Design thinking is a process for solving problems by prioritizing the consumer’s needs above all else. It relies on observing, with empathy, how people interact with their environments, and employs an iterative, hands-on approach to creating innovative solutions.
Leaders could look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage; they would do well to incorporate design thinking into all phases of the process. While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way.
Well, design thinking does unleash people’s full creative energies, wins their commitment, and radically improves processes. We have heard about design thinking’s tools; SWOT, empathy maps, journey maps, prototyping tools, mind maps, and experimentation, the use of diverse teams, and others, if not tried them.
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 leaders may be too impatient to take the time to figure out what questions 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. Some design thinking is very critical to discern the inexistent.
Uncertainty is unavoidable in innovation. That’s why innovators often build a portfolio of options. The tradeoff is that too many ideas dilute focus and resources. To manage this tension, innovators must be willing to let go of bad ideas or to “call the baby ugly,” as a leader once described. Unfortunately, people often find it easier to kill the creative (and arguably riskier) ideas; call it “throwing baby out with birth water.”
An innovation won’t succeed unless a company’s employees get behind it. The surest route to winning their support is to involve them in the process of generating ideas. The danger is that the involvement of many people with different perspectives will create chaos and incoherence, and no progress.
Harnessing or underlying the trade-offs associated with achieving these outcomes is a more fundamental tension. In a stable environment, efficiency is achieved by driving variation out of the organization. In an unstable world, variation becomes the organization’s friend, because it opens new paths to success. However, who can blame leaders who must meet quarterly targets for doubling down on efficiency, rationality, and centralized control?
Organized processes keep people on track and curb the tendency to spend too long exploring a problem or to impatiently skip ahead. They also instill confidence. Most humans are driven by a fear of mistakes, so they focus more on preventing errors than on seizing opportunities. They opt for inaction rather than action when a choice risks failure. But there is no innovation without action, so psychological safety is essential. The physical props and highly formatted tools of design thinking deliver that sense of security, helping to discover customer needs, idea generation, and idea testing.
Many times, design thinking involves several activities. Each generates a clear output that the next activity converts to another output until the organization arrives at an implementable innovation. But at a deeper level, something else is happening, that leaders generally are not aware of. Though apparently geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, each design thinking activity also reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves in profound ways.
The structure of design thinking creates a natural flow from research to rollout. Immersion in the customer experience produces data, which is transformed into insights, which help teams agree on design criteria they use to brainstorm solutions. Assumptions about what’s critical to the success of those solutions are examined and then tested with rough prototypes that help teams further develop innovations and prepare them for real-world experiments.
Along the way, design-thinking processes counter human biases that foil creativity while addressing the challenges typically faced in reaching superior solutions, lowered costs and risks, and employee buy-in. Recognizing organizations as collections of human beings who are motivated by varying perspectives and emotions, design thinking emphasizes engagement, dialogue, and learning. By involving customers and other stakeholders in the definition of the problem and the development of solutions, design thinking bring in a broad commitment to change.
The writer is the General Manager Commercial Banking at Centenary Bank
