What If

The next frontier: Design Thinking

Design thinking is the latest and hottest methodology talked about to help a company innovate. GE calls it CENCOR (calibrate, explore, create, organize and realize). The Mayo Clinic calls it SPARC (see, plan, act, refine, communicate). My new company calls it GIP (Gather, Ideate, Prototype). Its most obvious and direct power is in the creation of new products and services. Design thinking allows an organization to differentiate its products and services in an avenue other than pricing.

Design thinking is very people-centric - it is all about making a product or service relevant and meaningful to people. It is a method to tap into the unmet and unspoken needs of the people. Up until now, most organizations have used focus groups to figure out what people want or what to make or build next. A focus group is a great tool but it is limited to what consumers already know and it is not suitable to mine consumers’ unarticulated needs. This is where design thinking comes into play. It acts as a tool of empathy that can be used to understand what consumers really want. Consumers can easily articulate what they do not like about a product/service but they can rarely articulate what is needed to remove the element that causes dissatisfaction or to create delight. "Design thinking can offer greater, deeper, and faster insight into users' lives to help businesses know what to make in the first place," says Patrick Whitney, a 54-year-old Canadian native who is the director of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago.

Design thinking has other less obvious applications. For example, Samsung is using design thinking for their strategic thinking and Proctor and Gamble has set up an innovation “gym” which is a place to train its managers in design thinking.

So what makes up design thinking? The basic concept of design thinking is simple. It starts off by observation – going out into the world to see how customers shop at retail outlets, how they wash their clothes at home or how they are treated in clinics. By using observation, Gap Inc. and others have noticed that shopping in pairs and threesomes is common, and from this insight, they are making dressing rooms larger.

The next step is to try out lots of ideas quickly and cheaply by prototyping. This prototyping step allows ideas to be tested, improved and refined. It also makes ideas tangible and helps managers visualize them in order that they can make better decisions on which ideas to improve, discard and ultimately help launch products faster. Finally, the last step is to make design thinking part of the organization’s process to ensure that it is done all the time.

Even though the basic concept is simple, the devil is always in the details. So how does one start? The best place to start is by honing one’s observation skills. The next time you are at Coffeebean, stop and look around, try to notice where things are placed, ask why items are placed in certain areas, ask what catches your eye and why. Is it the color or something else? Look at how people are interacting and behaving with respect to the item. Another exercise you can do is to pick an item and deconstruct it mentally in simply understanding why. Do this over and over and soon you will start seeing patterns. That is when you know that you’ve got the first part of design thinking down.

Killes Phrases

The week before Chinese New Year I led a dialog session at HP Malaysia. The session was loosely based on the picture below which I took while visiting a friend's company that does a lot of creative branding work.

At first glance I think most of us can identify with all or most of the phrases on the whiteboard. In fact we might be guilty of actually saying one or more of those phrases at some point in time.

If you looked deeper into those "killer phrases" you can actually group them into 4 main groups and one of the groups is known as the Devil's Advocate. Hiding behind the Devil's Advocate persona you will hear people say things like:
    "… let me be the devil's advocate …"
    "I can give you five reasons off the top of my head why this isn't going to work"
    "Yes, but …"
    "Hah? That's stupid …"
    "Can meh? …"

The Devil's Advocate persona most often rears its ugly head during ideation sessions. Don't get me wrong, critical thinking is needed but not when an idea is at its infancy. Think about it - if ideas are the source of innovation, then ideas are actually like seeds for innovation. If every seed gets killed off even before they see the light of day, then there will be no innovation! Instead of killing these seeds (i.e. innovation) right off the bat, let them grow a little and see where they go.

A good way to let an idea grow a little is to do quick, cheap and dirty prototypes. These prototypes can be sketches, plasticine models or they can take on any other shape or form as long as they let you make your ideas tangible and let you test them out. Prototyping should always be about testing your ideas out, seeing what parts of your idea work, what parts don't work and how it can be improved. Prototyping should never be about putting all the polish and shine on an idea or making it look good or getting it to a close approximation of the final product. It should not be done to be exhibited at a stage gate/approval meeting where "higher ups", who probably know zilch about your project anyway, try to determine the goodness of your project and whether or not to fund it. So when you think ‘prototype’, always think iterative, quick, cheap and dirty.

In any case I digress… but I do want to end with a quote from a very wise man whose words speak against the devil's advocates of the world:
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." - Thomas A. Edison

Rules in a Storm

One of the most commonly used ideation method is brainstorming. However what many people don’t realize is that there is a right way to do brainstorming and a wrong way to do it. In fact there are rules to brainstorming that most people are unaware of. According to Alex Osborn in his 1957 book Applied Imagination the rules to brainstorming are:

1. Produce as many ideas as possible
2. Produce ideas as wild as possible
3. Build upon each other’s idea
4. Avoid passing judgment on ideas

Using these rules first penned by Osborn as the base and combining them with other ideas out there and with some of my own, stir them all together and voila! Here are the guidelines I use in the brainstorming sessions that I facilitate:

1. Go for quantity
2. Encourage wild ideas
3. Build upon each other’s idea
4. Defer judgment
5. Have one conversation at a time
6. Stay focused on the topic
7. Feel free to be visual and physical

I think most of us can understand the first six items pretty easily. Now, what does it mean to ‘feel free to be visual and physical’? Well being visual simply means to illustrate your ideas. Your illustrations don’t have to be masterpieces, they just need to be simple sketches. Sometimes a simple sketch will go a long way in helping other people understand your idea. As for being physical, all it means is to go ahead and stand, walk, act out your ideas, basically have fun during your brainstorming sessions! In all the brainstorming sessions in which I’ve either been a participant or facilitator, the best ones were usually where people were having fun while still staying focused on the topic at hand. There are also other aspects to a good brainstorming sessions like the environment, pre-brainstorming activity, a good brainstorming facilitator, etc. I will share more about these in my later posts.