design thinking

Design Thinking is NOT Creativity

Posted on 09.06.18

The new cell phone is a sleek, thin device with a beautiful metallic case. The new car has sexy lines and a wide, open grill. The new kitchen appliance is smooth with only one start/stop button to preserve its modern look.

We often consider design as the element that brings form to product function. In times past, designers were called into projects after all the technical specifications were completed. Designers were told to make the product “pretty”, maybe put it into a nicer box or color it according to current fashion trends.

Design thinking, however, is not the same as design. Design has largely been the purvey of graphic artists and specialists who create shells to surround products so that the ugly, functional guts are concealed from the user. In contrast, design thinking is a human-centered activity that translates customer needs into product or service offerings within business constraints. In other words, design thinking is more than just creative design.

What is Creativity?

Creativity is defined by dictionary.com as “the state or quality of being creative,” and “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns…” We view an artist’s interpretation of a landscape in an oil painting at “creative”. When kids act out stories and make up games, we say they are “creative”. My family and friends love my handmade greeting cards and tell me that I am “creative”.

In innovation, we seek creativity to generate alternative problem solutions. We intentionally practice divergent thinking exercises for creativity these include things like brainstorming, brainwriting, and role-playing. Our goal is to generate a lot of ideas, quickly.

In divergent thinking, we accept crazy ideas, even ones that defy known scientific boundaries and constraints. It is possible to convert a nugget of a wild idea into a true product solution. For example, most of us know the famous story of how a worker at 3M tested a not-so-sticky adhesive on slips of paper in his Sunday hymnal. Form a nugget of an idea (a not-so-sticky adhesive) was born a billion-dollar brand for a mining firm.

Yet, the problem with divergent thinking is that it limits innovators to only making lists of creative ideas. Brainstorming sessions end with flip chart paper covering the walls, hundreds of ideas written down, and the new product development (NPD) team feeling pretty darn good about the quantity of ideas generated.

Unfortunately, many, many firms stop at this point.

Convergent Thinking

Divergent thinking must be followed with a convergent thinking exercise. Long lists of ideas are useless to an innovation team unless they know which ones to develop further. Convergent thinking draws together similar ideas and concepts so that the NPD team can test assumptions. Methods used in convergent thinking include mind-mapping, multi-voting, and affinity diagramming.

Results of convergent thinking provide a set of new product or service concepts that can be developed and tested.

Design Thinking

Both divergent and convergent thinking are subsets of design thinking. Yet, design thinking is more collaborative and human-centered than simply generating prioritized lists of good ideas. Design thinking is based on customer empathy and seeks first to understand a customer’s need.

Successful innovators use design thinking tools throughout the product development process. First to identify customer needs, then to generate potential solutions, and finally to prototype and test functionality. Companies embracing design thinking bring customers into the product development process by observing them and questioning their emotional engagement with a given problem and existing solutions. As Clayton Christensen says, people don’t buy drills because they want a drill; they buy drills because they need a hole.

Innovators use design thinking tools to dig beyond the surface of a problem and then continue the conversation with a customer well beyond the idea generation stage. The product functionality is tested with prototypes and customers validate the form of the packaging as well. Usability tests dictate the inclusion of only a minimum number of functions so that the product is simple and attractive.

Design Thinking is More than Creativity

Successful innovators recognize the need to generate lots and lots of creative ideas during the product development process. However, creativity often ends when a team brainstorms a bunch of potential solution ideas.

Design thinking goes deeper through creativity with customer empathy to understand the true problem. Then, we use design thinking tools to test and validate solutions with those same customers. Following a customer’s needs and emotional engagement with a potential solution leads to faster time-to-market and better long-term profitability. You can’t afford to ignore your customers!

To Learn More

To learn how to apply design thinking to enrich innovation, please join us in Life Design Master Mind (LDMM), Innovation Master Mind (IMM), or New Product Development Professional (NPDP) certification. LDMM is designed for your personal growth by applying design thinking tools to finding the next step in life. IMM is a 6-month peer coaching group that allows you to extend your NPD knowledge beyond NPDP certification and to collaborate with other CIOs and innovation managers. You will realize improved efficiency and growth from LDMM, IMM, or through NPDP certification which entails a deep dive into strategy and NPD processes, including design thinking. Feel free to contact me at info@simple-pdh.com or 281-280-8717. At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications. You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!

Speaking on Design Thinking

7 September 2018 at Texas Association of Change Management Professionals Conference

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

A division of Global NP Solutions, LLC

Three Perspectives in Goal-Setting

Posted on 08.30.18

Research teaches us that people are more successful when they set goals. That’s why we religiously make new year’s resolutions; despite the fact that a resolution is different than a goal. Most resolutions fail in less than a month. Goals, unlike resolutions, are specific and measurable, and we target our achievement within a specific time frame.

In addition, goals fit within three categories: strategic, tactical, and operational. As new product development (NPD) managers and innovation practitioners, our goals – both professional and personal – must straddle the three categories to ensure success and creativity in building new knowledge. We’ll next discuss what these three types of goals are and how you can apply them to renew your joy in practicing innovation.

Strategic Goals

Strategy is the overarching mission and vision of a firm. It encompasses the why we are in business and the values or characteristics we apply to differentiate our business from competitors. As has been said, it is far easier to compose a strategy statement than to execute the strategy. That’s were goals come in.

Strategic goals, therefore, are the highest-level objectives we have. They are visionary yet practical at the same time. Achieving our strategy cannot be accomplished with the flip of a switch so we must parse our overall vision into smaller chunks, or goals, because strategy is also long-term.

For example, a company may wish to grow by accessing the South American market. That is both visionary and practical since economic data demonstrates an untapped market for products and services in this region. However, implementing this strategy requires more thought and consideration than simply opening a pop-up store in Asunción (the capital of Paraguay). Strategic growth goals for the initiative may include the following.

Complete a consumer market research study in Paraguay.
Evaluate competitive product solutions in place today.
Coordinate Spanish-speaking resources within the company.
Pilot test brands and packaging.
Conduct pricing studies.
Create technology and product roadmaps.

Of course, a detailed NPD project would follow the innovation strategy, but high-level strategic goals will frame the effort into specific deliverables. Steps taken to meet significant milestones are also steps along the strategic journey.

Tactical Goals

Tactics are shorter range than strategies and often involve previously tested market approaches. Strategic goals should be translated into tactical objectives that are clear, concise, and measurable. Each tactical goal supports an overall strategic thrust.

So, for example, if we focus on the strategic goal of growth in South America for our fictional company, we know that we need to gather customer insights. Some tactical goals to support this strategic objective are:

Identify target customers by demographic categories,
Gather ethnographic data for the product within at least three different regions,
Conduct product solution focus groups in at least three different regions, and
Define customer personas for future design thinking and NPD work.

Operational Goals

Tactical goals are supported by specific action steps, which we call organizational goals. Some operational goals are necessary in the short-term to maintain manufacturing, distribution, or functional arenas. Whereas strategic goals might take years to achieve and tactical goals are completed in weeks or months, operational goals are often day-to-day achievements. Operational goals directly support specific tactics and are the heart of successful innovation implementation. It is the little things that add up to overall success.

Continuing our example, then, some operational goals follow to support a tactical objective of holding a focus group to understand customer solutions.

Locate and rent an appropriate facility,
Recruit 12 potential customers,
Establish confidentiality agreements,
Prepare customer feedback checklists, and
Record and translate the focus group session(s).

Thus, operational goals get at the nitty-gritty details required to meet the tactical objectives, while tactics ultimately support the strategic goals. Each action is necessary, in its own time and with its own scope, to achieve the corporate mission.

How to Implement Goal-Setting

Setting goals is an exercise in strategic thinking since we first must understand the overall mission and vision. Brainstorming is a common technique to elicit both strategic and tactical goals. You will want to use a cross-functional team to establish tactical and organizational goals as the people that do the work will have the most experience knowing how to implement tasks and activities to support specific objectives.

In our Life Design Master Mind and Innovation Master Mind groups, we discuss goal-setting from these three perspectives. An easy way to ensure you are balancing life across the work, health, play, and love arenas is to assign goal categories to your work lists. For instance, I place an “S”, “T”, or “O” by each of my daily “To Do” list items. Bookkeeping gets an “O” because it’s a required activity to keep my business running but it is not a high-level mission-critical activity. Printing handouts for a speaking engagement is assigned a “T” since the handout includes thought leadership content and my marketing information. This will support my strategic goal of helping others become proficient at converting ideas into commercial reality through an integrated innovation ecosystem.

To Learn More

To learn more about setting goals that will help you achieve your strategic vision, please join us in Life Design Master Mind (LDMM), Innovation Master Mind (IMM), or New Product Development Professional (NPDP) certification. LDMM is designed for your personal growth by applying design thinking tools to finding the next step in life. IMM is a 6-month peer coaching group that allows you to extend your NPD knowledge beyond NPDP certification and to collaborate with other CIOs and innovation managers. You will realize improved efficiency and growth from LDMM, IMM, or through NPDP certification which entails a deep dive into strategy and NPD processes, including design thinking. Feel free to contact me at info@simple-pdh.com or 281-280-8717. At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications. You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!

Speaking on Design Thinking

7 September 2018 at Texas Association of Change Management Professionals Conference

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

A division of Global NP Solutions, LLC

Three Reasons You Need Design Thinking

Posted on 08.16.18

Today’s world is hyper-competitive. There are fewer jobs, more talent, and higher needs. Companies compete with products in their own industries, yet new categories offer novel solutions to existing customers. Schools and churches even limit the number of kids they can accept into various sports and extra-curricular programs. To the jaded observer, it seems that only the very, very best survive.

But, is it a matter of being the “best” or really a matter of being the “best prepared”? Companies and individuals that know themselves well – and understand customers and stakeholders even better – are the true, profitable survivors. A competition isn’t won by having more skills or more product features. The competition is won by sticking to a core set of principles, doing the basics well, and by understanding the rules of the game.

So, how do you accomplish the simple elegance of talent, skill, and competency to serve customers and stakeholders? Let’s look to Design Thinking for three ways to inspire positive change and to beat the competition.

#1 – Customer Empathy

Design thinking is defined as “a collaborative and creative problem-solving approach that integrates customer and user empathy throughout the development process.” Empathy is the key word in this definition. Recall that empathy is different than sympathy or acknowledgement. Empathy is putting yourself into someone else’s shoes to understand how they see the situation and how they feel about it.

In new product development (NPD), we use empathy to identify customer needs. New product development and innovation are not limited to the technical feature set and marketing campaign. Instead empathy helps the NDP team observe a customer’s decisions and interactions with a product or service from the point of research through the transaction and to after-sales support. If any point of the customer’s journey is difficult or challenging, the NPD team recognizes an opportunity for improvement.

In our own lives, we use empathy to understand our constraints and biases. Often, we end up with tunnel vision and assume a problem can only be solved in one way. Empathy allows us to view our own decisions and challenges from another person’s perspective.

#2 – Creative Curiosity

Design thinking doesn’t assume that there is one right answer. In fact, we don’t use design thinking to identify a single answer. Instead, we use the design thinking tools to generate lots of potential solutions to any question.

In design thinking, we demand curiosity. Not an idle curiosity, like “Is it going to rain today?” We demand a deep, core curiosity of how to do tasks better and how to improve the live of others. Curiosity in NPD includes understanding all of a customer’s problems and learning new technologies. In Life Design, we seek to find our energies and passions.

One way to regrow your curiosity is to disconnect from the grid for a few hours each week. Take a hike in the woods or a long bike ride. Play an old-fashioned board game with your friends and family. Go to the symphony.

The idea is to let your mind wander and enjoy fresh air and renewed relationships. On an outdoor trek, you might wonder about the shape of the trees, the colors of the flowers, or the destination of the birds flying across the sky. Downtime encourages our brains to seek new meaning through curiosity of how the world works.

#3 – Try New Things

In NPD, we often use prototypes to test customer reactions. With design thinking, you will try new stuff with earlier prototypes. Instead of testing a new product with a fully designed marketing campaign, test the form and function of a product improvement. Early prototype testing is inexpensive and can frame the context for a better designed product that will truly delight the customer. Not to mention, the customer interactions and feedback throughout the NPD process will lead to more competitive product and services.

In your own life, it is important to try new things, but within the boundaries of acceptable risk and expense. A participant in one of my PMP training classes told me that his wife decided she wanted to do triathlons. She wanted a new bicycle for her first event. He suggested she participate in a race first, with her current bike, to see if she liked it. She didn’t. And they saved the money for a new bicycle. However, she also discovered from the experience that she really enjoyed the running leg of the triathlon. So, the two of them began running together in all distance races (5K, 10K, half- and full-marathons).

Trying new things should not mean abandoning all that we’ve done until now. Instead, we can prototype parts and pieces to identify the best features and attributes to add, eliminate, or modify. Especially in innovation, we want to manage new features while understanding customer needs to use and interact with the product or service.

Design Thinking to Embrace Change

Because the world is competitive, we cannot rest on our laurels and hope that things will turn out okay. We must embrace change and identify opportunities to enhance our competitiveness. Winning business or winning happiness requires a different approach as our world becomes higher speed and more technologically integrated. Design thinking tools allow us to refocus on the person with empathy and to generate creative solutions to even the most challenging problems.

In NPD and in life, we use design thin king tools to (1) empathize with the customer and stakeholders throughout the development process and user experience, (2) to generate curiosity about how a product or service can be used and what new combinations of features and attributes will satisfy a customer’s needs, and (3) to establish frequent and candid feedback from customers on prototypes including form and function. Design thinking allows us to create connections with the people we serve and through empathetic relationships, we often benefit more than those we serve.

To Learn More

Join us in an introductory Life Design Master Mind group in Houston where we start with how you spend your time today. Over the next 6 months, we will use design thinking tools to take a deep dive into professional and personal motivation to frame and test what next steps you can take to live a joy-filled life. Check out our on-line tutorial on Design Thinking, too. Feel free to contact me at info@simple-pdh.com or 281-280-8717. At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications. You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!

Speaking on Design Thinking

7 September 2018 at Texas Association of Change Management Professionals Conference

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

A division of Global NP Solutions, LLC

Using Design Thinking to Manage Your Time

Posted on 08.09.18

A recent article in Harvard Business Review details that CEOs work, on average, 9.7 hours per day, conduct business on about 80% of weekend days, and work for almost 3 hours per day on 70% of their vacation days ⁽¹⁾. Yet, numerous other publications describe burnout as a major factor in declining performance of all workers. Burnout results in decreased motivation, lower productivity, and poor-quality work. Burnout manifests itself in lost time due to illness, poor health, and destabilized personal relationships. All of us, not just CEOs, need to better manage our time so that we can sustain deep engagement with our work and live happy, joy-filled lives.

How Do You Spend Your Time?

As product, project, and engineering managers, we know that we cannot find a solution to a problem until we fully understand the problem. Closing a budget or schedule gap first involves gathering data on the costs to-date and evaluating the work accomplished thus far. Once we have historical data in hand, we can interpret the size of the gap as well as begin to formulate changes and corrective actions to keep the project on plan.

Managing time in our professional and personal lives is much the same. First, we need to gather data on how we currently spend our time and then analyze that data to diagnose the need for change. There are two elements to tracking how you spend your time.

Task Time-Tracking

First, it’s important to know how much time you spend on various tasks throughout the day. In the HBR study discussed previously, the researchers used the CEOs’ executive assistants to track the CEOs time in 15-minute blocks. If you have staff support that can help you with time tracking of your various work tasks, by all means, take advantage of this service.

Since I don’t have full-time, in-office administrative support, I use a cloud-based time-tracking app. You can find dozens of free apps to help you track how much time you spend on which activities throughout the day. Many corporations also have available the Microsoft “My Analytics” time-tracking tool to analyze your Outlook calendar for time spent in meetings, etc.

Regardless of the tool you choose, make sure the application is easy to use (no more than one or two clicks) and can later expand if you want to track higher degrees of granularity of how you spend your time. However, make sure that you start with very simple task analysis. We don’t want time-tracking to become an extra job in itself! For example, I track teaching time, writing, specific client projects, and volunteer activities. I can also match each category to related income streams as part of evaluation and gap analysis.

Design Thinking Time Tracking

In our Life Design Master Mind Group, we follow the advice of Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in Designing Your Life. Here, we track our “flow” in different activities. Whereas tracking the minutes or hours spent on various tasks allows us to evaluate cost-benefit, tracking “flow” gives us a sense of what work we enjoy and what activities motivate us to do more.

“Flow” is a concept in which are working on tasks or activities that are so motivation and engaging that we don’t even notice the passage of time. These are often the activities we daydream about or find ourselves planning for free or quiet time. Flow is “being in the zone,” sort of like Steph Curry hitting dozens of consecutive three-pointers from the half-court-line. You feel connected to and inspired by the work. You are so embedded in your work, you might forget to stop and eat a meal. And while it is hard to describe “flow,” we’ve all been there and recognize the positive and rewarding feelings that come from “being in the zone”.

Therefore, in Life Design Master Mind, we want to identify the time we spend in flow. A separate time-tracking exercise using design thinking will follow the tasks on which you work, the energy you apply to the activity, and your feelings of engagement with the task.

For example, when I look at my journal from about a year ago, I recorded “doing email” with energy of 10% and engagement of 10%. Not surprising, as the CEO study by HBR described previously also noted that these senior executives preferred face-to-face contact with direct reports and customers.

During the same month, I recorded my energy level at 75% and engagement at 85% while developing new course materials for one of the university classes I teach. And I recorded working out at the gym with 100% energy and 75% engagement. (As a side note, my husband thinks I can get a bit too fanatical about my fitness regime sometimes…)

You’ll want to keep a Flow Journal for a few weeks so that you can capture the broadest set of activities in which you engage as well as to average out any anomalies. During a week when I had a head cold, my energy level was low for all tasks. But, again, that’s understandable when I move to interpreting how I spent my time and what I enjoy.

Next Steps to Manage Your Time

Once you’ve collected data on how you spend your time, you need to evaluate where the gaps exist between the current stat and desired future state. In Life Design Master Mind, we delve into understanding the core of flow for each individual and use more design thinking tools to frame the context for prototyping and testing new paths in our careers and lives.

You also can use the detailed task time-tracking to eliminate or minimize the least value-added tasks. For instance, we all have to “do email,” yet there is little profit gained in this task. Based on Cal Newport’s advice in “Deep Work,” I typically check email only two or three times per day, and at times of the day when my motivational energy is already low (like after lunch). In this way, I can preserve times of the day when my inspiration is high for “flow” activities (e.g. I do a lot of writing first thing in the morning).

How Do You Manage Your Time?

A lot of how we spend our day is rooted in habit. Some of these are good habits and some are not-so-good. We can only expect to change our lives and strive for the next highest level in our careers if we understand where we’re at right now. Start today with a task time-tracking app. Then, later add a Flow Journal to learn which of these tasks give you energy, engagement, and an acceptable cost-benefit ratio. (You can download a template for your Flow Journal as part of the Life Design Master Mind Group.)

(1) Porter, Michael E. and Nitin Nohria, “How CEOs Manager Their Time,” Harvard Business Review July/Aug 2018, pg. 42-51.

To Learn More

Reading Recommendation

We discuss different project team structures in NPDP Certification Prep: A 24-Hour Study Guide, and you can find additional references at https://globalnpsolutions.com/services/npd-resources/. Some other books you might enjoy:

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Deep Work by Cal Newport
The Power of Little Ideas by David C. Robertson and Kent Lineback
Well Designed by Jon Kolko
101 Design Methods by Vijay Kumar
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

Speaking on Design Thinking

15 August 2018 at Houston Organizational Development Network Meeting
7 September 2018 at Texas Association of Change Management Professionals Conference

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

A division of Global NP Solutions, LLC

What We Can Learn from Failure

Posted on 07.19.18

Any project, product, or engineering manager knows that we can learn from failure. Sometimes it is painful, but the learning often outweighs the misery of a lost opportunity. Learning new approaches or alternative ways of doing things is how we advance over professions, personal growth, and even technology.

In “Designing Your Life,” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, three types of failures are described. The authors argue – and I agree – that we should approach “learning from failure” differently depending on the category of the missed opportunity.

Screw-Ups

The first type of failure is a simple screw-up. This is also known as a mistake or error. We know what to do to be successful in the situation, but something just happened to prevent the right thing from happening.

We don’t really learn from screw-ups because we know the right thing to do already. Just this one time, something prevented us from acting in the normal way we would. Maybe you missed your spouse’s birthday because you were swamped at work and travelling across the globe. While the excuse might not pacify your spouse, you have never missed a birthday in over 20 years of marriage. It’s just a screw-up and won’t happen again. You can put a reminder on your calendar or design checklists to prevent future screw-ups.

About a year ago, I had a large-sized screw-up. I was stressed over the impacts of Hurricane Harvey and my father-in-law who had entered hospice care at the time. So, I accidentally copied the wrong course materials into one of the college classes I teach online. Immediately, students swamped my email asking if they had enrolled in the wrong course and why were all the assignment due dates for last semester. Some were accusatory, indicating that the Chapter 1 material had literally changed (it hadn’t). Unfortunately, some students didn’t even notice the error (but that’s a story for another day).

At first, I agonized over how to correct my mistake. I tried of a variety of technical solutions and realized there was not going to be an easy fix. More importantly, I let go of the emotion attached to making a big screw-up and acknowledged that it was a just a one-time error. In the future, I now know that I need to double-check before I double-click!

And I really can’t learn anything from this screw-up that will improve my performance as a professor or enhance my knowledge about becoming a better project, product, or engineering manager. We need to be forgiving of ourselves when we screw-up and then move on.

Blind Spots

Burnett and Evans call the second type of failure a “weakness”. These are errors and lost opportunities that we recognize occurring over and over again but are arenas in our lives in which cannot (or will not) improve. Like a screw-up, we know the right action to take but the task is not viewed as important enough to change our behavior. Continuing to make the same mistake may cause us a headache yet we (stubbornly) do so again.

Because blind spots do not cause us long-term emotional or physical distress, we don’t learn from these failures. There really isn’t any opportunity for growth through correcting these weaknesses, either. For example, I tend to put off bookkeeping until the credit card bill arrives. I know that a more effective strategy is to do bookkeeping on a weekly basis (which would also keep my desk clear of papers, invoices, and receipts), but I have a blind spot. I don’t like doing bookkeeping and because the task gets completed anyway, there is no long-term pain that will force me to change my behavior. The worst-case scenario is a small headache as I rush to input revenue and expense data when the bill arrives in the mail.

Growth Opportunities

The failures that we value as project, product, and engineering managers are growth opportunities. These are the reason why we do lessons learned reviews to identify how we can improve future activities to yield better performance. The growth opportunities are the times when we see errors, mistakes, and failures from different perspectives – and when we can calmly and clearly identify a better approach to solving a problem.

During my career, I supported marketing and maintaining customers for a chemical catalyst material. Luckily, I had the opportunity to learn from a failed communication. A client from an Asian country was sending frequent emails asking for a specific technical solution to a problem their plant was facing. There were a half dozen or more names on the cc: list of the email. I didn’t know these folks at the customer’s plant, but I assumed that since my contact had included them on the email, my response should also include these people.

So, I carefully explained the operational adjustment that was necessary and hit the “send” button. The next day, I found the same question in my email inbox with an added statement that implied I had not addressed their problem. I rephrased my response. And the next day, the question re-appeared. I could sense the customer’s growing discontent and frustration. I, too, was puzzled why the plant wouldn’t implement my solution.

After a few rounds of emails that went no place, I decided to reply only to my contact with no one else on the distribution list. This resulted in a new response. He was grateful for the solution offered and it worked perfectly! I learned from this failure.

First, in his cultural context, my contact need to retain “face” in the situation. He could achieve this by providing the solution on his own to his colleagues. With my “reply to all,’ I was robbing him of the chance to demonstrate technical competence in an emotionally-charged environment.

Next, and more importantly, I learned that communication is sensitive to each independent situation. My German customers would have been annoyed had I not used “reply to all”. Today, I like to consider each name on an email list to determine whether its of value to the individual. I also like to consider the social and cultural environment of the communication. And, instead of “assuming,” I will ask.

In short, I learned a lot from this failure that has given me opportunities for both personal and professional growth.

Learning from (Some) Failures

When we take a look back at our, we should categorize the failures and learn from the growth opportunities. There’s no use in losing sleep over a screw-up. It’s just that – a mistake. The right approach is to recognize and acknowledge the error, sincerely apologize, and move on.

Likewise, with blind spots or weaknesses, we should use scheduling tools, checklists, reminders, and other time management tools to help us be more efficient. Yet, it’s okay to acknowledge that changing our behavior in these situations is of limited value in advancing a career as a project, product, or engineering manager. Eliminating the blind spot might free us of minor headaches but won’t necessarily make us better people.

Instead, as you review your performance throughout a day, examine the failures for growth opportunities. These failures, errors, or mistakes take you by surprise. You observed an outcome you didn’t expect. Why? What could be done differently if you encounter a similar situation tomorrow? How would a trusted friend or mentor approach that same situation?

In our on-line tutorial on Design Thinking and in our Agile NPD course, we discuss failing fast and failing often to drive learning. However, we must first categorize the type of failure to benefit from lessons learned. Not all failures offer a growth opportunity, but we must be open and honest when we do encounter such circumstances. Join us for the Agile NPD course or check out our self-study and other NPDP Workshops. Feel free to contact me at info@simple-pdh.com or 281-280-8717. At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications. You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!

Reading Recommendation

We discuss different customer insight methodologies in NPDP Certification Prep: A 24-Hour Study Guide, and you can find additional references at https://globalnpsolutions.com/services/npd-resources/. Some other books you might enjoy:

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
The Power of Little Ideas by David C. Robertson and Kent Lineback
Well Designed by Jon Kolko
101 Design Methods by Vijay Kumar
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

Speaking on Design Thinking

25 July 2018 at PMI-Houston Energy Corridor Lunch and Learn
15 August 2018 at Houston Organizational Development Network Meeting
7 September 2018 at Texas Association of Change Management Professionals Conference

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

A division of Global NP Solutions, LLC

The Curse of Knowledge

Posted on 01.18.18

I was recently teaching a Project Management Professional (PMP®) prep course to a group of 15 experienced project and program managers. The gray hairs in the room attested to the years of experience, and all of the participants actively described their current project work and challenges. Several of the attendees were employed by a government agency working on capital construction projects – roads, bridges, and drainage.

Not surprisingly, the government agency had a lot of strict and rigid policies and procedures in place to manage projects. Contractors were granted procurement agreements when they had the lowest bid, regardless of past experience. Bidding and acquisition followed specific procedural steps with no allowances for deviations. In no circumstance was budget allowed to overrun, yet cost estimates could be padded beyond a normally-acceptable allowance for private industry.

During the PMP prep class, one individual (let’s call him Spencer), struggled to align practices from the Project Management Institute (PMI®) with the policies and procedures he was used to in his job. Change orders were a particular stumbling block since the government agency required full accountability of any change before it was approved. A general industry practice is to estimate the overall impact scope, schedule, and budget for the change, and to work out the details later if the change is approved.

Spencer’s problem was the curse of knowledge. His experience in one job had taught him that there was one right way to do the job. Of course, his knowledge had served him well in his job and resulted in success in that job.

The Basis of Cognitive Bias

Spencer had learned to follow the rules. He had made sense of complex projects according to one set of policies and procedures. Following these practices to the letter meant he could successfully execute a project in that environment. He simply could not conceive of an alternate way to do things.

All human beings are bombarded with data and information daily – even more so today with social media and technology available to us 24/7. We are exposed to risks and we must make trade-off decisions to balance time, money, and relationships in a constant rhythm. To survive the onslaught of information, we necessarily filter this vast amount of information through our history of past experiences to make the best choice.

For example, we know that if there is a car accident on our primary route to work, a secondary road will be a good alternative. Because we are familiar with the roads, we can easily estimate the trade-off in terms of the delay in time to reach our workplace. Our history leads us to an effective decision in the present.

However, in projects and in innovation, cognitive bias can lead us to uninteresting, trivial tweaks of technology. Our new products and services are “lukewarm”, and sales have only marginal improvements. The Apple iPhone’s latest version advertises “brighter colors”. I have to wonder if the average consumer can discern these subtle intensity changes for brighter colors and if that alone will motivate him to spend $1,000 on a new smartphone.

Reframing the Problem

One of the key principles in Design Thinking is to reframe the problem. This technique is also helpful for project, quality, and risk managers. Looking at a problem from a new perspective can help us generate new insights to a better solution. Even more important is to view the problem from the customer’s perspective.

Andy Zynga shares a story (“The Innovator Who Knew Too Much,” HBR.org, 29 May 2013) in which an organization sought a new vaccine for AIDS. Scientists experience in working on solutions for the dreaded disease did not submit any proposals. Yet, when the organization reframed the problem as a need to stabilize proteins, they received dozens of high-quality proposals. Protein stabilization is a step toward a vaccine, but cognitive bias prevented the scientists from viewing their work from that perspective.

Tools for Overcoming Bias

The first tool to overcome cognitive bias is observation. All too often, R&D scientists, engineers, and project managers sit in offices working on so-called innovations in isolation. Get out there! Talk to potential customers and end-users. Learn what their problems are and seek to understand issues from their point of view.

A second useful tool to generate alternative perspectives is the SCAMPER heuristic. The acronym SCAMPER encourages us to view a product or solution with a different perspective: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse.

Finally, we can use standard project management techniques such as interviews and focus groups to gain insights to the problems our customers face. What these tools have in common is that they are qualitative market research techniques. While data is important, we also have to understand the emotional impacts of trade-off decisions and of how our customers interact with our products and services.

The Curse of Knowledge

I finally convinced Spencer that his experience was very valuable for the government agency and for us to learn from him. But, for four hours, while he sat for the PMP exam, he needed to visualize the ideal world that PMI envisions for successful project management. Spencer suffered from the curse of knowledge, assuming that the right answer in one situation translate to the right answer in another circumstance. While following our internal compass usually results in a predictable outcome, project, product, and engineering managers need to overcome such cognitive biases in order to generate truly innovative solutions. We do this by viewing a problem from new perspectives and especially through the eyes of our customers.

To learn more about problem-solving for project, product, or engineering managers, please join us in an NPDP Workshop. Feel free to contact me at info@simple-pdh.com or 281-280-8717. At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications. You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

A division of Global NP Solutions, LLC

Design Thinking

Posted on 01.11.18

Design Thinking (DT) has been growing in popularity as an approach to determining requirements in projects, especially in new product development (NPD). While successful NPD has always needed a close tie to customers, DT formalizes customer focus within the methodology. DT is a collaborative and creative problem-solving methodology that involves exploration of many alternative and rapid prototyping to deliver products and services that meet customer satisfaction and quality goals.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans of Stanford University have written a great book on applying design thinking principles to the journey of life. They list five mindsets for DT.

Curiosity
Bias to action
Reframing
Awareness
Collaboration

Curiosity

Product development team members and design thinking share an inherent characteristic of approaching work. So do engineers, marketers, data scientists, and social workers. We all want to know how things work – it’s just that the “thing” that we study is different. Computer scientists study machines and codes. Psychologists study people.

Wanting to know how something works is formally called “curiosity”. Curiosity is why we ask questions and how we delve deeper into a problem. DT requires a healthy dose of curiosity so that we can understand the true problem facing a customer and so that we can build empathy with their plight.

Bias to Action

As Burnett and Evans point out, design thinkers like to “try stuff”. And like successful product development practitioners and project managers, designers are not afraid of failure. In fact, a test that fails is valued for what the team can learn. In this way, DT is not unlike a lean learning approach in which failure gains meaning because new opportunities are revealed. Remember what Edison said? He did not learn how to make a light bulb, he had learned hundreds of ways not to make one.

Reframing

A critical skill of a creative problem-solver is to understand the “right” problem to solve. Often this requires taking a step back to reframe the problem. A classic example is that we don’t buy a drill because of its features and functionalities. We buy a drill because we want a hole in wood, steel, or some other surface.

When you reframe the problem, you can often come up with more creative and effective solutions. However, reframing must consider the customer’s viewpoint. It’s not that people on diets don’t want to eat cookies, it’s that they want to limit their calorie intake. Reframing the problem has led to 100-calorie packs of mini-cookies. This solution may have been available to a product development team without considering alternate views of the problem.

Awareness

Again, understanding and defining the “real” problem is important to generating the best solution. Design thinking asks us to be aware – aware of our biases and aware of different perspectives. You know the old saying that if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Engineers, marketers, and project managers tend to view all problems through a lens of past performance. We want to apply a solution that worked in a similar situation in the past.

Yet, breakthrough innovation and disruptive product development requires that a new, novel, and unique solution is used to address existing problems. Using the camera in your cell phone, you can take a picture of the parking spot and its number, so you don’t “lose” your car at a large event. You can pay for your daily latte with a cell phone app. None of these solutions would be available if the problems of a cell phone had been restricted to improving the quality of voice transmission.

Collaboration

Finally, a major element of design thinking involves cross-functional and multi-disciplinary collaboration. New product development (NPD) teams typically involve R&D, engineering, operations, marketing, sales, and purchasing. However, we sometimes fail to involve all the team members all the time. DT demonstrates that collaboration among team members leads to better solutions.

Diverse viewpoints can access more creative ideas which generate breakthrough innovations. Engineers may view usability and features as key to a product’s success while a logistics expert will note packaging and shipping boundaries for the new product. Working together, cross-functional team members can create a product or service that is optimized from the customer’s viewpoint.

Mindsets of Design Thinking

Design thinking is not new but applying the iterative and cross-functional approach to projects with customer empathy outweighing project planning might be new to you or your organization. Teams working on complex issues should consider using a DT methodology that gives a collaborative and creative problem-solving approach and places the customer first. The five mindsets of DT include curiosity to identify the right problem, a bias to action in learning from failure, reframing problems to gain the customer’s view, awareness of biases in generating solutions, and collaboration among diverse and multi-disciplinary team members.

You can learn more about design thinking in an NPDP Workshop. Feel free to contact me at info@simple-pdh.com or 281-280-8717. At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications. You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

A division of Global NP Solutions, LLC

Rapid Prototyping

Posted on 01.04.18

New product development (NPD) practitioners and engineering project managers are challenged to design and develop products and services that deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction. While it is not always easy to do, we know that involving customers during design and development stages is critical to the commercial success of a new product or service. We must consider how a potential consumer will interact with a product over its life cycle in order to gain consistent market share.

Rapid prototyping is one method frequently used in NPD and design thinking (DT) to evaluate a potential new product or service. A prototype is defined as a representation of the product, but it is not in its final form. Materials used in the prototype sample might be different than those used in the final product, for example. Normally prototypes are built in a lab rather than assembled on a manufacturing line. A prototype is not expected to have the same longevity as the final product and so the method of construction is often simplified or incomplete in some way.

Rapid prototyping is a methodology in which the product is tested quickly – in a matter of hours or days rather than weeks or months. The fundamental concept is to test as many ideas as possible in as short of a time period as feasible. Thus, rapid prototyping is utilized to screen ideas and to filter product concepts so that the final design most closely reflects customer expectations.

Tools in Rapid Prototyping

Two tools that are commonly used in rapid prototyping are concurrent engineering and design of experiments. Both tools involve cross-functional teams and encourage product, project, and engineering managers to consider design variables in addition to technical specifications.

Concurrent engineering (CE) is a tool that focuses on the cross-functional team as well as the long-term nature of product development. For example, in a traditional waterfall project management process, a system or product is planned, designed, and tested prior to any production runs. Concurrent engineering brings the production and operations boundaries and constraints to the forefront so that planning, and testing, and testing activities consider simultaneous production limitations. The end result is a better product design that can be quickly scaled in the manufacturing facility. Moreover, the multi-disciplinary approach of concurrent engineering draws the team members together with stronger relationships leading to more effective and efficient work practices.

The second rapid prototyping tools is design of experiments (DoE). In a traditional R&D study, we will vary one element at a time and evaluate the impact that a change causes. Usually there are several input variables in a product design and each of these has several different levels which may need to be tested. Design of experiments is a statistical technique which allows for simultaneous testing of multiple variables at several levels. Thus, design and development cycles are shortened as the most important components are determined with a few tests rather than many one-variable experiments over a longer time period. Customers can interact with a few prototypes developed from the key variable list based on the results from design of experiments testing.

What to Test?

Rapid prototyping must test both the function and form of the product. Both elements are crucially important to whether a customer will engage with the product or service in a buying decision. The function of a product determines what it can – and cannot – do. Functions are often clearly specified technical requirements and can be easily measured.

The form of a product, on the other hand, requires continuous testing with potential customers over the product development life cycle. Consumers and end-users often have changing tastes and preferences based upon trends, fashions, and new technologies. Consider, for example, the form of an automobile. In the 1950s and 1960s, cars were designed with excessively large “fins” and utilized a lot of chrome. By the 1980s, cars often had a boxy, minimalist style reflecting fashion preferences and economic conditions. Today’s SUVs include interior design elements more than exterior components, such as hands-free interaction with technology (GPS, Pandora, and phone calls). Consumers today value technology interaction at a higher level than the appearance of the automobile.

Using Rapid Prototyping

Companies can benefit from using rapid prototyping in their design and development of new products and services. By testing and evaluating a lot of different combinations early in the NPD life cycle, customer needs and wants are better defined. With a closer relationship to customers and a better understanding of their expectations, ideas are quickly transformed into working models and commercial products. Rapid prototyping saves a firm money by quickly screening out poor concepts and by accelerating time-to-market.

If you’d like to learn more about rapid prototyping, please join us for an NPDP Workshop. Feel free to contact me at info@simple-pdh.com or 281-280-8717. At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications. You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

A division of Global NP Solutions, LLC