Design Thinking for Everyday Life
The Shenomics Mentoring Circle for June gave us a flavor of how we can apply design thinking to our everyday lives – at work and outside work. Our guest expert Shalu Manan, an HR Transformation and Talent Development Strategist, took us through an overview of the Design Thinking methodology and its application. She has spent ~19 years with GE & Genpact in key leadership positions across Operations, Quality, and Human Resources. She specializes in driving enterprise-wide learning & development initiatives for building strategic organizational capabilities. Programs designed and implemented by her have won multiple Brandon Hall Group Human Capital Management excellence awards and Excellence in Education award by LOMA.
Calling it a connected skill, Shalu opened the session by explaining that design thinking requires us to interact and work together. To get the us started, she ensured that all of us switched our cameras on, and actively engaged as a group. This gave us a feel of what it means to be wearing the design thinking hat, as we began collaborating and exchanging ideas right from the beginning of the session. Areas of focus for our session were :
- What is design thinking?
- How do we frame problems better?
- How do we apply it to our next challenge in life?
What is design thinking?
Taking us through contrasting scenarios or different ways in which providers can use services as platforms to create experiences for consumers, Shalu explained how experiences have become distinct economic offerings with the way our economy has evolved. These engaging experiences create unique value for the consumer and act as a differentiator for the provider. Needless to say, they also command fees that may be orders of magnitude higher than the original, pure vanilla product or service.
Staging these memorable experiences, creating value for consumers and creating a distinct identity in the market requires providers to get innovative. But innovation doesn’t come easy. Lack of a proper toolkit and skillset often come in the way of innovating effectively. Very often, the challenges that come in the way of innovating, take away from the focus on the consumer and their needs. The key to innovating effectively lies in keeping human needs at the core while designing experiences, to create value for the consumer as well as the provider. This concept of human-centered design lies at the heart of Design Thinking. Luma Systems of Innovation describes Design Thinking as the discipline of developing solutions in the service of people. This discipline works for anyone who is solving problems or aiming to move from the current state to the desired state.
There are 5 stages to solving problems using Design Thinking :
– Framing the problem
– Empathy walk
– Drawing insights
– Generating ideas
– Developing solutions
Framing the problem
We did a deep dive into this first and most crucial stage of problem-solving, because it lays the foundation on which the entire process rests.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
– Albert Einstein
Design Thinking is a lot about problem finding rather than solely problem-solving. The way we understand the problem, the context and its impact on those who matter, has a significant bearing on the value of the outcomes we create. Shalu shared two powerful tools that help frame problems effectively, Abstraction Laddering and Flagging Votes.
Abstraction Laddering is a technique that helps us solve problems at various levels of focus. We can begin by placing the problem in the middle of a theoretical ladder – above the problem sits the question of why (a more generalized and abstract view of the problem) and below sits the question of how (a more clear and concrete view of what needs to be done).
During our session we used this technique to look at a common problem of “How to lose weight?”. It was interesting to see the wide variety of responses to “why” this problem is worth solving. Answers ranged from looking good, to creating a positive mindset. Likewise when we asked the question “How, can we lose weight?”, we received a variety of responses ranging from eating healthy, to sleeping on time. In order to create various frames of the problem, we then converted these responses into questions like “How do I look good?”, “How do I create a positive mindset?”, “How do I eat healthy?” or “How do I sleep on time?”
Flag your vote is a technique to help collaborators reveal their preferred choice. Simply put, this technique allows collaborators to vote for the frame that their believe they should be solving for. As a group, we voted for the frame we should we solving for when looking at how to lose weight, and the frame that got maximum votes was “How do I stay heathy?”
So while using these powerful techniques to frame a problem of losing weight, we first diverged, inviting various inputs from the group to look at “why” and “how” using Abstraction Laddering and then converged to solve the problem at an elevated level – “How do I live a healthy life?”.
3 key principles of design thinking
- Diverge before you converge – Collect enough information before you draw conclusions.
- Don’t let best come in the way of good…Fail Fast – Focus on making progress and perfecting the solution over a period of time. Rather than making one big leap. Take small iterative steps.
- Experience matters – Keeping experience of those who matter the most, as the focus of the process helps create a high-value solution.
Skills needed to be a good design thinker
- Being curious – Ask powerful questions
- Being visual – Be visual and try to draw, see and imagine.
- Being imaginative – Allow yourself to think in terms of possibilities
- Bring iterative – Keep learning through the cycle of building, observing, and refining.
- Being collaborative – Work with a common and shared vision that is inclusive towards diverse perspectives with space for respect, humility, and combined intelligence of a group.
- Being empathetic – Keeping judgments and assumptions aside and connecting with emotions and experiences of people around us. This enables us to understand which solutions would work better for those who we intend to serve.
Resources:
Mural: a Visual workspace for visual collaboration
Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley and David Kelley
Design Thinking courses on Coursera and Design Thinking courses at Darden online by Prof. Jeanne Liedtka.
Thank you, Shalu, for introducing us to the concept of Design Thinking through this interactive and fun session at our Mentoring Circle. It was truly an insightful session that piqued our interest to explore the subject further.
