Lacking ‘Inspiration’: Challenges with Design Thinking
The DART Innovation team at ReadyTalk has started on a three-week investigatory process modeled after Design Thinking:
We’re pretty solid on Ideation and (our version of) Implementation, but the team has floundered a little in the earliest stage: Inspiration.
I know why; it’s because as a stand-alone innovation team, we’re not tied to an existing line of business or even a customer segment.
Imagine the possibilities! They’re almost … paralyzing.
In my former roles as an Idea Designer at LexisNexis or as a Product Strategist at ReadyTalk, we had constraints. We knew the market we served, so if we needed inspiration for new products, we knew exactly the box to play in. We knew who to reach out to to better understand their challenges or jobs-to-be-done. In this new role, there are many more options to explore.. which also means more choices to make. Choices are hard.
According to “Brand New” by G. Michael Maddock of Maddock Douglas:
Innovation occurs when:
- There is a significant need or insight
- A product, service or business model meets that need
- There is a clear communication and commercialization strategy that connects one to two.
Put another way, you need a customer with a problem, a solution to that problem, and a way for the customer to be aware of and procure the solution.
For the Inspiration phase of design thinking, your aim is to develop empathy for your target customer so you can understand and start to devise solutions for their problems. I like the output to be a series of insight statements.
Notes from “Brand New” on the structure of an insight:
We’re cheating a bit — we have an idea for a product/solution already. The question is who the best early adopters/target users are. So can we still use the Inspiration stage to back into insights? Of course we can!
Insights Only Come Through Interviews
1. Pick a market you think is a good fit
Really, this happens every time you seek to innovate. The difference is that when you already have a solution in mind, you already have series of hypotheses. I think our target customer has a specific (important) problem. I think my solution could solve that problem for them.
2. Actually talk to your target customer
This is critical: suspend worrying about your solution. Ask them about their problems. I’ve always liked Ash Maurya’s Problem Validation scripts because they start with a hypothesis but leave space to gain different insights from your interviewees.
3. Document observations
What are the challenges your target customer faces? Do they align with the problems you hypothesized (you know, the ones you thought your solution could solve?)
4. Phrase your observations as insight statements
What is your interviewee trying to accomplish? What is her motivation? What stands in her way?
5. Pivot or Persevere?
Let’s say your target market doesn’t identify a strong need to solve the problem your solution aims to solve. You have two choices:
- pivot your target market
- pivot your product
In any case, this step is a sign of success or progress. You’ve learned SOMETHING, which gets you closer to a great innovation. Invalidating a hypothesis is great; it means you’re applying rigor to your investigatory process and refining it.
There are two approaches to get to step 5, above. You can do either serial or parallel investigation. A team may wish to divide and conquer with target markets, and then see which is the most promising, or they may want to dive into a promising market and then only pivot if deemed necessary.
Does your team struggle with the inspiration stage? I’d love to hear how you’ve approached it to ensure you’re moving forward.
I hope that setting desired outputs from this stage as generating “insight statements”, we can move beyond analysis paralysis and just focus on learning as much meaningful (unique) information as we can in the time we have.
