Design Thinking « Ingo Rauth

Design Thinking

Teaching Design Thinking – Innovation as a learning Process

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.

download the paper

download the presentation

Design Thinking, a toolkit for managers?!

Cover by Columbia Business School Publishing

This is the first publication, I’m aware of, that tries to address the operative nature of design methodology in management practices. A bit supprised by the monodisciplinary approach, (previous publications of other authors have favored mostly multi.- or transdisciplinary approaches) “Designing for Growth: a design thinking tool kit for managers” by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilivie frames a good logical structure and sheds some light on the use of design thinking in management practices .

Since the book isn’t out yet, this review draws on the first two chapters which are online and definitely worth a read.

The main share of the first chapter is devoted to develop a convergence between design and business and point out four main reasons why design is beneficial to managers:

Design is all about action, and business to often get stuck at the talking stage.
Design teaches us how to make things feel real, and most business rhetoric today remains largely irrelevant to the people who are supposed to make things happen.
Design is tailored to deal with uncertainty, and business’s obsession with analysis is best suited for a stable and predictable world.
Design understands that products and services are bought by human beings.

Although these statements read like an ad campaign for design the authors clarify their view on management practices by stating: “The problem in many established organizations today is not that our analytical approaches are bad – it’s all we’ve got…”.

The second chapter offer an alternative visualization of the process. Instead of using a verb based vocabulary the authors identified four basic questions, underlying the design process. (Fig.1.)

Fig.1: Design thinking process description from "Designing for Growth" by J. Liedtka and T.Oglivie

In addition to these, the book suggests 10 tools which should be used within the steps to manage the journey from identifying today’s challenges till the learning lunch, a tool which moves concepts into the field to find out about disconfirming data to improve previously developed hypotheses (prototypes). Although these tools might not seem that many, its great to see a logical structured approach from ideation to insights to ideas and finally concepts, underpinned with tools that allow a replicable approach.

The second chapter ends with a WARNING that, despite all good intentions, the biggest obstacles with this lies in the inner barriers of companies who “still don’t get it”. Although I don’t know if that’s just the companies fault, the outlook on a final chapter addressing “moving a design project through an organization”, sounds promising.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the final book, which will be released (according to amazon.com) in June 2011. The only main critique which I would have right now is that design thinking, as far as I understood it in the first two chapters, is mend to be used as a toolbox, which I think differs quite heavily from recent approaches and misses a lot of the benefits one can get through collaboration.

Design Thinking — No Comments
10
Nov 10

What is Design Thinking?

Being asked to define it a couple of times, I just came across this very interesting video on the “Dialog on Design” blog.

Design Thinking — No Comments
23
Apr 10

Integrative Thinking

Humantific just released a chapter of their forthcoming book “design thinking made visible”.

Within this chapter, it seems, they somehow redefined what “integrative thinking” is:

“Integrative Thinking (and it’s cousin integrated innovation) is the disciplined ability of recognizing, orchestrating and integrating the diverse brainpower of cross-disciplinary teams as they grapple with and navigate complex innovation challenges.” [Humantific, 2010]

This was formally done by Roger Martin who defines integrative thinking a this way:

“…the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.”[Rotman 2008]

If you compare the two, the main difference is that Humantific looks into diversity as in the “diverse brainpower” of teams while Martin looks into them as “opposing models”. In a way, Humanific’s explanation re-frames integrative thinking a bit closer to the team approach and therefor towards design thinking.

Never the less, with this new publication Humantific enters the “Design Thinking” discourse which will give great new inputs for the community. For those who aren’t familiar with them, check out Humantific website or this publication NextD: Understanding Design Futures That Have Already Arrived!

Design Thinking / User Centered — No Comments
20
Apr 10

Why we don’t care

This TED-Video by Daniel Goleman – the psychologist who coined “emotional intelligence” – made me think, if this might be the reason why d-school students often skip user testing due to time constrains, although they know that it might be important.
If this is the case, it might be a good reason to plan in some extra time for user-testing.
Although it might not seem that relevant for a lot of designers, since user testing is more often seen as a constrain than helpful, it’s quite interesting to know what makes people pissled (combination of pissed off and puzzled). Especially if you refer to Bruce Nussbaum who just wrote that “B-Schools And D-Schools Should Listen To The Cultural Context of the SEC Lawsuit Against Goldman” and used this example to point out the importance of the social context.

Design Thinking — No Comments
6
Apr 10

Critics on Design Thinking

These posts also show that there is still a lot to clarify. Although most people/professionals are aware of what could be done and what not, using design thinking, a lot of peoples still seem to see it as “the” weapon when it comes to innovation.

Here are the two posts…

Design Thinking is Killing Creativity

Design thinking: Everywhere and Nowhere, Reflections on The Big Re-think

… and Tim Browns reaction to the second one:

Half full or half empty?

In my mind these posts show that there is still a big need for clarification on both sides of the table (business & design). Never the less, these articles are a valuable source to see how design thinking is understood and how it is used. They also show that there are a couple of “design thinking models” out there which leads to a lot of confusion, misinterpretation and misuse. It will surely take some time and although many people like the openness of design thinking, I think some clarification on “how to use it”, “when to use it” and “what is it good for / and what not” might be a big help for many who think that design thinking is the weapon to hunt down radical innovation for their business.

Companies & Innovation / Design Thinking — No Comments
6
Apr 10

P&G and Design Thinking

Claudia Kotchka was the women in charge of introducing Design (Thinking) at P&G,. In the video she explains how they did it and in addition gives some quite good example about how to explain the value of design to “non designers”.
Another aspect which I think is quite interesting is, that she introduced design in a couple of steps. Beside that she showed how they addressed many innovation hurdles companies quite often face introducing design into their companies (corporate culture, general understanding, risk awareness …).