Report from the Field: Thoughts on Design Thinking

Some 40 attendees participated in last week's experiential workshop Design Thinking: Beyond the Buzz Words hosted by Dan Buchner, Vice President of Innovation and Design at renowned design consultancy Continuum. A lively and engaging workshop from beginning to end, Dan and his team of designers presented a day-long deep dive into the world of design thinking. Turns out that you can indeed use design thinking to solve business objectives - all you need is an open mind and a few tools.

Design Thinking 101

A powerful methodology for marrying creative right-brain thinking and analytical left-brain thinking, design thinking doesn’t prefer one method of thinking over another but rather, it blends the positive aspects of both. (Roger Martin, dean of Toronto’s Rotman School calls it ‘integrative thinking.’) This talent is at a premium today because innovation so often happens in the space between disciplines. Design thinking can get you into those spaces - it's a proven strategic methodology, long used by industrial design firms but now businesses are beginning to see its merits too. Balancing skeptical and cautious with open and risky requires finesse and firms like Continuum, universities like the Rotman School and business leaders like A.G. Lafley are leading the charge. Here at the Business Innovation Factory, we use design thinking as a catalyst for all of our work. This integrative approach has enabled us to build an experimentation platform for creating a real-world test bed of innovation.

How to Reap the Rewards of Design Thinking
Immersive from the get-go, Dan and his team brought us on a journey to redesign the packaging of a cellphone. We watched three videos of three different people opening up and trying to turn on three different cell phones. It was fascinating to watch the effort - turns out the iPhone was the easiest to open and the AT&T Go Phone was a maddening struggle. From there, we were broken into six separate teams and traveled through the journey map from ethnographic observation to prototyping.

A journey map is a designer's roadmap to innovation. It's a method of visually representing the actual and everyday user experience of a product or service. Simple, straight-forward, yet time-consumming too, this method helped us understand the intentional and unintentional aspects of our cell-phone customer's journey. During the workshop, we humanized the map with personal insights, anecdotes and photos, using the user's language from the video tapes. In the end, this approach helped us significantly to identify and design opportunities for improvement and innovation.

Producing significant value from design involves a deep understanding of customer behaviors, corporate leadership, organizational culture, and cross-discipline work teams. It’s NOT ideation and brainstorming. That became abundantly clear during the course of the workshop. In fact, we did very little brainstorming until the end of the day. Instead, we learned that it’s very helpful to think about design in terms of a whole system rather than discrete buckets of new products or services. The big mistake most companies make is holding brainstorming sessions too soon. Instead, you need to inform the context and obtain a thorough understanding of your customer's needs and aspirations as well as the environmental conditions and constraints in which they live. It's only after this process takes place when creativity and ideation kicks in. (For all of us in the workshop, applying visualization techniques was key to propelling the process forward and the humble post-it-note an unbelievable asset.)

It was a lot to chew on in one day but somehow going through the process of redesigning the packaging of a cellphone provided just enough context for many of us to have an a-ha moment: While processes like Six Sigma can help you squeeze more efficiency out of your operating processes, design thinking tackles value generation from a different place - it really can help you create entirely new markets, businesses, and business models. But you must take the time and go through the process.

I want to thank the folks from Continuum for a great day of learning and discovery. Forty diverse people from the public and private sectors came together and many innovative concepts were created. Business executives should take notice: if you’re looking for industry-revolutionizing concepts, there is a methodology available to you, and it does deliver results.

Finally, here are a few final thoughts gleaned from several of our workshop participants or, you know you have what it takes to be a design thinker when you:

• Are exhaustive in your observations and lines of questioning.
• Start looking at the emotional motivations, frustrations and expectations of your customer.
• Don't smother innovative, hare-brained potential with risky and cautious attitudes
• Are non-hierarchical and include everyone in your organization in the innovation process.
• No longer include “that can’t be done” in your vernacular.
• Understand that perspectives add value and diversity in problem-solving means everything.
• Can travel a journey map from beginning to end.
• Live to experiment and always look to try things out without knowing if you have the right idea.

Next Up
Our next workshop is taking place on Thursday, April 24th. Andrew Hargadon, author of How Breakthroughs Happen will take us through a half-day workshop on the Design of Networked Innovation. If you're interesting in learning how companies interact to build networks of innovation, this workshop is for you. Moving between historic and modern examples and interactive experiences, Andy will provide us with a design framework for driving the adoption and evolution of new ventures. Registration information is here. Don't miss it!

Posted April 7, 2008 11:58 AM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink