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.

1. Curiosity
2. Bias to action
3. Reframing
4. Awareness
5. 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!

 

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