Design thinking: a strategist’s interpretation
Ana wrote an article for the weekly Croatian print magazine Globus and asked Matt Cooper-Wright, designer at IDEO, and me some questions about design thinking.
She wanted to know how I use design thinking in my day to day job as a strategist.
You can read the article here if you speak Croatian. I’ve also published the original questions on this page.
Do you use the design thinking process in your daily job? If so, how does it help you to achieve the most creative, innovative strategy for brands? What do you find most useful within design thinking?
I do. In SapientNitro, design thinking is an important pillar of the discipline we call Experience Strategy. The Experience Strategy team is a diverse group of innovators who have strong ideas about how large organizations should navigate an ever-evolving landscape that is heavily influenced by technology and changing customers expectations. We think by making, which means that both happen in parallel. We introduce new ways of working and problem solving, both internally and with clients. Furthermore, we help companies to become radically obsessed by their customers. “We are the tenants of our customers’ customers”, as my team member Ray Silva would say.
What I find most useful about the design thinking process is that it doesn’t follow a straight line and that it empowers you, in certain projects, to move really fast between the different stages of “empathize”, “ideate” and “prototype”. In other projects, we might start ideating very soon when there is a lot known already. A third option would be that we might need to run a huge discovery phase in order to understand the nature of the problem and its critical challenges related to that nature. We as design thinkers have the power to run the process depending on the problem we’re trying to solve. It’s about having the freedom to do the right thing. Which ultimately should enable us to find the right strategy and creative executions that break boundaries.
Are the established companies you are working with familiar with design thinking and if so, why did they embrace it? Why did SapientNitro decide to embrace design thinking?
I think this question is more about education. It should really be about us as Experience Strategists educating our clients about what’s out there. One of my team members Richard Trovatten describes this well: “we need to get out of the building, explore what’s out there, come back, and tell people what we’ve seen.”
Everyone knows that SapientNitro’s roots are in technology. We have the capabilities to build great experiences, which is a differentiator on its own when you look at the agency landscape nowadays. But this is obviously not enough. Design-driven companies, both new entrants and established companies, are truly changing the expectations of customers. I am currently working on a service platform for a big law firm in the UK. Their customers are also using Citymapper to navigate through the city, AirBnB to go on business trips and Amazon Prime to order just anything within the hour. We need to remember that we’re competing against all these experiences across different industries.
Proponents of design thinking claim it is the discipline that enables companies to become more user-focused, more creative and innovative. Some of the opponents (Nussbaum, Norman) claim it is just a “useful myth”, a “term for what creative people” and “big thinkers” have always done (break the rules, think afresh, empathy, deep immersion in a problem, experimentation and critique…). What’s your opinion?
Doesn’t this phenomenon happen a lot? A lot of what we’ve been doing throughout the years can be theorized and branded afterwards. It was a smart move from IDEO to start claiming design thinking and owning that conversation.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that the power of design thinking lies in the process and its way of creating the right space for multi-disciplinary teams to come up with user-centric products, services and other business solutions. The model of the lone creative genius is broken when it comes to solving complex problems. “Most brilliance arises from ordinary people working together in extraordinary ways” — Roger Von Oech
What are the benefits/challenges when users are involved in the process of designing the new product/service?
I am not going to use that Henry Ford quote about faster horses, but I seriously believe that it’s about finding that balance between listening to users and realizing that they often don’t know what they want unless you show something to them. We are in the game of discovering latent and emerging needs, and it’s our responsibility to orchestrate the right environment for that to happen.
Some challenges would be: are we talking to or observing the right people? Are we looking for the right observations? Are we asking them the right questions? Are we involving them at the right time in the process? How might we discover the difference between what they say and do, and vice versa; and how might we learn from that? How do we transform observations and insights into recommendations for the team to move forward? Our job’s not easy.
On the other hand, the benefit of involving users would be that there’s a role for users in each phase of the process. When we try to empathize, we can observe them. When we ideate, we can shape ideas together. And when we prototype, we can test our ideas with them.
