2020: Not as per plan!
I remember sitting in a cafe on the 1st of Jan, planning the year that had just begun for TinkerLabs. I visualized a larger team, exciting projects perhaps even a new office space? As it has for everyone, this pandemic has really had me question all of this — are my plans still possible? can I make them happen? an even bigger question though, how important are these?
In a matter of weeks, TinkerLabs has completely changed gears, we’re reinventing ourselves to step into this new world. Some say it comes with constraints, I’d like to believe that amidst the chaos, there is opportunity. Thankfully, my team at TinkerLabs has been up for the challenge and as we work together to carve our own space in these times, I thought I’d share a snippet of the year so far — 4 months, although it feels more like 4 years!
Jan 2020 — TinkerLabs started on a high. We were cruising. Design Thinking Workshops with Amazon, using Design Thinking to innovate a critical internal process at Flipkart. Design Thinking to enable Digital transformation was one of our core pillars: we worked with Marico’s IT team, Piramal Glass’s process excellence teams, WNS’s senior leaders amongst others. Parallelly, we were growing our social impact work: SRH (Sexual Reproductive Health) project in rural Bihar, Tuberculosis (TB) project in Karnataka & Andhra Pradesh.
On the academia front, we had signed on design thinking workshops and courses for IIM Indore, IMT Ghaziabad and Tezpur University.
We were thoroughly enjoying the complexity & diversity of these projects. So much so that Jan-Feb 2020 went by in a flash. Early March, as every year, I started planning the next financial year.
Successful deliveries of our Design Thinking workshops were resulting in repeat business from some of our clients and word-of-mouth was helping us procure a whole new set of clients. On the other hand, all our consulting projects were “research plan ready” with 3 teams ready to travel to their respective research locations starting 2nd week March. We were set to close the last quarter and the overall financial year on a bang. I was excited.
And then on March 12th, two news item made me pause: WHO declares coronavirus as a global pandemic and India reports its 1st death due to coronavirus.
I vividly remember the internal conversation that I had with myself on this day. I had, like everyone else, been following the repercussions of being exposed to the virus in South East Asia, how quickly it was spreading and how the key recommendation to reduce the spread was physical distancing. While there were 60 cases in India at the time, there was no real panic and further, no news on the country being locked down either.
Travel and Field work (on ground research) is a core part of our work at TinkerLabs, in fact we spend 70–80% of the time outside of our office in Mumbai. Our calendar for the next few weeks looked like this:
- A 4 member team from TinkerLabs was going to travel to Bangalore & Bellary for our TB project on the 13th of March
- I was supposed to travel to IIM Indore for a Design Thinking workshop on the 14th of March
- A 2 member team was to travel to Pune for a Design Thinking workshop in the 3rd week of March
- A 3 member team from TinkerLabs was going to travel to rural Bihar in the 4th week of March
These were our immediate travel requirements but we had lined up field work for the next 2 months after that.
I was confused, not delivering on these could jeopardize the business, however was it worth it? The opportunity cost was jeopardizing the health and safety of not only my team, but also people they interact with. This last thought stuck with me, people first always is a mantra I try and live upto. Holding back just felt like the right thing to do so that very day, I communicated the decision to transition to 100% Work From Home (WFH) and to cancel all further travel till the situation improves from that moment on.
If I’m honest, while I made this decision, I wasn’t able to see through it completely. What would 100% WFH mean for us? We spend so much time outside of office, all of us cherish the few days we get to see each other in Mumbai. We eat lunch together, make unwind plans. We also had a new team member joining our team in this time, how would a remote welcome to TinkerLabs work, how do we imbibe our culture through a screen? Additionally how would our clients react? We have great working relations and plans set out for each of our projects, what would happen? So many questions!
Again, fortunately (I use this word a lot!) our clients were extremely supportive and fully understood the decision. And the team? They have really stepped up.
Within a span of a few weeks since then, lockdowns were announced all across the globe and the world around us changed. Thankfully, we had changed before that.
At the end of March, I once again re-evaluated our ongoing projects but realized this is just one part of a larger, deeper perhaps more strategic revaluation.
The low touch world is here to stay and Design Thinking as a service is conventionally considered high touch:
- Learning workshops are expected to be experiential and are mostly delivered face-to-face
- Consulting services involve: on-ground research, co-creation and on-ground testing
On the other hand, it was also clear to me that in this low touch world full of uncertainties, and ambiguity, old rules of the business and traditional problem solving may not work. What then? How do we push forward?
I thought hard about TinkerLabs and about Design Thinking, went back to why we exist and realized the answer is in our own mission statement
“To empower people and organizations to thrive in a VUCA world using Design Thinking”
Never before has there been a clearer requirement to use our expertise in helping navigate the uncertainties today and in the near future through deep empathy, radical collaboration and smart experimentation. TinkerLabs’ three corner stones.
I must admit this was quite an AHA! moment for me. Immediately put these thoughts down and shared it with the team. This was our moment to be of service to people and organizations. The team embraced this ideology and I saw them excited to re-evaluate their own roles, their deliverables and more rapidly than I could have ever imagined, we have transitioned all our services to cater to this new world.
Remote Design Thinking Workshops
In the high touch world, we had conducted a good number of remote Design Thinking workshops for clients and teams in Germany, USA and for 30+ business and liberal art schools with Piramal Group (as a part of Piramal Tangram, a Design Thinking competition). While these happened incidentally because of travel complexities either ours or participants/clients, at least we had experience doing them remotely. We used these experiences and have now created three specialized learning offerings for teams and organizations around Learning Design Thinking in a low touch manner.
1) INSPIRE: 2 hours “Live Remote Design Thinking Session” which gives participants an inspiring immersion in the world of Design Thinking
2) EQUIP: 5 sessions “Live Design Thinking Workshop” which equips participants with Design Thinking tools & techniques
3) IMPLEMENT: 7 sessions “Live Design Thinking Workshop” which enables participants to implement Design Thinking principles on their projects
You can read more about these services: HERE
It’s been humbling to get the support of some companies already seeking our services remotely — HP and Piramal have now become our 1st set of low touch Remote Workshop clients.
Remote Design Thinking Consulting
Once again our incidental past work empowered us to quickly create a revised offering. In 2016, we collaborated with LTI & Colgate to re-design some of their processes — this project was predominantly delivered from India remotely. Last year, we worked with a high end furniture brand to understand how customers make their furniture purchase decision — the entire research was conducted remotely.
These experiences and our comfort with digital co-creation tools: such as Miro, Mural, Jamboard has enabled us to make a shift.
In the high touch world we would mostly use these tools to document our research and visualize our findings. Now, we are using these tools extensively to plan our research, document and synthesis our research. To quote one of our Design Researchers “in small meeting rooms organizing post-its with our research findings was always tricky, sometimes our post-its expanded to spaces outside the meeting rooms; however, now with MURAL this particular challenge is eliminated. This platform allows us to organize, synthesize and visualize very easily”.
While most of our consulting projects have swiftly transitioned, those with a deep rural focus are still work in progress. These need hard core field research and we are currently working on finding ways to do remote research. Our work around this space is definitely showing promise and I look forward to sharing some thought pieces and experiences around “remote research” in the next few weeks. I also welcome inputs from any people/organizations out there who are figuring out how best to carry out research in these times — there’s never a better time to share.
It’s been a journey but it’s coming together slowly. Perhaps Design Thinking was born to support humanity during times like this and the thought that TinkerLabs can be of service and help navigate these uncertain times, definitely gives me optimism!
Author:
Ankur Grover, Co Founder at TinkerLabs
