Reflections on Design Thinking
Like the Force, Design Thinking exists within us and all around us
I signed up for the Design Thinking class on a bit of a whim. I was feeling like I needed a structured “distraction” during the Covid-19 isolation, and as a self-described “education junkie”, taking classes is something I do for entertainment . I can’t quite remember how I came across Design Thinking. My first concrete recollection is from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in their Designing Your Life book (Burnett and Evans, 2016).
I watched a few YouTube videos and listened to several of Bill and Dave’s podcast interviews. From there I explored some other videos on Design Thinking, which seemed like this magical, radical approach to solving any problem you could through at it. Little did I realize how much Design Thinking I was already doing in my professional life, and how many of the principles I’ve learned through other methodologies and courses.
I’ve previously learned about user empathy and personas through my own reading and researching on user centered design principles for software and website design. I’ve also learned about user empathy from my study of organizational change management (thinking about “What’s In It For Me” for all your stakeholders). I was introduced to brainstorming concepts and techniques in my university studies on creativity. Prototyping and testing, and repeating (or iterating) the cycle, are foundational tenets of the Agile development methodology. So, from that perspective, most of the concepts in the class were not new to me, and I believe I now intuitively practice many of the Design Thinking principles during my work.
What I did find helpful and interesting was Mural and the variety of stock templates provided there, as they provide some structure to prompt me to think of different perspectives and stages. The empathy map and journey map were new templates for me, and I can see myself using those again to help guide my thinking for future projects. Mural was also my first exposure to the online brainstorming and collaboration tools, and although I found Mural has a bit of a learning curve, and doesn’t always behave the way I think or want it to, I hope to continue using it in the future.
The other most valuable concept from the course was to re-framing the problem from something like “I can’t do [this thing]” or “I have [this problem]” into a “How might we …” challenge. Changing the words to describe the problem automatically make it seem possible to solve, with many possible paths, rather than an obstacle to be beaten into submission. It opens the doors of curiosity. I recently used this thinking approach during a meeting I was facilitating. We were focused on solving a specific problem involving the management of inventory items by serial number (which creates many low-value, high-cost tasks). The proposed solution is to avoid tracking equipment by serial number, which doesn’t work very well once the equipment is installed and we want to track the purchasing and maintenance history of the item. I applied the “How might we…” thinking and asked if we should try solving the problem differently. Instead of avoiding the headaches of managing serialized inventory, how might we make the management of serialized inventory easier? I didn’t get any real uptake from the other meeting participants during the call, but hopefully I planted a seed for a new perspective.
In the same way, the 5 Why’s framework does the same thing of helping to shift perspective. By asking why we do or think or say something over and over, we challenge each idea and get to the core reason (or core belief) holding us back from a breakthrough. While I had heard of this framework before, from an incident response and investigation perspective, I hadn’t really applied it for myself.
From a personal development perspective, the 5 Why’s (and perhaps all of the Design Thinking process) remind me of The Work by Byron Katie (The Work Foundation, n.d.). The Work is a similar process of re-framing a thought so you can break free of its grip.
In The Work, you:
Notice — who or what upsets you? Why? Recall a specific situation. (Problem Identification)
Write — capture your stressful thoughts on a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet using short, simple sentences (Empathize)
Question — Isolate one thought. Ask the four questions. Allow the genuine answers to arise. (Problem Definition and Ideation).
The four questions, the core of The Work, are:
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without that thought?
These questions, to me, feel like the “How Might We …” perspective encouraged by Design Thinking.
Turn It Around — Turn the thought around. Is the opposite as true or truer than the original thought? (Prototyping and Testing).
In closing, I believe Design Thinking principles already existed in my life in many forms. I am leaving this course with some new frameworks to help facilitate my own thinking and problem solving, which was my primary goal. I feel the course has helped my open my mind to new possibilities in my personal life as well as my professional life, and I expect to be applying the principles of Design Thinking for years to come.
References
Burnett, Bill and Evans, Dave. (2016) Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. Knopf
The Work Foundation (n.d). How to do The Work. The Work of Byron Katie. https://thework.com/instruction-the-work-byron-katie/
