What is Design Thinking and How to Use it
Having the right environment and building a positive mindset is key, but to successfully deliver on your initiatives you need a replicable structure. Many companies embrace methodologies such as agile, scrum, or design thinking to structure their organization’s innovation process.
Although rooted in the field of design, you can apply design thinking to keep an innovation project organized. Design thinking is a broad topic and here we provide an overview of the key principles behind it. There are many tools, videos, and training programs, which can help you master this.
Design thinking is used to solve end-user problems by applying empathetic thinking to their needs, whilst framing this in the context of technological and economic viability. It begins with gathering information that can help you frame your question and look across the different stakeholders for validation.
Next, you can invest time in defining the problem. During the third stage, you generate ideas in search of creative solutions. One of the most common methods used at this stage is brainstorming.
Generating Ideas Through Brainstorming
Research shows that brainstorming in groups is not necessarily the best way to come up with many ideas (which is the start of any great idea). It is best to have a combination of individual and group brainstorming.
Brainwriting is a combination of individual and group brainstorming. It gives room for all team members to individually contribute their ideas before discussing them in the group.
You can compare this technique with the so-called brain dump: dumping those first spontaneous ideas.
Individually, write down all the ideas you have. This is a brain dump.
When you think you are done, encourage yourself to write down some more.
When it becomes hard to think of yet another idea, forcing your brain to come up with more, can help bring out unexpected creative ideas.
After 2 or 3 minutes of coming up with ideas individually, everybody passes all the written sticky notes clockwise to their neighbor.
Read through the sticky notes you just received and use them as fresh inspiration for another round of brainwriting. You can repeat this as many times as you have team members.
Based on your brainstorming, during Prototyping, you produce various minimum viable products (MVPs), which you can present to your leadership team. An MVP lets you collect the maximum amount of informed learning with the minimum amount of effort. In other words, it provides early adopters with sufficient information so they can give constructive feedback to improve the final innovation.
An MVP will help you secure funding and backing from your peers and senior leadership. As you progress and test your ideas, take the time to understand whether you are achieving your goals and delivering value as you set out your innovation and business strategy. It’s important to proceed systematically when experimenting and delivering your ideas.
Although seemingly a sequential approach, design thinking is a flexible method. You can carry out one or more stages at the same time or choose to return and begin the process again. This method embraces the fact that there is no single path to innovation, it’s a way of challenging common assumptions and finding solutions to identified problems.
So you’re interested in design thinking... consider these key questions:
What do I need to learn?
Do I have a clearly defined problem?
How might I frame this problem to generate business value?
What is the persona of the primary user?
What is the current customer experience?
Do I have the necessary skills and tools to achieve buy-in?
Are other players in the market dealing with the same problem?
Who are the key stakeholders?
When should different stakeholders join the program?
Is design thinking the right process for the organization?