“My first impressions of Design Thinking — A load of mumbo jumbo”
Hi everyone! I’m Leon, based in Singapore, at the Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT). One of my roles is to run workshops and introduce the key concepts of design thinking to colleagues in other business units.
I often forget how perplexing and odd the design thinking methodology can appear to people who are experiencing it for the first time. Upon reflecting, it made me think about my own first impressions of design thinking.
. . .
Rewind a few years ago to 2009.
That year was my very first encounter with design thinking, when I was working in the public service, and I volunteered for a design thinking workshop. The catch? In return for attending a 2-day workshop, I was expected to use what I learnt and apply it on a staff engagement project.
I had no clue what design thinking was, but it sounded cool and I was curious. Little did I know that it would eventually lead me to a new career.
Thought #1: Mumbo jumbo
My first thought on Day 1 of the workshop:
“What is all this weird talk about EMPATHY? I already know what the problem is! I need to get staff to feel more engaged. Give me tools to find answers how to do that!”
All the talk about being curious, keeping an open-mind, being comfortable with an iterative and fluid process, it sounded like complete mumbo jumbo to me!
At that time, I just couldn’t appreciate what it meant to “walk the customer's journey” and how important it actually was to solve the problems that my customers cared about — from their point of view and their personal experience.
Thought #2: Talk to 6 people?!
My second thought was in response to the 1-on-1 interviews we were learning how to conduct. We were given brief training and asked to speak to 6 people. 6 people. Just six people?! Surely my trainers had meant survey 60 people?
“How can we make any conclusions or recommendations to my management, after only spending time with a mere 6 people?!”
I was very doubtful that my teammates and I could learn anything substantive from speaking to so few people.
It was only after my first few interviews that I could start to appreciate how this approach was helping me challenge my existing assumptions and remove my expert blindness. I started to better understand the problem and pain points from the eyes and minds of the people I was trying to help. This helped me realize I had been thinking about key issues the wrong way.
Thought #3: This is so bad for the environment
Minor but funny point. My third thought was…
“Why does this process waste so many post-its? Why do we have to write one point per sticky note? Why can’t we use pens and a piece of paper? Why do we generate so many repetitive post-its?”. Sometimes design thinking just seems like a giant wall of post-its, a lot of them!
I still think that design thinking process uses up a lot of post-its and I do my best to recycle them when I can. But I’ve come to greatly appreciate the need and value in clustering and reclustering, finding patterns and having a visual library that both my team and my stakeholders can refer to, whenever they need to.
. . .
So there you have it. These were my initial thoughts and reactions to design thinking. Pretty bad right?
I hope to post again about what happened later on and why I decided to learn even more about design thinking after this experience.
Till then, I would love to hear about your own first reactions to design thinking. Share with me in the comments below!
