The reality of the Double Diamond for project leads
The Double Diamond has now been out there since 2005. Created by the British Design Council it visualises the thinking process when tackling any design problem. Increasingly it is being used in the delivery of digital projects. I have written this article to help those recently introduced to the Double Diamond make use of it in their projects and hopefully make better solutions.
I do not want to go into the details of what the double diamond is and I assume here you understand the nature of the convergent/divergent thinking and design the right thing/design it right. The Design Council has an explanation here and I am sure there are many others. A word of caution though, there are also many articles misusing the Double Diamond. Don’t get tripped up by these.
Particularly as a project leader it is tempting to turn the Double Diamond into a delivery process. Moving from one phase to the other systematically and linearly. The Double Diamond is a thought process, not a project process and care must be taken to treat it well. Force it into a project process and you will find it restrictive and misleading, causing more problems than it solves.
Let’s take a look at it from a micro perspective first. Any design problem can be tackled using the double diamond as a framework. It may be a huge issue requiring a dedicated project, something to workshop with a team or tackling a new feature. There is no scale to the Double Diamond and so it can be used wherever it is useful.
Our aim is to get to the solution, so we need to move through the Double Diamond from left to right. Almost certainly this will not be a smooth journey though, the Double Diamond is not a liner process. Like a turbulent river you are likely to get into a whirlpool, forcing you to exert a lot of effort to move yourself downstream. Perhaps you are struggling to fully understand a complex problem or the design of the solution is difficult to nail down. This keeps you from progressing but spending time on the important bits early in the Double Diamond will make the solution output so much better.
Sticking with the river analogy you may find yourself heading back upstream. Sometimes it is only by progressing your thoughts and exploring solutions that you identify gaps in knowledge and new opportunities. Never be afraid to go back, do more research, validate with users or do more design exploration. It is essential you do so or risk the wrong solution.
Imagine yourself in a canoe heading down this river. Sometimes you are in clear water, quickly and smoothly heading downstream. Sometimes the rapids hold your progress back, making every meter hard and slow. So too the journey through the Double Diamond. As you seek to solve your problem you will find yourself going slow and working hard or sailing smoothly through. The Double Diamond has equal halves but this does not mean they have equal weight, effort or duration. Some challenges are easy to solve and you speed through the first diamond only to find delivery is significantly harder. Perhaps research and validation of your idea is slow and hard fought but your solution is easy. No matter, place the effort where it is needed and move on as soon as you can.
Let’s zoom out to a macro view, a project view. Here things get a little complicated. It is tempting to look at your project and stick a pin on the double diamond and say ‘this is where we are’. But this is to make the process into a project plan and not using it correctly. A project is made up of a host of challenges that need to be solved. Each of these problems will feature somewhere on the Double Diamond and so we cannot pinpoint a project like this. Embrace the ambiguity at this level. The project will never be neat enough to be in a single phase at any one time. I have found that projects span an area of the double diamond. A cloud of points, each representing a design challenge the project faces. Perhaps crossing diamonds and certainly crossing phases. The Double Diamond is valuable as a frame of reference at a project level and particularly for two key things you need to be able to do as a project lead.
You need to be able to know when the right time is to move from a research mode to a delivery project mode. In Agile language this would be moving from Discovery/Sprint 0 to Sprint 1. Although there will not be a single best point to do this the Double Diamond can act as a tool. It can help you decide when the balance has moved to the point where delivery should begin in earnest.
The simplicity of the Double Diamond makes it a fantastic tool for communication. Communicating progress of your project to an external audience is significantly easier when sharing the Double Diamond. In 2 minutes anyone can grasp the logic behind the Double Diamond. Demystifying the creative process so anyone can understand and engage.
One final word on the Double Diamond. It is a design tool and as such is applicable across a variety of problem domains. I have largely been writing from the context of digital products in this article. It is not a digital tool though, in fact the digital industry as we know it was very young in 2005. At the macro level it’s applicability beyond a narrow sector helps us get to the right solution. To illustrate let me tell you a story.
I recently worked for a B2B organisation rich in their customers data. They saw the value in this and their initial instinct, being a software company, was to build an analytics platform. However, when they started talking to their customers not only did they not want it but they asked for the data for free. It was now costing them money. At this stage we took them back from being delivery focused, to ‘design the right thing’. We explored the problem and unearthed a new hypothesis, that the solution was not an expensive bit of software but a service. Industry knowledge combined with data provided an asset far more valuable than the data alone.
The result? Doors re-opened and a new revenue stream that was easy to implement and quick to market as well as being highly popular and profitable. This would have been almost impossible if we had been fixed on a software solution.
I hope this article has given you some food for thought on the use of the Double Diamond. It has been an invaluable tool in my progress as a project lead and can be for you to. Use it as intended, as a thought process, and you will reap the benefits. Shackle it with rigidity and you will only hinder your projects.
