What are the critical skills our people need today in order to future-proof our organizations? How do we make sure that we create a culture of innovation to keep up with the pace of change? Well, let me introduce you to a term that has changed my life … Design Thinking.
Design thinking is a process for solving problems that prioritizes the customer’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.
No one wants to build things customers don’t want, and this is how you avoid that.
Companies who have embedded this approach to problem solving have seen incredible ROI vs their peers:
What does this look like in practice?
Fresh out of university and a post-diploma in HR, I was hired to lead Learning and Development at a high-tech company in Burnaby, B.C.
My mission was to create a Corporate University—a virtual centre for all learning and development activities accessible to employees worldwide.
Despite being defined and popularized in the 1950s and 60s, design thinking wasn't covered at university, nor mentioned in my circles. In fact, I thought the word design was reserved for “interior designers”, “product designers” or “artists”. I didn’t fully embrace the fact that this project I was given was a major design opportunity.
We followed the “typical corporate approach” which was to solve the problem right away. But, now I can reflect on what I could have done differently – knowing what Design Thinking is. I hope that as you read about my experience, it might help you take a step back and start recognizing the many design opportunities that you have that can make your customer’s life better.
Some helpful terms before diving in:
· Design Thinking: a customer-centred approach to creative problem solving.
· Customer / End-user: The person or group for whom you are designing a product or service. This could be internal or external users.
Examples:
· Empathy Map: a quick, digestible way to illustrate user attitudes and behaviours
· Customer Journey Map: a visual storyline of how the customer experiences your product or service
· Prototyping: A tangible form of your idea used to think through the user experience and gain feedback from people for further iterations to ensure desirability
Fun fact: Dyson made 5,127 prototypes to build the 1st bagless vacuum cleaner! But don’t let that discourage you, sometimes it just takes 2-3 iterations depending on the idea!
Design Thinking is a 3-step process: Inspiration --> Ideation --> Implementation. One of the key things in design thinking is that we are always looking to solve “the right problems” – and sometimes this means spending a bit more time getting inspired and understanding our customers before “jumping to a solution” (we’ve all been there, right?!).
While building the Corporate University, we went through “the typical process” of solving a problem. Knowing what I know now, I can reflect on where we could have used design thinking to deliver something that would ultimately be more valuable for the end-users, and the company in general.
The first phase of design thinking is called the Inspiration phase. It’s here where we gain inspiration (literally) from the potential end-users of our design.
Although I did not know about design thinking, my Manager and I discussed the importance of discovering the development goals of our customers (the engineers) of our product (the Corporate University).
So the first step I took in this project, was to get inspired! I wanted to understand our engineers' learning and development goals, as well as their frustrations in getting to those goals.
Over countless coffee chats with several engineers, I learned all about their development goals and challenges. I developed a lot of empathy by actively listening to their concerns and hearing their passion for up-skilling so that they could help the company and our customers. This allowed us to learn about their key pain points, such as:
· a lack of clarity about where to find company training information
· a time-consuming approval process for taking training
· confusion about which vendors offer the most effective sessions and are approved by the company
This made me hugely motivated to design something that would make their lives better – knowing the positive domino effect this would have.
If I focused on the desirability of the Corporate University to our end-users, then ultimately, these engineers would be able to design better products for the company's customers and that would lead to greater profitability for the company.
Reflection
I have seen many companies spend millions of dollars designing products that were not desired by their customers which backfired and destroyed the bottom line (i.e. Blockbuster, Kodak and Blackberry).
Is there an opportunity for you/your company to think more about the desirability of your products and services rather than solely focusing on profitability? Try using a Customer Journey Map and / or an Empathy map to identify the key challenges your customers face so that you can focus your design on something that will make a key difference.
The next step of the project was to use the information we gained during the Inspiration phase to start the second design phase called “Ideation”.
This is where you and a diverse group of thinkers come together and creatively collaborate to come up with a bunch of ideas that address the main “pain points” (frustrations) and opportunities that your customers have.
Since we did not have formal knowledge of design thinking, we did not intentionally use any design methods and simply came up with one good idea and went for it. Upon reflection, I can see how much more creative we could have been, which would had led to greater success in addressing the main challenges that our engineers faced.
Reflection:
Where might there be an opportunity for you to brainstorm with others so that you can be even more creative in your work? It’s amazing what you all might come up with in a short amount of time. Resist the urge to converge on an idea too quickly and stay divergent longer. This will lead to much greater ideas!
The third step of the design phase is called “Implementation”and this is where you build a prototype of your idea in order to test it out with your end-users and gain feedback in order to iterate on the idea and make it even more desirable.
Essentially, you are building a prototype to think through the customer experience and often find improvements to the design - starting with a low-fidelity (cheap and cheerful) prototype like a sketch on the back of a napkin!
On the Corporate University project, we skipped that. We were more focused on getting the product approved and meeting our personal objectives. Deadlines had been set and the pressure was on to just get it going. Sound familiar?
Reflection
One of the greatest innovation killers is not creating space for testing. Did you know that the famous P&G product was first designed on the back of a napkin and tested with a number of people who wanted a clean floor? By following the design thinking process, this company is earning an average of $500 million in sales annually.
Is there an opportunity for you to test out your ideas to get real feedback that could make your ideas even better for your customers?
We built the Corporate University, and it achieved 100% participation by the global workforce. I’ve been bragging about that for a long time and we were all proud of this achievement.
However, if I’m being totally honest, it could have been much better. After some time, we found out that several business areas were continuing to struggle with meeting their development needs. They continued to organize their own training with a variety of vendors rather than using the Corporate University. Our goal to have everyone use the system was achieved by making certain courses mandatory to maintain our ISO certification, but it did not resolve the key pain points of our end-users and it was not yet the competitive advantage for our company that it could have been.
Our team did a great job of the inspiration phase, but where we failed was in the ideation and implementation phase of the design.
We would have benefitted greatly by more intentionally using design thinking and learning from experts how it is done.
Oh you know, just the most successful and recognizable brands like Google, Airbnb, Nike, IBM, PepsiCo, Bell, Nike and so many others. At Kirke Leadership (KLI) we use design thinking every day to design learning experiences that are extremely valuable to our global clients.
I’ve come a long way in my own application of design thinking in the last 20+ years working as a leader in high tech and financial services, and consulting to 40-50 companies who compete to be first to market with the most innovative products and services. I have built a team of design thinking experts who are also passionate about helping organizations learn the tools and mindset to drive greater innovation. I hope that by sharing how I stumbled into it, that it might help you embrace design thinking and how it can make the difference in your organization.
We at Kirke Leadership deliver workshops, programs, and coaching in English and French for our clients so that you can create the conditions for innovation and creativity to flourish in your organization.
Like having a quick coffee or cabernet with the best and brightest in the leadership space.
