Scaling design thinking playbook
Introduction
The first draft of this playbook was created based on the insights from 12 in-depth interviews with design thinking practitioners, facilitators and experts who are currently based in California, Ohio, Brazil, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Although insights from these interviews provide a starting point for learning how to scale design thinking, it is up to the individuals reading this playbook to try these activities, see what works and report back so we can all empower each other to become better at scaling design thinking.
This version of the playbook is adjusted to fit in a Medium article. Feel free to reach out for the more interactive and detailed version of the playbook which is meant to be printed and distributed to design thinking facilitators in your organisation.
What is design thinking?
To briefly recap what design thinking is, let’s take a look at Ideo’s definition of the term: “Design thinking is a process for creative problem-solving. It encourages organizations to focus on the people they’re creating for, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes.
In employing design thinking, you’re pulling together what’s desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows those who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges. […] It’s about embracing simple mindset shifts and tackling problems from a new direction.”
Values and mindsets of design thinking
Overview of the approach explained in this book
The scope of this approach is based on the idea that you already have buy-in from the business to start working with a pilot team using design thinking.
Depending on your context, activities can be added or removed.
1. Discover
When introducing this new way of working, it is advised to begin with a discovery phase. The goals of this phase are to assess the design maturity and to establish a deeper understanding of the pains and gains of the business.
1.1 Assessing the design maturity
Depending on the design maturity of the pilot team, you can define the right challenge to start with. In the next chapter, we will focus more on choosing potential challenges to start with.
3 basic levels of design maturity
1. No knowledge about design thinking
2. Familiar with the concept
3. Already using design thinking
1.2 Understand the pains and gains of the business
Next, gain a deeper understanding in the pains and gains of the business by interviewing different stakeholders.
A starting point for questions to ask stakeholders:
“What does the company want to achieve?”
“What do they want to improve?”
“What are the problems?”
Insights from these interviews can later be used to tackle design challenges which are more relevant to pains of the business and help in choosing the design metrics that align with the goals of the organisation.
First challenge you can try in your organisation:
Interview one or more stakeholders and see what you can discover about their pains and gains.
Was this useful? Did you discover anything you could use to better align your design metrics with?
1.3 Picking the right challenge to start with
If the insights of the discovery phase indicate towards low design maturity, it would be advised to start with a fictitious and easy challenge to familiarise the team familiar with this new way of working.
Alternatively, when starting with a real challenge, ensure you pick something with a high chance of becoming a success story early. In the chapter ‘creating a movement’ we will look further at why these success stories are needed.
tip: To convince the pilot team of this new way of working, try using these methods which Aj&Smart describes in two of their videos. Although these videos are focussed on design sprints, a similar approach could be used for your first challenge using design thinking:
Watch at: 1:56
Second challenge:
Prioritise potential challenges to tackle using design thinking based on the value they could provide for the business and their potential of becoming a success in the least amount of time.
2. Start of first challenge
2.1 Set the right expectations
The business
Check with the organisation to ensure there is enough capacity to start developing potential solutions generated through this new way of working.
The pilot team
Set expectations with the pilot team about the process and what the results might be. Ask them to trust the process and trust you.
2.2 Create a shared vision
Create a shared vision related to what the pilot team wants to achieve with this new way of working.
“A good vision statement is aspirational. A good design vision statement inspires and motivates the Design team — it gets them excited about what they do as designers, why they do it and how it serves the overall organization.” (Sean)
Here is an example of a canvas which could be used to facilitate a product vision workshop.
More information on how to use this canvas:
https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/the-product-vision-board/
2.3 Define metrics for success
Organisations must see the value of this new way of working. Therefore, it is advised to define how success will be measured. Different projects and challenges require different metrics, so make sure these metrics are defined based on the context of your projects and challenges.
Examples
Long term
Improve customer satisfaction by 10%
Reducing the time needed to align the team
Prove the effectiveness of a prototype
Find a problem everyone is passionate about
Find the right problem to solve
Short term
Third challenge
Try introducing one short term and one long term metric for success in your design thinking project.
Iteratively do, test and learn
In this phase, participants of the pilot project gain hands-on experience with design thinking. Experts in this field suggest that letting employees experience this new way of working (rather than being told about it) enables them to better see its value and improves buy-in.
“you can’t just tell a company about design thinking, it is experiential”
3.1 Hands-on experience with design thinking
Introduce the team to the design thinking values and propose different design thinking activities depending on the challenge the team is trying to solve.
Here are some websites containing design thinking activities:
toolbox.hyperisland.com/
www.designkit.org/methods
www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/toolkit
www.sessionlab.com/library
Tip: The key to this design-led transformation is getting people to empathise.
3.2 Creating a positive team experience
While facilitating these design thinking activities, make sure to give freedom to the group and create an environment where people are comfortable with these new values and mindsets. As a facilitator, it is advised to act as an example of the values you want other people to embody.
Here is some more inspiration on this topic:
Gamification elements
Although experts argue that design thinking activities are often perceived as ‘fun’ because of their contrasting feel compared to ‘day-to-day’ tasks of participants, we can attempt to further improve this positive experience by incorporating elements of gamification into these activities.
Design thinking room
Additionally, see if there is a possibility to create a dedicated design thinking room. Facilitate this change in environment, so people further start to feel that there is a new way of working.
As explained further in ‘Creating a movement’, people must see that something is happening and want to be part of it.
Tip: Design thinking spaces should not be near participants’ workspaces, which could remind them of time pressure, stress-related activities or otherwise repress creativity (Dam and Siang, 2018).
3.3 Ask for feedback, measure and learn
Consider the introduction of these different design thinking activities as small experiments, each having their individual measures for success. After each ‘experiment’, gather feedback from the participants and check if the success metrics were met. The goal is to see what works so you can learn and adapt.
Use this feedback to effectively prototype a design thinking toolkit containing the activities that work best for your organisation. Later this toolkit will become the organisation’s design thinking playbook. In the next chapter, we will learn how to create a playbook.
Design thinking playbook
Based on the input of these experiments from the previous chapter, you can start creating a design thinking playbook. When doing this, it is important to involve employees, which improves engagement.
Steps to creating a playbook:
1. Run different experiments using design thinking activities
2. Based on feedback from these experiments, create a first draft of a playbook containing design thinking activities that specifically work for your organisation
3. Share the playbook within the organisation and ask people to scratch content and improve where possible
4. After a certain amount of time, gather all the playbooks
5. Make improvements in the playbook based on the notes people shared
6. Distribute a new version of the playbook
7. Repeat
Tip: If possible, the first draft of the playbook should be created with designers at the company and later refined by using it with the pilot team(s).
In the next chapter, the link between scaling design thinking and the creation of a playbook is explained.
Creating a movement
5.1 Making it visible that change is happening
It is important that people see that change is happening and want to become part of it. The design thinking playbook and room can both contribute to this goal. However, both these serve a secondary purpose as ‘artefacts’ of this movement. For example, it is not only about the content of the playbook. The playbook itself is an artefact of this movement that travels through the organisation; it is something which is on people’s desks and given to others. Primarily, however, it is a tangible representation of this new way of working that gets people talking about design thinking and creates a ‘buzz’ around the movement.
5.2 Success stories start spreading
When following the steps in ‘Iteratively do, test and learn’ together with your pilot project team, you set the measures for success, run experiments and evaluate the results. Through these experiments, it is important to create successes with the pilot team. Doing so results in the pilot team becoming enthusiastic about this new way of working and enables the creation (and spreading) of internal success stories.
The employees involved in the pilot project can then serve as ambassadors by organically spreading the word about these successes and getting the other employees interested in joining this new way of working.
Tip: Take the opportunity to further spread these success stories during existing company rituals like get-togethers, lunches, et cetera.
5.3 People get curious
The artefacts, success stories and enthusiasm of the pilot team can all result in people becoming curious and interested in joining this new way of working on their own free will. This is an essential enabler in the creation of this movement, which cannot be ‘pushed’ on people.
Sustaining this new way of working
6.1 Train the trainer
As mentioned in the previous chapter, it is essential for people in the organisation to express interest in this new way of working. Therefore, the next step in this transformation is establishing different design thinking training programmes and making them available for all interested employees. One such programme could be a ‘train the trainer’ programme where employees are trained to become design thinking trainers themselves. This approach empowers the organisation to drive the transformation from within and increases the rate of scaling for this new way of working.
Next steps
To further scale and sustain this new way of working, buy-in from top management is needed. Although a detailed explanation on how this support can be achieved is out of scope for this version of the playbook, such examples of how this could be done will be added in future iterations.
