Design Thinking Innovation for a VUCA world

Do the personal and professional problems that you face have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. Not when we live in a VUCA world. And no, not when we do not use Design Thinking to ideate, prototype and test designs and solutions.

So, what is Design Thinking?

Innovation = Design Thinking + VUCA + Multidisciplinary Teams + Inclusivity Innovation = Target; Design Thinking = Process; VUCA = Reality;  Multidisciplinary Team = Experts; Inclusivity = Bottom-up Prototyping

The rules governing innovation are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everyone in their own personal space is dealing with their own problems. To make matters even more complicated, in the real world we need to listen to and collaborate with other people – increasing levels of complexity by the 10^th degree

Consider this real story by Stanford’s D. School, published in Design Thinking for Social Innovation by Jocelyn Wyatt. It is a case of a perceived top-down innovation that does not work.

In an area outside Hyderabad, India, between the suburbs and the countryside, a young woman—we’ll call her Shanti—fetches water daily from the always-open local borehole that is about 300 feet from her home. She uses a 3-gallon plastic container that she can easily carry on her head. Shanti and her husband rely on the free water for their drinking and washing, and though they’ve heard that it’s not as safe as water from the Naandi Foundation-run community treatment plant, they still use it. Shanti’s family has been drinking the local water for generations, and although it regularly makes her and her family sick, she has no plans to stop using it.

Shanti has many reasons not to use the clean, safe water from the Naandi treatment center, but they’re not the reasons one might think. The center is within easy walking distance of her home—roughly a third of a mile. It is also well known and affordable (roughly 10 rupees, or MYR 1, for 5 gallons). Being able to pay the small fee has even become a status symbol for some villagers. Habit isn’t a factor, either. Shanti is forgoing the safer water because of a series of flaws in the overall design of the system. Although Shanti can walk to the facility, she can’t carry the 5-gallon Jerri-can that the facility requires her to use. When filled with water, the plastic rectangular container is simply too heavy. The container isn’t designed to be held on the hip or the head, where she likes to carry heavy objects.

Shanti’s husband can’t help carry it, either. He works in the city and doesn’t return home until after the water treatment center is closed. The treatment center also requires them to buy a monthly punch card for 5 gallons a day, far more than they need. “Why would I buy more than I need and waste money?” asks Shanti, adding she’d be more likely to purchase the Naandi water if the center allowed her to buy less.

What has this story to do with Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is the step by step process that brings life to the abstract idea of Innovation. Combined with the VUCA approach of understanding our personal and professional realities, Design Thinking enables organisations to empower and realise the potential of their most valuable resource – the people. The way Design Thinking methodology works, takes into account the real needs and problems of the people who will need and will use the innovation; which is what Shanti needed in the story above.

The core idea is that Design Thinking is a real world, step-by-step innovation process that revolves around a theme or a question that the organisation would like to have answered.

An example of a question would be, “How can we train our employees to constantly innovate and deliver new ideas for products, processes and services, using available resources and infrastructure; and all tailor made for real people living real lives in the real world?”

Design Thinking helps the people in an organisation look at the organisation through new eyes, using new thought processes, implement new methodologies and to know the right questions to ask. Often, answers and solutions are obvious, just as new SOPs to create new levels of efficiencies are usually right in front of us, provided we know how to frame the correct perspectives and to then view that frame with an innovative mind.

The world, market places, our lives and our careers are volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Design Thinking clearly outlines the process to innovate in our VUCA environments, and to give us vision, understanding, clarity and agility to position ourselves in ways of doing and living sustainably, profitably and happily. The new way of using happiness indices to measure success and economic return on a human level, can be readily achieved using the 5 steps of Design Thinking – Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

Businesses have to innovate, grow, develop capabilities and human potentials, and in a way that maximises current resources and that will appeal to the human spirit of experimenting, building and creating. The key understanding is that the production worker, the middle management and the decision makers already understand the human problems and the ready-made solutions; they just need to come together in a tested methodology to make it all work in a seamless process and flow.

Design Thinking brings key players together in an inclusive process that takes home grown and in-house experts and churns out innovation, products and services and makes businesses more profitable and sustainable for the bank account, for nature and for the human spirit.