What Is Design Thinking?
This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Mark Tweedy
What is Design Thinking?
Designers have a claim on having the coolest job of all. Imagine being paid to brainstorm and then bring in other professionals to help make your dreams come to life. They are the Walt Disneys of the business world.
Design thinking takes the elements and processes that have proven themselves over centuries of design work and applies them to problem-solving for common operational roadblocks. These principles allow anyone in your organization to live the life of a designer within the confines of a given project.
Set aside some time to experiment with the four stages of design thinking below to join the ranks of innovative design thinkers like Steve Jobs, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
4 Steps in the Dance of Design
Fortunately, a wide swath of US professionals are already familiar with the basics of design thinking from the oversimplification of it on TV shows from Bewitched to Mad Men. It starts with an impossible challenge, plunges into wild and unpredictable ideation and emerges with something shockingly new through collaboration. Often hilarity or heartbreak are stops along the journey.
That’s the dramatic version.
In the real world, design thinking consists of:
- Step one: Dig deep with research to define the problem with as much fine detail as possible.
- Step two: Brainstorm and benchmark across industries without judgement on how outlandish the concepts are.
- Step three: Question every assumption and test each hypothesis to gain a level of confidence in a working prototype, with iterative refinements.
- Step four: Bring it into production with the full endorsement of the management team and open lines of communications with the front line.
Design thinking is challenging because it defies many of the basic principles about “the way things get done” in a traditional business. That is its strength but is also the biggest challenge for those new to the process.
Digging Deep
Poorly defined problems always result in poorly designed answers. That’s one of the few certainties of the business world. If a project starts before everyone knows exactly what they are trying to fix, you get team splintering, conflicting priorities, scope creep and a cobbled together solution that nobody wants. Bring your chess skills and think two moves ahead. What happens if you only address one part of the problem? What workarounds are customers already using to deal with this? Who is threatened by your success? Make the time to fully define the problem and the dependencies radiating out from the problem. Everyone on the solution team must be aligned on what they are trying to solve and what success will look like.
Brainstorming and Benchmarking
No matter what the problem is, somebody else has tried to solve it already. Why did they fail? How did people in other industries approach similar problems? Think about Uber. Before 2009, everybody knew that the two cardinal rules of common sense security were: 1) Don’t trust random strangers on the Internet; and 2) Don’t get into a car with someone you don’t know. Now millions of Americans do both every day. Most people don’t even know what their assumptions are, let alone have the motivation to question them. This is the hardest stage of the design thinking process, and the most storied. In reality, truly innovative and disruptive ideas don’t come in flashes of inspiration, but in the persistent application of a repeatable ideation process.
Questioning and Testing
Even a cursory review of history demonstrates that just about everything people believed in the past turned out to be wrong. It’s statistically unlikely that this trend no longer applies to facts that we believe in without question now. The only tool we have to combat confirmation bias is the scientific method, made up of hypothesis formation and testing. In this way, design thinking is the marriage of art and science. Both prioritize symmetry and parsimony. The Lean Startup methodology defines this stage as the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop, with an emphasis on the iterative refinement of prototypes. There should be only one true measure of how good or bad an idea is: does it solve a problem effectively in the real world?
Bringing It to Production
Training, tooling, communicating, promoting and customizing are typically the most time intensive stage of the entire process. Short-term ROI is not an effective metric when it comes to evaluating radically new and disruptive concepts. Leaders, stakeholders and customers may need a great deal of training to adopt something that challenges their prior way of thinking. When iPhones were introduced in 2007, many analysts agreed that they would only appeal to a few “gadget freaks” and the big phone makers like Blackberry had nothing to worry about. In hindsight, it’s easy to see that smartphones became one of the technologies with the fastest adoption rate in history. The cloud-based app ecosphere, the widening availability of wireless, acceleration of supply chains and the tightening of global markets made mobility a necessity. Still Apple got there first by aligning management with Genius Bar workers in a singular vision of what this device could do for customers.
Overcoming Inertia
You may already see why design thinking projects remain so rare, comparatively. There are many people within your current organization who are entrenched in existing work structures and comfortable with outdated processes. They are at every level and they will tend to resist, delay and disengage from the project because they are certain it will fail. To be successful, a team of design thinkers must include collaborators who have both confidence in their own powers of creative production, but also a facility for diplomacy in gaining consensus up and down the management chain.
Great ideas everywhere are languishing in production limbo right now because they just don’t have the support of either the management team or the front line workers who will have to see the project through to execution. After all, even Walt Disney needed a whole film studio and an army of cartoonists on his side.
Written by:
Data storyteller -- Mark T is a digital marketing manager and playwright in the Washington D.C. region. He specializes in innovative technology and the history of science.
