Applied Design Thinking
How to leverage design thinking for business impact
Our ideal model is to work to learn & learn to work, to create impact and capital. This model is grounded by 2 tenets
- Design Thinking: which is combining critical thinking and analysis processes to understand context, identify narratives, apply solutions based thinking, and persuasive communication to solve problems.
- Entrepreneurship & Business Growth: we’re grounded by our focus on entrepreneurship and measured business growth. We measure success by systematically identifying goals, opportunities, risks, and actionable efforts that let us realize our professional and business goals.
“Applied Design Thinking empowers us to solve problems systematically through frameworks.”
It’s important to understand our focus in applied design thinking is to abstract problems from their current context and systematically work through them within an objective framework.
We’ll repeat this concept over and over.
ADT 201: An introduction to Systems and Frameworks
Two important words with very similar meanings: systems & frameworks. What’s the difference between a system and a framework?
A) system: a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole; working together as parts of an interconnecting network.
B) framework: a basic structure [for operation] underlying a system, concept, or text.
While a system is a series of interconnected things that rely on each other, a framework is a model of operation by which a system can be created, traversed, interpreted, and acted on holistically and in a standardized way.
Why are these concepts so important to Design Thinking? Good question.
We need systems and frameworks to approach the specific problems we’re trying to solve in abstract ways.
Problems are generally easy to solve as anything is solvable so long as you dedicate enough resources towards it (resources being time * people * tasks).
But as Design Thinkers (here’s looking to you, kid), we want to do three things to go above and beyond solving a problem:
- Understand the system within which a problem exists
- Approach it with a holistic solution
- Through our time and efforts in solving this problem, identify a framework through which similar problems can be solved (or all types of problems, depending on how abstract our approach).
If you’re applying your experience, your intuition and reasoning to a problem, then you might as well do it efficiently.
Exploring Systems & Frameworks
If we’re actually talking about applying systems and frameworks, we’re likly dealing with big problems. Not that any problem is too small, but do it enough, it’s likely enough to make an engineer want to write a program to do it for them.
From a strategic and operational approach, we want to do the same type of thing. Be like an engineer.
The work is the easy part, & so is learning– but holistic growth happens by identifying systems and creating frameworks.
4 ways to to identify systems
When you’re thinking about this for yourself, try to think about some of the problems you’ve solved for yourself in the past few months.
- Hindsight is 20/20: if you could go back and do it again, you’d have a frame of reference on how you already tackled the problems.
- Take advantage of shortcuts: you’d know some tips and tricks you’d tell yourself to take advantage of… shortcuts on how it’s done ‘the right way’.
- Look forward to new and similar challenges: purposefully apply your past experience.
- Identify your biases: your mind has set-up a mental model of ‘how things are’ and ‘how you should work through them’.
By working to learn, and learning to work, we identify systems. Then we create frameworks to work through those systems . Let’s recap with a vocabulary check:
- Systems: the way everything works together.
- Frameworks: blueprints for carrying out work.
- Resources: tools, or constraints.
- Abstraction: getting meta with the work.
- Holistic: think for the system, not just a node within it.
Good luck.
