Design Thinking: Not Just For Design
My thought process on business, life, and everything in between has always operated in more or less the same way. A detailed, analytical thought process that informs my decision making. On occasion, I will go with my gut, make a quick spur of the moment decision, but in most cases I am thinking through facts, gathering information, planning things out, trying to make the wise, rational decision. While this approach can yield some good results overall, it is a one sided approach that is not the optimal one always.
“Design thinking” to me has always felt like just some buzz words that I never really understood. So when I was speaking to one of my mentors on advice of other skills or concepts to explore further, he had mentioned design thinking. That prompted me to enroll a 4-week design thinking course online. Below are my key takeaways from this course that I will look to apply to my daily life.
Great design occurs at the intersection of constraint, contingency, and possibility.
Design focuses on iterating your way to a solution and reality is constructed by people living it, it is not fixed in the design world.
Design separates itself from business in four critical ways:
- As opposed to the business way of thinking, design is all about action. Business too often gets stuck at the talking stage.
The academics who study these things estimate that only somewhere between 10 percent and 60 percent of the promised returns of new strategies are actually delivered.
2. While managers are showing spreadsheets — the ultimate abstraction — designers are telling stories. Design teaches us how to make things feel real, and most business rhetoric today remains largely irrelevant to the people who are supposed to make things happen.
3. Design is tailored to dealing with uncertainty, and business’s obsession with analysis is best suited for a stable and predictable world.
4. Design understands that products and services are bought by human beings, not target markets segmented into demographic categories.
The key steps to designing for growth stem from asking 4 key questions that define stages of the process.
- What is?
- What if?
- What wows?
- What works?
- Visualization: using imagery to envision possibilities and bring them to life
2. Journey Mapping: assessing the existing experience through the customer’s eyes
3. Value Chain Analysis: assessing the current value chain that supports the customer’s journey
4. Mind Mapping: generating insights from exploration activities and using those to create design criteria
5. Brainstorming: generating new possibilities and new alternative business models
6. Concept Development: assembling innovative elements into a coherent alternative solution that can be explored and evaluated
7. Assumption Testing: isolating and testing the key assumptions that will drive the success or failure of a concept
8. Rapid Prototyping: expressing a new concept in a tangible form for exploration, testing, and refinement
9. Customer Co-Creation: enrolling customers to participate in creating the solution that best meets their needs
10. Learning Launch: creating an affordable experiment that lets customers experience the new solution over an extended period of time, to test key assumptions with market data
Think differently, think like a designer, even when you aren’t designing.
