Design Thinking and Intelligent Technologies

Adopting Design Thinking!

With Design thinking the goal should be to equip your employees with new problem-solving tools that will help the company evolve to “out of the box imagination thinking”.

The confidence to want to innovate by employees has been established as the common ground between many companies who have introduced the creative process of design thinking to their respective employees.

The hunger to innovate is further enhanced when these employees are given the chance to practice the creative process on as many real projects as possible.

Through the design thinking process it doesn’t matter how many steps you have in your process, whether it’s three steps or seven, there are still a couple of key values involved.

My introduction to the design thinking process was on a large software project where I was lucky enough to work with an expert of design thinking who provided the foundation of the five step process; starting with Empathy which flowed to define – next was ideate – then prototype, and test.

I’ll give you the quick introduction to each step;

So, empathy: is where you go out into the world with the eyes of an ethnographer and your goal is to spend time with people, understand their lives and what’s important to them. And what you uncover are insights about their needs and often latent needs that aren’t obvious upfront. Understanding users is how we make solutions that solve their problems.

Define: is where you take those needs and insights that you have uncovered in the empathy phase and you use that to reframe or define a problem that is actually worth working on. More times than not, what you come up with here is a new problem definition that is very different from the one that you started with.

Next is;

Ideate: where you take that problem that you have identified and you will want to generate as many unexpected options to solve that problem that you come up with. Some people use brainstorming, but there are many other ideation techniques. The goal is to come up with as many unexpected options as possible.

Then we have;

Prototyping: where you take some of those new-to-the-world ideas and you create very quick and dirty experiences or experiments that you can put back in the lives of people for whom you’re designing for, as you start to learn of what works and what doesn’t.

Then testing: is exactly that, where you take those low resolution, quick-and-dirty prototypes and by putting them back in the lives of the people who are impacted by your work, they get to see what their new life is like with your idea in it.

What’s so important to recognise is that the design process is not a formula or recipe for innovation that you just create and optimise. It’s more like a learning ladder to learn new behaviours. And because this is different to the way many of us have been taught to work most of us are used to getting a problem and just accepting the definition as-is, just putting our heads down and thinking our way to a solution and finding out at the end whether or not it works.

With the design thinking process what we start with, is not the problem definition, but rather the people – viewing the problem through the eyes of the user.

There can be an uncomfortable factor for many people at first because for a while it feels like you don’t know what you are working on. You need to be intentional about trying out new behaviours and only then after you see that working this way can get you to better outcomes then you start to learn to trust this process.

You iterate as many times as possible within the time you have for your project to really understand what the problem is and try to generate as many ideas as possible.

Every time you go around the block, you take a day or two or you take a week to do this, each time you do it you gain a few insights about needs, you then start to gain a sense of what the problem is, you have some ideas that you have tested, and now you come around and you do it again.

At this stage you gain more empathy for people, and have a better picture of what their needs are, you have more ideas for testing and when you’ve finished with your project you have confidence that when you are working on a need that is meaningful to people and conviction that the way you are solving it is going to work.

So, whatever it is for you, after you use this process, think about how it worked for you and adapt it as you go, and you know you have a good design thinking process if it’s a living process and you’re as creative about how you work as well as what you work on.

The design thinking process brings together diverse perspectives and unlocks creative potential.

So the beat goes on….

According to a 2003 report by the Danish Design Centre, increasing design activity such as design-related employee training boosted a company’s revenue on average by 40% more than other companies over a five-year period who had not implemented a design process. Convincing experienced managers of the value of design-led innovation is becoming a lot easier as we progress into more innovative IoT (Internet of Things) and help build support at all levels.

It is imperative for managers to steer their company into a problem-solving machine with clear vision and concrete details of the long-term goals before cascading them down to the rest of their teams. To nudge employees to use these creative skills, some companies reward them not only on what they achieved but also how they achieved it, based on “KPIs” such as clear thinking, inclusiveness, and imagination. When these traits become used more widely, the results are markedly outstanding.

The role of technology in the enterprise has been changing for some time now, moving away from its traditional place as a cost centre to occupy a new position as a profit driver, disciplines as diverse as psychology, cultural sociology, anthropology, and trend research, in addition to the more conventional design-related skills are employed.

The force behind this is the new capabilities and business models that intelligent technologies like blockchain, IoT, machine learning, and AI have to offer.

In a recent Forrester survey of more than 2,000 global business leaders, 40 percent cited adopting emerging technology as the top driver for changing business models. This new purpose necessitates a new approach — an adaption of how we’ve innovated with technology in the past — and design thinking has a role to play within this.

Achieving new growth through the use of intelligent technologies is not without its challenges.

First and foremost is the fact that they are not tightly connected to business processes in the way more established technologies are. While having so many possible problems intelligent technologies can solve opens the door to creative innovation which can be littered with proof of concepts and prototypes which may result in business impact at scale.

Design thinking has always played a pivotal role in the question of “Where do I begin?” By being laser-focused on uncovering the end user’s needs, it provides a narrower definition of the problem that needs to be solved. This begins with bringing together the different perspectives of the people involved. Marketers, accountants, developers, executives, etc. all bring unique viewpoints that sharpen the understanding of the problem and help to refine the solution.

While design thinking brings focus, we need more than this to break free of the POC trap. We must consider two additional perspectives to catapult a great idea into one that delivers business value at scale, namely;

Intelligent technologies and the digital platform:

Often intelligent technologies are approached in isolation, separate from the core business they are trying to affect. That said, true scale will only come from considering how you connect or embed these technologies into established systems.

For example, sport shoe giant Adidas has layered machine learning on top of supply chain systems to create “speed factories” that deliver personalized shoes. It reduces the time it takes Adidas to turn trends into shoes from a typical 18-month time frame down to days. This innovation is only made possible by combining the digital platform and intelligent technologies.

Three questions have been at the core of design thinking for some time, namely, is it desirable (are we solving the right customer problem?), is it practical (will the solution be workable using the assets and capability we have today?), and is it viable (will it deliver business value over time?). Modern challenges are too complex for any one person, methodology or industry.

Moreover, we also need to think about scalability right from the start remembering the importance the role of customer value and user stories play in the arena of scale.

As companies increasingly look to growth, and the application of intelligent technologies to enable this, adding the two vantage points, the blending of intelligent technologies and the digital platform, and further adding a design perspective focused on scale, will lead us to deliver the impact we all aspire to – innovation, profits, and streamlined processes.