectively use design thinking to drive disruption and fuel innovation, organization have to understand and implement these five basic concepts

Check your assumptions at the door

One of the things that drew me to design thinking was the fact that design thinking is data-driven. The very first step of the process is empathy, which requires us to leave our assumptions aside and learn about our user/customer’s needs. We then use that information to understand the problem and create a solution. We then test those solutions, get input from our customer and use that data to drive our innovation.

The key is that we are getting data directly from our user. What we know/think/believe does not matter if our user does not need it. This is the purest form of data. However, if we start with an assumption/idea/solution, we will spend our time trying to seek validation. Often, data derived by this method does not help us get to the heart of the customer’s problem, and the solution built is minimally or not at all useful.

Build a culture of collaboration

Design thinking is democratic, inclusive and action-oriented. It demands diverse input and teamwork. An ideal innovation team must represent diversity of talent, training, culture and experience. This diversity encourages the creation of unique ideas, concepts and solutions that a homogeneous team would not have envisioned. Organizations are used to working in silos and often different departments rarely talk to each other. For effective use of design thinking organizations have to reorganize and clearly adopt a culture change that encourages collaboration.

Embrace ambiguity and flexibility

In design thinking, data defines the direction of the project. This means that the project will be ambiguous initially and will take shape based on user and market input. It’s like sitting at a potter’s wheel with a lump of clay and slowly shaping it into the final product. Teams have to be comfortable with the initial ambiguity and must be flexible to change course based on feedback.

Often, I have seen that when teams get data that conflicts with their belief or direction of the project, they shift to validation to obtain the results that they want. This distorts user input and does not provide the right direction. When teams embrace ambiguity and spend time to understand the problem they can quickly tease out the ambiguity to reach clarity. In early stages of the project it is essentially to pivot often to reach that stage of clarity.

Organizations have to build teams that are flexible and comfortable with ambiguity in order to make this happen. More importantly, organizations have to be comfortable with ambiguity and give the team the time and flexibility they need to effectively define the problem-solution fit.

Create avenues for inspiration

We will rarely create truly innovative products by sitting at our desk and staring at a computer screen. Steve Blank coined the phrase “Get out of the building” to encourage companies to invite customer input. Get out of the building is also important to seek inspiration for creative ideas. Something as simple as taking a walk when we feel stuck can be enough to inspire creativity. Sometimes we have to look beyond our lens and step outside our comfort zone to derive inspiration.

For example: biomimicry encourages us to look at how nature solves problems and seek inspiration from that to create solutions for our problems. Looking at tangential industries is another way to inspire unique ideas. But in order to do this, employees have to abandon their desks and learn from non-traditional sources. Newton “discovered” gravity because an apple fell on his head when he was sitting under a tree. Archimedes’ principle of buoyancy was inspired by observing water displacement during a bath.

Organizations must encourage and provide room for creative exploration. A 9-5 culture will create employees that put in the time. But to create a culture of innovation, we must provide employees the flexibility to explore and be inspired.  

Love the problem

If we want to pivot from incremental to disruptive, we have to learn to love the problem. Most organizations are creating incremental innovation because teams are given six months to innovate, or are being ask to validate an idea or build around an existing solution or make their boss look good. None of these approaches are encouraging teams to embrace the problem. To truly create disruption, we have to first understand the problem and then build solutions. A problem or an unknown creates a path to innovation. Instead of burying the outliers that “mess up” our data, lets encourage our teams to explore these outliers and learn their stories. Although clichéd, I will quote that problems are indeed opportunities!

Design THINKING is a process and a journey. It is not a widget that we can buy off a shelf. Design thinking requires us to first innovate ourselves so that we can innovate our companies, communities and ecosystems. We must also understand that design thinking is ONE tool in our innovation toolbox. It is not a solution, but a guide to a solution. We must supplement design thinking  with other innovation tools to create a comprehensive strategy.

I will discuss how I integrate the different innovation tools into my model in my next post.