Day 34— Process series 3/7: “Design Thinking — Business Adoption”
Design Thinking is probably the most discussed/ promoted design process for the last 5 years. Except for big consultancy like IDEO, IBM, Cooper are pushing it, we’ve also seen all sorts of certificate programs, free online resources everywhere, even business schools are teaching it.
It’s probably not worth the time to re-introduce Design Thinking to design leaders. But just in case you want to hear it from Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, here’s a video:
Important but Less Discussed Question
Instead of going to the details of Design Thinking, which you can find abundant of tutorial/discussion online, I’d like to focus on things are crucial but less people talk about: Business Adoption of Design Thinking. In order to make sure this is the right post for you, here’s the outline of the structure of this post:
What you’ll learn
- Before adoption: Ways to convince stakeholders to adopt Design Thinking process;
- During early adoption: Common push back or confusion, and how to respond;
- During mature adoption: Common pitfalls and how to avoid or react;
- If pivot or no adoption: What are the alternatives.
Before Adoption: Stakeholder Persuasion
Business Case
According to Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, “Good ideas rarely sell themselves”. As most of the design agencies/ consultancies have been trying to sell their client Design Thinking process for quite a while, there are countless documentation generated for us to leverage. Just to name a few:
- McKinsey: The business value of design
- UIE: A proven method for showing the value of good UX
- Cooper: Notes on the business case for design
“Design Thinking isn’t just a method, it fundamentally changes the fabric of your organization and your business.” — David Kelley, founder of IDEO and The Stanford d.school
“Are you ready for this?”
Even though we’re equipped with these reports from industry-leading creative force, sometimes it could still be hard when we’re dealing with stakeholders/ companies that are either not culturally ready for it, or simply don’t see the urgency to change the way they work. On that note, recently John Maeda published an article with a very interesting diagram to describe this sort of concept:
What we can say:
- Competition & Risk: “Are you losing money to competitors with easier-to-use products? At the end of the day, a product that better meets the needs of your users is far less risky long-term.”
- Efficiency: “Our capacity to break down the siloed teams in organizations through productive and efficient communication has led us to the forefront of the design world.”
- Diversity: “Design thinking is about creating a thoughtful environment where divergent voices have a seat at the table.”
What we can do:
- Be persuasive by being smart: Bring some good case studies with you. If no relevant case studies at hand, use humor (see figure below) or analogies to clearly communicate the importance of involving real users in the early stage.
- Look for quick wins: Instead of forcing our stakeholders to swallow the whole Design Thinking process, ask for some quick user research. If possible, show them the video of how users respond to their existing product/service. If you can’t get the real users, find proxy users or colleague and see who fits. Often time stakeholders are surprised by the response from the user research, and agree to more in-depth UX activities.
Early Adoption — Confusion & Push Back
Given Tuckman’s stages of group development: Form-Storm-Norm-Perform, putting a new process in place might comes with some growing pain within the organizations. With a process like Design Thinking which involves lots of collaboration across department, early adoption might not be well taken by every single team. Some common confusion and push back are:
- “Why does it take that long for user research? What do we need to do it in user’s context?”
- “Why do designers need to do these activities? Some of these are product people job.”
- “Why do designers challenge the product direction/requirement? “
What we can say:
- 1:10:100 Rule (by G. Loabovitz): Finding an issue and prevent it in the research stage only cost a dollar, fixing the issue during the implementation stage cost $10, and when the product is launched, it costs $100 to remediate. Therefore, user research is a good investment to de-risk the project.
- Expert in human: Designers and researchers are trained to uncover hidden data: emotion, stress, hidden user goals. We’ve master the skill set of observation and other technique to uncover “unspoken requirement”.
What we can do:
- RACI Matrix: Outline the research activities with RACI matrix so that product managers and other stakeholders are consulted and included, even responsible for certain tasks so that they are not left out or feeling credit stolen.
- Collaboration process & timeline: Clearly layout the timeline and setup routine + ad hoc check point with stakeholders, so that they don’t feel like designers are operating in a black box.
Mature Adoption — Common Pitfalls
Even in an organization that has been running Design Thinking as a process model, there are still areas that people may find it difficult to deal with, and situations that are hard to resolve. Below are some examples:
- Resource alignment: This happens a lot in stakeholder/user research stage. Getting the right people to talk to on the right time is proven difficult a lot of times. Also getting the right type of talents to take on the right task is not a easy job either;
- [Subject] -driven: “Most problems are people problems.” In designers world, people often talk about Design Driven culture and organization. However that might not be the case in our partners’ minds all the time. Even with talented teams and partners who are willing to “cooperate”, it doesn’t mean they are easy to “collaborate”. When the three pillar — product, design, tech are all running their own agenda, a collaborative process like Design Thinking might not gain its full velocity due to lack of information and collaboration.
What we can do:
- “Failing to plan is planning to fail”: Resource alignment isn’t easy. Therefore we need to constantly plan-do-check-act to make sure it’s in good shape. Other ways to handle it is to hire professional vendors to outsource the pain.
- Mission & Vision Statement: Having a clear mission statement and great vision statement help align the project team, especially during the tough time. You can think of the statement like the speech a general would give right before sending foot soldiers on the field, charging toward the enemy. It excites people and bring the bright side of human being for collaborative problem solving.
- OKRs: Setting up OKRs early in the project also helps each team to stay focused. Also at the end of the engagement, each team can be proud of achieve their goal instead stealing each other’s credit.
Process Pivot (or just gone…)
Change is constant. When changes happen, the investment/resource/ timeline on a project changes as well. There’s all kind of possibilities that might have impact on the agreed process. Project engagement that adopts Design Thinking tends to be mid/longer terms and might encounter major changes in a company. I’m listing some common ones below:
- Market up and down, new trends/technologies here and there: When the product-market fit changes, the original business assumptions or goals might shift as well. Depends on competitors’ move or market trends, what’s a valid MVP last month might not be viable anymore now.
- Priorities change, too: Along the same line as point 1, corporate priorities might change due to decisions from board meeting, C-suite, senior leadership team, or other unknown people/reason. This may have impact on what’s important and what not, and the corresponding resource of projects.
- People come and go: For example, change of leadership, re-organization, down-sizing, change of key stakeholders, change of design/product team. What was agreed upon by the original team might not stay with the new teams.
What we can do:
- Mission rarely changes, visions can pivot: Utilizing mission & vision statement helps evaluate whether the design process is helping to achieve short term or long term goal. You might find that if we’re merely trying to achieve short term goal, putting a process in place might take longer time to be effective; and if the design process is to achieve mid/long term goals, these goals don’t change as often. Therefore, the first step will be examine if the changes on design process is actually needed, or do more harm than good.
- Understand the why: The key part of change management is to understand “why”. This will help align your project direction with the new goals, and increase efficiency of the change management. For example, if the general solution of the new leadership team is to cut cost for the near term, proposing a new project with large investment and long time frame might not be the most appropriate idea.
- Prioritize necessary tasks: Sometimes we’re not fortune enough to keep the planned scope of work intact during the changes. If we need to pick our battles and can only sustain part of the original scope, we’ll need to prioritize the design activities/tasks. Tools like MoSCoW method, Kano model, and others might help you have a meaningful conversation with the project team.
Conclusion
“Success is 10% Idea, 90% Execution” doesn’t sound so right for people working in creative industry, but we know that an idea remains as an idea if we don’t have ways to make it actually happen. As Stephen Gates mentioned: “Creativity is blue-collar profession, it is a lot of work!”, getting the right talent working in the right process with velocity and quality remains one of the biggest challenges for design leaders.
New processes will be born, old processes will be repackaged and become popular, design leaders will have to respond to constant changes. Aas Darwin said, “the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment.” Therefore, effectively manage the project/process/stakeholders/team through learning and sharing experience is the crucial part of our job. I’d like to hear your thoughts and learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
