I was sitting with a friend,
beside a swimming pool, with peaceful sounds of fifteen teenagers teenaging
each other over a barbeque, pizzas and a football, at ten in the night, when
the subject of patience and allowing ideas to mature came up. Our children need
to accept the art form of slow thinking, and not go with split second Google
searches was the general statement.
This soon evolved into a
discussion on the merits of experimenting, doing research and making mistakes
that will generate new knowledge over the course of time, rather than to rely
on instantaneous knowledge the is ubiquitous and sometimes not so
representative of the true answers being sought.
This got me thinking about how
Design Thinking and FAST prototyping and testing might not be the greatest
thing to put up alongside a discussion on Slow Thinking, but heck, perhaps
Design Thinking does need a dose of Slow Thinking, especially since it IS a
VUCA world.
By the way, for me slow thinking
means hearing about X, then researching X to gain various perspectives and
stories, then reflecting and thinking about X to see what has not been taken
into account and whether there are other directions for X to go into, then
staring some initial work to talk to people about X and implementing X in small
doses to see what happens and then thinking, reflecting and talking about X all
over again before further implementing…it is weeks and months of work. Slow
Thinking. Pretty much like bringing up children, educating, nurturing,
experimenting and sometimes giving them a smack on the bottom (when they are
still young enough to not smack you back on your own bottom)
The question in my mind is can we
logically and confidently say that Design Thinking methodologies such as
empathising and ideating through crowd sourcing and in a multidisciplinary
fashion, take into account or even negate the need for slow thinking? Might
Design Thinking instead benefit from a healthy injection of patience and
provide more room for experimenting and making mistakes? Or does Design
Thinking already do so?
Something that many implementers
of Design Thing do not realise is that it is not a standard step-by-step
process. It is not a process where you use only your own employees who have
been hired and brainwashed into uniform organisational thinking, and it
certainly is not a process where you can put people through a fixed-day
cow-leading herd program and have a solution or customised training objective delivered.
Yet, that is exactly what
impatient organisations willing to spend big bucks, expect and want. Many think
it is a process that does take into account slow and patient thinking, so that
mistakes and experimenting can be avoided and results quickly achieved.
See here mate, it IS a VUCA
world. And to a certain extent, crowd sourcing, ideation and quick prototyping
and testing does negate the need for slow thinking and patience. But the whole
point of Design thinking is that you take the time to bring in a multidisciplinary
and diverse crowd to build a team, ensure you have whackos and nutcases who do
not know a thing about your product or service and better still, people who
hate your product and are always looking for ways and means to crucify your
organisation. It even helps to include team members who will wind others up and
curse at everyone. The point is that Design Thinking for a VUCA world must have
chaos, non-rules and be completely outside the box form the very beginning.
As I am writing this, I start to realise
that slow thing and design thinking are actually similar processes, though I started
off thinking they are “versus” one another. An oxymoronic way to put it would
be that design thinking is slow thinking on steroids.
The critical point I suppose,
would be that the people involved in a specific design thinking effort in the
construction and deconstruction of that service or product, must be that clichéd
“out-of-the-box” type personalities, with multiple talents and be willing to
work. Hard.
This is another problem with the
idea of quick results that actually work. We need to be willing to work hard.
The type of people who can make Design Thinking processes work are usually also
the type of people who will play hard when brought together. SO the moderator
needs to be a stone faced army sergeant type who can both inspire and instil
enough fear that a certain semblance of discipline is maintained. This is a
stumbling block as this fear-inspired type of personality whom he himself is
willing to work hard, is a difficult find.
Come on, you think it is easy to
bring a band of lunatics together for a few days or weeks, set a target for
them and then let them loose with as few rules as possible; and have the boss
implement subtle psychological games and overlay the whole process with a
healthy dose of game dynamics to ensure everyone works hard while still
thinking they are playing hard!? And pay them all well on top of it.
So…I still don’t know actually. I
will swing like a Poe’s pendulum and try to find a way to be that artful
moderator who can inspire the best while ensuring they remain VUCA-fearing at
the same time. My tattoo and larger than life physical aspects might even help
in that. In the end though, Design Thinking is a pretty credible way to make
use of slow thinking thought processes, provided as always, the right mix is
present and everyone works hard.
But what the heck, the human race
got where we are now by plying hard too, and we represent the extremes of
ugliness and beauty, screwing the earth and each other whilst trying to rescues
the earth and each other at the same time.
Isn’t that what Design Thinking
does too, especially when accounting for the fact that it is a VUCA world?
Let’s see if I am wrong…
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