Turn heads with your success rates on developing collaborative new propositions
Use 'design thinking' facilitation
Tired of serial meetings just to get one new proposition? Then it’s time to see what all the fuss is about with design thinking. It’s a process for centering human factors in the design of innovative products, services and projects. Designers empathise with humans—their foibles, strengths and surprises—which often drive a design’s success or failure.
Design thinking provides a great way to structure and sequence a facilitated session. It makes the participants into designers. (Good results don’t require you to explain design thinking). Below I first describe design thinking in more detail then show how I apply design thinking to facilitation.
Design thinking starts with real people in mind, because no matter how great your ecological lamp is, no eco-benefits result if people won’t use that lamp. But other criteria, like sustainability or economics, aren’t ignored. In fact, design thinking usually features cross-discipline collaboration, to bring together stakeholders who might not otherwise work a design challenge together in real time.
From the outside, design thinking might seem mysterious, but it’s actually a clear, well established processes with proven techniques. You might have seen the ‘double diamond’ representation of design thinking, paired with the steps: discover, define, develop, deliver:
Four stages
The Discover phase is about understanding the problem, and it’s human core, in all dimensions. There are lots of ways to do that, such as observing or interviewing people (including ‘extreme users’), or running experiments. Designers call this ‘learning about the problem space.’ The end point of this first diamond is the Define phase where designers translate a problem into a design challenge or question.
Designers are famous for a particular question format, ‘How might we…?’ so much so that it’s often abbreviated to HMW. The HMW question should be specific and inspiring, and focused on an outcome. For example, imagine this problem: office workers find it difficult to make healthy choices at lunch time, which leads to low energy and dissatisfaction.
The HMW could be: HMW improve healthy eating at the office to support people’s energy and improve their satisfaction. This kind of question opens up a lot of creative avenues. In contrast, we could have researched the problem further and zeroed in on the benefits of making your own lunches. Then we might have had, ‘HMW help people prepare their own lunches.’ (See another HMW example in my other article)
Ideation, or ‘coming up with ideas’
In the Develop phase, which starts the second diamond, designers come up with ideas to solve the design challenge. While ‘brainstorming’ is one common technique, there are many other structured techniques that prompt thinking outside the box. For example you can ask, ‘how could we make the situation worse?’ and then reverse-out some good ideas. Or you can ‘force’ connections between your challenge and items in a collection of random objects (bulldozer, sink, tree, etc). You can ask about scale and time frame – what if we had to solve this in a week for $100, or in a year for $5 Million?
Once there are a number of possible solutions, designers pick the most promising to test, usually by prototyping, which is an important part of the last step, deliver. (see some thoughts on dot voting as a way to pick ideas). Prototypes can be ‘low fidelity’, for example made of paper simulations to test with users, to understand how people will interact with the design, whether it is a product, service or system.
Facilitation and design thinking
To apply design thinking to facilitation, I like to translate the double diamond into the four ‘C’s: collect, choose, create, commit. There are a lot exercises available for each of these stages.
You start by collecting ideas about the session’s challenge area for the day. For example, the broad topic might be ‘improving our well being at work.’ But that could involve meeting rooms, nutrition at the office, social events, and a number of other topics ( it’s the Discover phase). Then participants choose one (or several) avenues to pursue in the rest of the session—the Define phase. In the example above, the group chose to explore ‘improving healthy eating at the office.’ Next you create possible solutions through ideation (Develop phase) and then commit to the most promising ones, often by prototyping how you could trial the ideas (in a Deliver phase).
Critiques of design thinking
A common critique of design thinking is that whatever out-of-the-box, cutting edge ideas emerge from your design thinking session, there is often a challenge to successfully implement them. Perhaps they’re too naïve or novel. I liken this to the problem of transforming the energy system to all-electric. Yes, we can generate a lot more electricity right now (e.g. generate ideas), but we don’t have the electric grid and transmission system in place (the implementation system) to handle the increased load.
Design thinking has also been accused of being exclusive, or of becoming a ‘tick box’ process without the depth and genuine understanding of the ‘problem space’ needed for success. Some call this ‘innovation theatre.’
What’s good about design thinking? People like it because it works! You can follow specific steps that are likely to generate innovative ideas. It helps you see problems in a new light and can be transformative. It can also help people see ways to tell stories that support change. These dimensions of design thinking can support team-building.
A few considerations can help make the best of the design thinking approach. First, have a clear view of scope for implementing new ideas. You may want to end the facilitated session having created or prototyped an experiment that you can use to try out the new idea(s) for a set period of time, say 4 months. After that taster of how a certain change may feel, new information and adjustments will surface. A key part of the work begins when the ideas go out into real world implementation.
What’s your experience of design thinking? Have you tried it in facilitating your innovation sessions? If not, based on this description, would you try it?
