no comments yet If there is one paper I would recommend to every teacher, coach and student on who wonders about team leadership or the learning process in design thinking it would be the paper ”Innovation as a learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking” by Sarah Backman and Michael Barry. The paper not only introduces the design thinking, but connects it to learning theory (Kolb, Owen) and thereby combines good, practical advise with background knowledge.
Based on their understanding and observations they propose that every phase of the “process” needs different skills and therefor a different leader. Meaning that the leadership should alter within the team based on skills.
Beside this, the paper offers a list of guidelines for leading teams which I can only recommend:
How does a team know when it needs to shift phases? A good team leader is often critical to helping teams see when they need to move. What does that team leader look for?
- There is no reframing going on. The team is stuck with one frame, or one perspective of the problem it is trying to solve, and has been unwilling to try other points of view.
- There are no interesting stories being told about the current situation.
- There are no “ah-has” from team members who are seeing the situation differently or in new ways.
- The conversation and stories that are being told about customers and users are boring, and not inspiring to team members.
- There are no challenges to existing norms.
- The team is not being generative enough; it is coming up with interesting ideas that may well meet user needs, but none are real opportunities for the business.
- The team is confused; the models or frameworks that it has come up with are too complicated or difficult to internalize.
The team leader must also understand the learning styles of each of the individuals on the team so that he or she hears each team member well, and in particular is tuned into the need to shift the process based upon the inputs of the team members and their particular perspectives. (Source: Sara L. Beckman, Michael Barry (2007) Innovation as a learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking)
From my own experience I think this as well as the rest of the paper is not only helpful to teams but also to coaches in design thinking since it provides a solid background as well as some hands on advice. It is full of example from the research’s experience teaching the subject. Although this might be considered as a very subjective view, this paper is definitely worth a read.
Tags: Design Thinking, Education, Paper
