Customer-centric design capabilities are becoming an integral part of any organisation’s problem-solving DNA. Design Thinking has been quickly gaining popularity as the people-focused problem-solving approach across many industries.
This post focuses on how large organisations can effectively develop sustainable and coherent Design Thinking capabilities while avoiding unnecessary frustration and teething problems within their teams.
What is Design Thinking?
The Interaction Design Foundation describes the approach as follows:
In essence, Design Thinking focuses on delivering value to the customers and users of a product. This may sound obvious but, upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that traditional business goals and technical constraints have been dominating the decision-making process.
Design Thinking invites us to better understand the problem (build empathy) from the perspective of the intended users before designing the solution. The result is a product that delivers value and solves the customers’ or users’ actual needs (as opposed to what we may have assumed these were).
Here’s a simple example: understand why your employees don’t log their working hours to a project before hiring someone to build a new software solution. The truth is that being in the role of product or company owners, we’re often too close to (and too tired of) a specific problem to investigate its roots. This can cause decision fatigue and lead us to implement a solution – not the needed solution.
A way to avoid the unnecessary investment of time and money is to gain a deeper, more objective understanding of the problem you need to solve. Design Thinking guides us into starting with Empathy (as opposed to the solution).
The diagram below outlines one of the popular frameworks used in the design process:
Value to your customers = sustainability for your business
As simple as the above equation may be, most organisations begin with profit as their first goal. It stands to reason that an organisation-wide move towards customer-centricity comes with many challenges – the larger the company, the more complex and slower the change.
Most organisations are concerned with implementing the approach to customer-facing products and services. In the process, they often tend to miss the significance of the people involved in the value chain architecture, like their employees.
Learning how to solve “wicked” problems is a “wicked” problem within itself
It’s typical for newly formed human-centric initiatives to start off under the pressure to deliver tangible and measurable value quickly and cost-effectively. In addition, they often end up working “against the stream” of people and processes that are deeply grounded in the organisation’s collective, and unique, dominant logic.
No single, quick course or workshop can solve these challenges in a sustainable way, after all, Human-Centred Design is not as well established as engineering or architecture.
Doing together is the solution
True to Design Thinking being an approach focused on “doing”, facing these challenges effectively requires practical experiences that works in your environment.
Sustainable learning comes from being able to do something yourself, fail, and do it again with guidance. Your team needs immersive, structured and collaborative opportunities to redesign actual products and services for your organisation.
Design for all humans involved, starting with your team
It’s likely that your team has varying levels of education and experience when it comes to the Human-Centred Design approach you’re implementing. It’s therefore most useful and practical to create a process that helps your entire team get on board theoretically and in practice.
Start by empathising with your team and ask questions like:
- What do they know about Human-Centred Design?
- What knowledge or support do they need?
- What capacity do they have to learn and apply new processes while maintaining their “business as usual” tasks?
- Which of your team members are stronger as problem-finders and which are great ideators?
By applying the process, with the right support, to a real problem in your organisation, your team will consistently increase their capacity and confidence. With adequate planning, preparation and clear constraints, they should be able to complete a design challenge within 2 to 4 weeks.
It’s about sustainable growth
In conclusion, Design Thinking is about finding a sustainable balance between increasing your company’s internal capacity for successful design while minimising its reliance on external consultants.
Get in touch if you need guidance and direction in developing your company or academic institution’s internal capacity.