To apply the principles and tools of Design Thinking, some practitioners have a 5-step process, some four or some even six. School of Design Thinking also has a process – a 5-step process. That said, we don’t start with the process or focus on the process alone while applying Design Thinking. Our experience has taught us that compliance to a process isn’t everything. Teams tend to follow processes to the T and then all are unhappy – neither the development team, nor the marketing or sales team or the implementation team. Beyond a point, the process becomes a comfort zone. I recently came across an insightful article in LinkedIn titled “Agile is Dead”. The article talks about how mere adherence to process completely killed the agility of Agile than the intention with which it came to be. In a user-centric, human-centric world, a process is needed for a common understanding for the team – it may be useful when the product or service is in the nascent stage or in the growth stage – but in later stages, we need to look at either the need of the product/service and the process through which it is being delivered.
Each step in the Design Thinking process includes a set of tools. There should be more focus on the insights from the tools than just blindly completing it because the process says so. It will not be out of place to mention here that Design Thinking is a team sport and not an individual one. Hence, different people with diverse perspectives should come together to work on the tools and share their values.
At the School of Design Thinking, we have broken Design Thinking as “Design The Thinking®” first before “Thinking The Design”. Design The Thinking® talks about the mindset aspect and Thinking The Design is about the process to be followed. The process here is indicative and definitely iterative and would be flexible to what is being embarked upon.
The first step of the Design Thinking process is ‘Feel’. How well do you understand the current eco-system? What is the current reality for the customer? What pain is the customer going through? What alternatives does the customer have and what are the work-arounds available for the customer?
This is followed by the ‘Define’ phase where the problem is redefined as an opportunity. These two steps should ideally take about 50% of the time and effort and energy. The mindset aspect helps us avoid falling in love with the solution. A design thinker would always fall in love with the problem and hence fall in love with the person facing the problem. Only this leads to user-centricity. Such a mindset (we term it as Design-mind) helps in understanding the need for the stated requirement and also what the unstated requirements would be. A design mind enables one to stay with the problem for a little longer than getting into the solutioning. Unless the customer’s world today is understood well, the next three steps in the process of ‘Divergence’, ‘Convergence’ and ‘Communication’ would be of no value at all.
Hence, it is imperative that the Design Thinking team focuses more on the need for the application of Design Thinking, the challenges today and asking tough questions rather than jumping into following the process.
Author
Dr. Anbu Rathinavel
Head and Co-founder - School of Design Thinking
Chief Design Officer - Intellect Design Arena
