Getting a new project or initiative off the ground can be as taxing as wrangling a pack of wild horses. There are competing objectives, limited time and resources, and heightened expectations—especially if you’re looking to launch a new product or service. Sometimes, there may not even be enough people to work on the project.
Is there a way to guide the process of trying to solve a problem to ensure that you and your team can come up with a thoughtful solution?
That’s where design thinking can come in.
When you think ‘design’, you might think that it’s all about how a product or service looks. But design isn’t just about aesthetic. Design thinking is a strategic way to solve problems, as it puts empathy at the heart of the process.
In a Harvard Business Review article, designer and now-IDEO executive chair Tim Brown described design thinking as a way to “match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can connect into customer value and market opportunity.”
The design thinking process can be broken down into five key stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
Empathizing is learning about what life is like for the people and environments we’re designing for. Defining is highlighting what we learned from the experience and what the problems are. Ideating is coming up with different visions of what the solution to the problem can be. Prototyping is making the ideas tangible, making it real in an inexpensive way, so that you can proceed to testing, which is where you bring it out to the real world so that you can develop an understanding of the solution and the people and environments using it.
What makes design thinking unique is that it is more of a cycle rather than a linear path, or a step-by-step process, which makes it a good option to look into for addressing complex or complicated problems, because it embraces iteration, integrative thinking, and active listening.
Where has design thinking been used? At On-Off Group, we’ve worked on a project with a private hospital and the Armed Forces of the Philippines, to improve communication between departments and improve the patient experience in military hospitals, organizing a Design Thinking bootcamp to get participants to craft a gameplay for the problem, followed by a 30-day program where they applied the Design Thinking process to their project.
We have also worked with a regional development bank to introduce design thinking and human-centered design to the organization, so employees can combine it with their existing framework for innovation thinking and integrate the process into applicable projects. A local organization also tapped us to design and run a design thinking program to help underserved communities prepare for natural disasters, which led to the development of a more affordable life vest prototype, which could be used by people living in areas with substantial flooding.
One of our teammates even used it to their family trip!
What do you need to do design thinking? Design thinking practitioners can come from a variety of backgrounds—in fact, we encourage it. A diverse set of perspectives can help uncover unexpected barriers and solutions to challenges. There are five attributes that we feel are critical to embracing design thinking—empathy, curiosity, open-mindedness, resilience, and bias towards action. Empathy is critical to understanding people, their wants, needs, strengths, and challenges, the communities and systems they’re part of, and the larger forces that may help or hinder them from achieving their goals.
We also see design thinking as applied curiosity—curiosity and open-mindedness keep design thinking practitioners from falling into their existing biases, knowledge, or assumptions. It also opens the door for us to learn from different people, experiences, and fields.
The last pair of qualities that will be helpful to embracing the design thinking process is resilience and bias towards action. The design thinking process can be uncomfortable, because it rejects instant certainty, but taking action, opening ourselves to feedback, and making changes are necessary if one is to create solutions that people will actually use.
How do you know you’re ready for design thinking? While we don’t have a comprehensive checklist, we do have a few qualities that could signify that you and your team could make the most out of design thinking:
Openness to other perspectives. Are your conversations at work encouraging people to bring in new ideas, perspectives, or tools? Do you and your teammates say “Let’s try it!" more than you say “That’s not how we do things here.”? If people at different departments or levels within the organization can try out new things or bring in new ways of working, it’s a good sign that your culture will embrace the design thinking process.
A healthy relationship with feedback. If your organization encourages people to give direct and kind feedback and encourages feedback across the organization, instead of just flowing from the most senior to the most junior, your organization can benefit from design thinking, as it encourages active listening and seeking to understand, instead of just seeking to be heard.
A culture embracing learning and curiosity. If people are rewarded for seeking out better ways of doing things, investigating customers needs, or improving workplace culture, design thinking will help you and your organization make the most of these strengths to improve existing products, services, and processes or even to come up with new ones that are more responsive to what people and the planet need and want.
If you think a design thinking engagement would work well for you, book a introductory workshop or get in touch.
