A possible Design Thinking program

A possible Design Thinking program, for an Innovative, Competitive & Healthy workforce

(adapted from Stanford’s d.School Bootcamp Bootleg document)

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. This is achieved by working with organisations and businesses to construct key questions that will address the needs of the business, and to implement training sessions that are built around the specific question.

An example of a question would be, “How can we immerse our workforce in communication spaces that enable constant innovation, in an efficient and sustainable manner that promotes the sharing of knowledge & expertise?”

A.    Program

Programs for layered groups of the workforce. The program is geared towards making the Innovation methodology real and to provide Autonomy, Purpose and Mastery to employees, and contributing towards the development of a “Healthy competitive working environment”. Design Thinking can be introduced as an acknowledged methodology to evolve Innovation Thinking for various groupings of the workforce such as Upper Management, Middle Management, Lower Management, Administrative & Production teams

B.    Design Thinking Methodology

The premise that is a workforce needs to have a working environment that stimulates creativity. The belief is that the provisioning of challenging goals for the workforce, combined with office spaces that are shaped for communications at a personal and team level, will create opportunities for people to learn and grow, vital components of the innovation mindset.

This process-oriented work environment is ideally matched for the implementation of the Design Thinking methodology.

A possible workforce expertise building course outline that comprises the Design Thinking 5-Step methodology might look like this

1.  Empathise – Observe, Engage, Immerse and finally Understand the populations and spaces the product is being developed for. The stories that people tell and the things that people say they do—even if they are different from what they actually do—are strong indicators of their deeply held beliefs about the way the world is. Good designs are built on a solid understanding of these kinds of beliefs and values.

2.    Define – Explaining the definition of the problem that uses a shared language of the designers/workforce.

The define mode is when you unpack and synthesize your empathy findings into compelling needs and insights, and scope a specific and meaningful challenge. Two goals of the define mode are to develop a deep understanding of your users and the design space and, based on that understanding, to come up with an actionable problem statement: your point of view. “Your point of view” should be a guiding statement that focuses on specific users, and insights and needs that you uncovered during the empathise mode.

3.    Ideate - This is the mode during your design process in which you focus on idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes. The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space – both a large quantity of ideas and a diversity among those ideas. From this vast repository of ideas you can build prototypes to test with users.

4.   Prototype - Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form – be it a wall of post-it notes, a role-playing activity, a space, an object, an interface, or even a storyboard. The resolution of your prototype should keep pace with your progress in your project. In early explorations keep your prototypes rough and rapid to allow yourself to learn quickly and investigate a lot of different possibilities.

5.      Test - Testing is the chance to refine our solutions and make them better. The test mode is another iterative mode in which we place our low-resolution artifacts in the appropriate context of the user’s life. Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.

C.     Objectives

The focus is Innovation Thinking. To this end, a proposed Prime Objectives for a workforce could be as follows.

1.      To increase employee creativity, idea generating  & conceptual abilities

                                            I.            Uncover needs that people have which they may or may not be aware of

                                          II.            Guide innovation efforts

                                        III.            Identify the right users to design for

                                        IV.            Discover the emotions that guide behaviors

2.      To enable personal and team strategic planning abilities

                                            I.            Provides focus and frames the problem

                                          II.            Inspires your team

                                        III.            Provides a reference for evaluating competing ideas

                                        IV.            Empowers your team to make decisions independently in parallel

                                          V.            Fuels brainstorms by suggesting “how might we” statements

                                        VI.            Captures the hearts and minds of people you meet

                                      VII.          Saves you from the impossible task of developing concepts that are all things to all    people

                                    VIII.            Is something you revisit and reformulate as you learn by doing

                                        IX.            Guides your innovation efforts

3.      To Improve teamwork and communication skills

                                            I.            Step beyond obvious solutions and thus increase the innovation potential of your solution set

                                          II.            Harness the collective perspectives and strengths of your teams

                                        III.            Uncover unexpected areas of exploration

                                        IV.            Create fluency (volume) and flexibility (variety) in your innovation options

                                          V.            Get obvious solutions out of your heads, and drive your team beyond them

4.      To enable both top-down and bottom-up expertise to be shared

                                            I.            Learn. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.

                                          II.            Solve disagreements. Prototyping is a powerful tool that can eliminate ambiguity, assist in ideation, and reduce miscommunication.

                                        III.            Start a conversation. A prototype can be a great way to have a different kind of conversation with users.

                                        IV.            Fail quickly and cheaply. Creating quick and dirty prototypes allows you to test a number of ideas without investing a lot of time and money up front.

                                          V.            Manage the solution-building process. Identifying a variable to explore encourages you to break a large problem down into smaller, testable chunks.

5.      To discover workforce and real world needs

                                            I.            To refine our prototypes and solutions. Testing informs the next iterations of prototypes. Sometimes this means going back to the drawing board.

                                          II.            To learn more about our user. Testing is another opportunity to build empathy through observation and engagement—it often yields unexpected insights.

                                        III.            To test and refine our POV. Sometimes testing reveals that not only did we not get the solution right, but also that we have failed to frame the problem correctly.

D.    Potential problems leading to opportunities

The objectives listed here also represent potential weaknesses and problems that will need to be overcome in the newly shaped spaces of an office environment.

1.   Sharing knowledge and expertise – Design Thinking promotes a mindset of working together to create innovation and share expertise

2.     Building a shared language – identifying and understanding the innovations that will address an organisation’s needs

3.   Building workforce loyalty – the design thinking process immerses the workforce in an environment that maintains open communications between the highest and lowest levels of management, but in a manner that provides deep understanding of each other’s needs and perspectives; and empathy building process that instills deep satisfaction, friendship and loyalty

4.   The most exciting part of the program is the discovery of Wicked Problems and the development of Wicked Solutions – for problems that nobody was aware even existed

This then is an attempt to provide an initial glimpse at what a proposed Design Thinking program for an organisation might look like. It begins the process for a workforce to start understanding that innovation lives in the human brain, and shared expertise and insights, empathy, a trusted environment where rapid prototyping and testing is secure and fun – can be achieved once a shared language and shared objectives are …well…shared!

It is not about Design Thinking. It is about Innovation, when it applies, and when it matters. If not anything else, the process itself build Autonomy, Purpose and Mastery, and brings about those much needed trait that is missing in workforces today – loyalty and commitment.

Innovation is about seeing what’s around the corner before anyone else does.