I Took a Design Thinking Crash Course…Now What?
Since January 2017, my colleagues and I on the LOFT Innovation Enablement team have run our design thinking crash course with over 1,500 Manulife/John Hancock employees. This is part of our initiative to make Manulife/John Hancock, more of a human-centered organization. It has been a remarkable journey meeting people from across the company who are not only excited to work this way, but also feel empowered to do so.
Like most design thinking crash courses, we like to teach using an abstract problem — we look for an equalizing topic that people from across different management levels and job functions can interact with on an level playing field. Being abstract works great for the purposes of teaching, but it does make it a little bit harder for people to see how design thinking as a methodology can be applied when they get back to their desks.
So, here are four easy ways that you can introduce design thinking into your daily work:
1. Have a conversation with a customer. Call one, meet one, grab a coffee with one. Get a better sense of the problems that they face and get the juices flowing on how you might make their lives just a little bit better. This is a tangible way to gain empathy and maintain a customer-centric mindset.
2. Build a scrappy prototype and shop it around. Whatever you’re working on, be it a service, a website, or a physical product, try to make something quick and dirty that you can get into the hands of real people. Have people on your floor or on the street interact with your product and really listen to their feedback. Take notes and iterate!
3. Get unstuck. Leverage some design thinking brainstorming rules to get your team out of a problem that you just can’t seem to solve. Embrace the ideals of radical collaboration and the power of “yes, and…” to get to more meaningful solutions.
4. Do a deeper dive. Check out great online resources like IDEO’s Design Kit or if you’re at Manulife/John Hancock, engage LOFT for a deeper dive. We’re happy to facilitate sessions using tools like journey mapping, user interviewing, testing and more. Let us be your partners in innovation.
Like anything else in life, practice makes perfect, so get the ball rolling on your design thinking journey today!
If you’ve taken a design thinking crash course — with us or someone else, what are some of the things you’ve taken away? Leave a comment below!
