Driving Alignment Through Design Thinking

The Problem

Highly ambiguous cross functional projects are challenging. There are many type 1 decisions (i.e., difficult to reverse) that will have broad long-term implications for the people in the organization that will have to live with these decisions. Every decision has trade-offs and deciding on the right set of trade-offs requires a high degree of alignment. Working to drive alignment early in the process will build trust and pay dividends later.

In a previous post I touched on one aspect of Design Thinking. In this post, I’d like to go a little deeper on Design Thinking and highlight the aspects that I’ve found most useful in practice.

Driving Alignment

Over the past year I have leveraged Design Thinking to successfully drive alignment on several occasions. In particular, for projects that are cross-functional and highly ambiguous. Design Thinking is one of the most valuable tools you can have in your arsenal as an engineering leader. How many meetings have you been to, or proposals have you read, where you think to yourself:

• “Why is this the proposed solution?”
• “What is the actual problem we’re trying to solve and how do we know this solution will solve it?”
• “What are we optimizing for?”
• “How come my needs weren’t taken into consideration?”
• “What other solutions were considered?

As with any process, you should pick and choose the aspects of it that you find most beneficial and tailor it to your needs. In terms of Design Thinking, I’ve found 3 steps to be particularly useful in terms of driving alignment:

Step 1 — Empathy Mapping

The main goal of empathy mapping is to gain a deep understanding of the stakeholder’s experiences, needs, and motivations. Empathy mapping focuses on four areas: what the users say, do, think, and feel. Some flavors of empathy mapping also include two additional areas: pains and gains.

Through this process, you gather qualitative insights about your stakeholders and identify their pain points. The exercise typically involves creating user personas for the different stakeholders and brainstorming ideas across all the aforementioned areas. The user personas are incredibly helpful in terms of putting yourself in the shoes of your various stakeholders and trying to experience things through their lens.

At the end of the brainstorming phase of the exercise, there is an affinity mapping process where ideas are clustered together. This helps identify trends and common themes. The next, and final, phase is to create “how might we” questions and prioritize them. For example, if a stakeholder is feeling frustrated by how long it takes to complete a certain workflow, a “how might we” question might be: “how might we make the workflow more seamless and efficient?” The “how might we” questions become one of the inputs to step 2, the Double Diamond exercise.

Credit: https://medium.com/@davegray/updated-empathy-map-canvas-46df22df3c8a

Step 2 — The Double Diamond

The goal of the Double Diamond exercise is to diverge and converge, first on opportunities, then on solutions.

Most double-diamond resources refer to the Opportunities Space as the “Problem Space”, however, my thinking is, if you’re going to take the time to have an exercise like this with a cross functional group of stakeholders, you may as well capture a broader set of ideas than just the problems they are currently facing. This is why the output of the empathy mapping exercise is just one of the inputs to the Double Diamond.

For each of the divergent phases, the goal is to generate ideas. For each of the convergent phases, the goal is to cluster similar ideas and rank the ideas. The output of the “Opportunities Space” exploration is a statement that the entire group aligns on. The output of the “Solution Space” exploration is a list of prioritized high level solutions that are likely to solve the challenges/opportunities captured in the statement.

Step 3 — Evaluation

The final step in the process involves aligning on what to optimize for and categorizing the solutions in terms of their difficulty and impact.

Categorizing the proposed solutions will provide insight into how the ideas should be prioritized.

This 3 step process is incredibly beneficial for driving alignment for cross-functional projects that are highly ambiguous. Initially it will feel slow, especially for those that have high confidence that they understand the current challenges and feel the solution is straightforward. However, it is imperative to create alignment, even if the ultimate outcome matches the most proposed solutions at the beginning of the process. The risk of not seeking broad alignment is larger than you think and it will take months, and oftentimes years, for the true cost of “moving fast” to be realized.

Design Thinking in Practice

I typically follow a process similar to what’s described below in terms of putting this process into practice. I use a mixture of FigJam and sticky notes depending on whether or not the session is virtual or physical.

1. Empathy Mapping — Typically a 60–90 minute session will suffice, depending on the number of user personas you’d like to explore:
   - Intro — 5 mins
   - Persona 1 brainstorm — 10–15 mins
   - Persona 2 brainstorm — 10–15 mins
   - Persona 3 brainstorm — 10–15 mins
   - Affinity mapping/idea clustering — 10 mins
   - “How might we questions” — 15–20 mins
2. Double Diamond — Opportunity Phase — Typically a 60 minute session will suffice
   - Review — Quick review of Empathy Mapping exercise artifacts — 5–10 mins
   - Opportunity exploration brainstorm — 15 mins
   - Affinity mapping/idea clustering — 15 mins
   - Define “opportunity statement” — 20 mins
3. Double Diamond — Solution Phase — Typically a 60 minute session will suffice
   - Review opportunity statement — 5 mins
   - Solution exploration brainstorm — 15 mins
   - Affinity mapping/idea clustering — 15 mins
   - Evaluation — 15 mins

Tips:

• Be flexible — The exercise might move quickly or take longer than expected
• Progress over perfection — Don’t worry about collecting every idea. The focus is alignment. There is still plenty of time to perfect the solution.
• Provide pre-reads — Give everyone a chance to prime their brains before they show up for these exercises. Make sure all relevant context has been shared ahead of time to get the most out of your time together.
• Set expectations — Some people will find this process overkill and time-consuming. Be humble and stay curious. Ask everyone to stay open-minded and emphasize that the process may not be perfect, but it’s an opportunity learn what works and what doesn’t.

Conclusion

Don’t underestimate the power of alignment. It will help you build trust and it will help all of the stakeholders feel a sense of empowerment, that they were involved and played a role in coming up with the solution. By including a cross functional set of stakeholders you will avoid an “us vs them” mentality, which can be toxic and lead to resentment, low morale, and impact employee engagement. It will also help you collect a diverse set of perspectives that will ultimately result in a better long term outcome for the business.

I look forward to hearing what other processes you all leverage to drive alignment, improve employee engagement, and create business impact in your organization.