It's working! How we are understanding a complex and diffuse organization through the design thinking process
As usual, when we chose our project, we only had a very vague idea of how we would develop it. Besides the fact that the project seemed very cool in a first sight and presented a really challenging experience to us, we thought that the most difficult thing was going to be the deliverables, the final output of the project.
What we didn’t know is how difficult and complex was for us to understand the organization and its environment. When we read case stories and while doing activities in class, we pass trough this phase in a very quickly way, because the environment is already explained to us or it’s showed in a way that facilitates to understand how the system works — and how to make the information work for us.
In the research phase, this was the main obstacle for our project — how to put the pieces of information together? At the first point, we got only pieces of information and in a second moment our client was preparing their main event — so we had to do the first stages of the research with the information we’ve had and based on logical assumptions.
But if we tried to do only a stakeholders map, a business model or just deliver some solution, we would fail. The rush to understand and to deliver is not a friend of the design thinking process, and we were told of this before, but we needed to experience it to figure out how it can be hard.
Even working with disconnected pieces of information at the first moment, the tools — like the personas, customer journeys, and ecosystem map — and through the process of design thinking, we’ve gained actually good insights that we could confirm later with the real personas in our field research at our client’s main event.
As my teammate Angad uses to say — “You have to trust the process.”
