Career Development: Creating an Action Plan with Design Thinking
Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home — at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. But beyond customer-centric empathy, beyond creative iteration, beyond the bias to a maker mentality, design thinking has more to offer to the modern organizations and even to your personal life and career development.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a method of creative problem solving used to produce novel solutions to practical problems. Whilst originally used primarily for solving design problems, this method of thinking is now used to tackle problems in a range of settings. At its core, design thinking involves using creative thinking and models to posit a range of innovative solutions to a given problem.
Design thinking is effective where there is incomplete information or the desired result is unknown, thus it has proved to be a useful lens through which to consider career decisions. Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans decided to employ design thinking in the context of careers after noticing that the traditional logical analytical approach to career planning was not working for students who did not know what they were looking for in their careers. Consequently, Burnett and Evans developed a process that incorporated design thinking to help individuals come up with a range of possible career paths. Let’s see how you can make it for yourself.
Get your reality check first
A personal growth plan requires reflection and self-awareness. Lots of it. To decide how to get from A to B and on what areas to focus, you need to know your current location. What are your skills? What does the gap between you and your vision consist of?
Again, it can help to apply a framework that businesses use to guide their strategy: the SWOT analysis. It’s a great framework for understanding both your internal capabilities (Strengths & Weaknesses) and your external environment (Threats & Opportunities).
Read more about SWOT Analysis in this article
Step 1: Empathise
What does this mean in the traditional design thinking process?
Empathy is the foundation of a human-centered design process where you observe and engage with users and immerse yourself to uncover their needs. By empathizing with people through observation or open-ended interviews you will be able to uncover what people do rather than what they want. Usually, if you ask people what they want, they don’t know. That’s what you need to understand through this process. By immersing yourself in the costumer’s world you can understand their needs and pains.
How to use it for your own goals?
The most important part of applying design thinking is empathizing with yourself as the customer. This is the right time to be completely honest and describe what you do not like in your current place and what makes you feel unsatisfied. It could be something from this list:
- Pressure from family, friends, society — everything that comes at you, that doesn’t take your individual personality into account
- Self-Inflicted — Pressures we put on ourselves in the form of perfectionism, hours worked, tasks are taken on, expectations we have about our roles, etc.
- Passion — It’s not that you can’t have passion for your job but we put a lot of pressure on it! “Just quit your job and do your passion! Find your calling!” It makes it sound like we only have one passion and we should probably know it by now.
Step 2: Define
During the Define stage, you put together the information you have created and gathered during the Empathise stage. This is where you will analyze your observations and synthesize them.
Them in order to define the core problems that you have identified up to this point.
Your problem statement sets out the specific challenge you will address. It will guide the entire design process from here on out, giving you a fixed goal to focus on and helping to keep the user in mind at all times. A good problem statement is human-centered, broad enough for creativity, yet specific enough to provide guidance and direction.
Example: “I want to maintain a healthy lifestyle, by working from home on projects I love whenever I feel productive.”
Step 3: Ideation
Design thinking is a solution-based framework, so the focus is on coming up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible. Ideation is both a core design thinking principle and a step in the design thinking process. The ideation step is a designated judgment-free zone where participants are encouraged to focus on the number of ideas, rather than the quality.
Normally, when a problem pops up it seems that there are only two-three choices to deal with it. You will be amazed to discover how much more different than the obvious ways there are to handle a problem. Just think about different scenarios, like in a movie, write and read again your weaknesses and think about people around you who can help you with the things you lack. It’s all about letting your mind lead you, without restricting it.
Step 4: Prototype
When you use design thinking for your personal growth this phase is about taking small action in the new direction. For example, if you are planning to switch your career path from, try working on side projects, take initiative at your current work or help your friends with your new skills.
Example: Is if you have an idea for digital product and you want to make more time working on it. A good step would be if you start validating your idea by talking about it. Make sure it is enough to give you a real perception of what this new stage will demand.
Step 5: Test
When applied in a traditional way the testing phase enables you to see where your prototype works well and where it needs improving. Based on user feedback, you can make changes and improvements before you spend time and money developing and/or implementing your solution.
The good thing about applying this for personal growth is that your emotions will do half of the work. You don’t have to worry about the authenticity of the feedback, it is right for sure. If needed it will turn you to the Ideation phase again.
For example: “I don’t feel like I am the right person for this project, I may need to research for other ideas or to commit to existing one.”
or
“I love work on this project but I’ll need to outsource some of the work.”
Now you know what design thinking is and how it can be applied to almost any context. Thanks to the significant success of design-led teams, communities and companies, it has now progressed beyond the creation of objects to being applied as a science that informs strategic development and change. So, why not implement it at a personal level to design your career, wider thinking and decision making? You never know where else it could lead you.
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