Design Thinking 101: An adventure for you & your business
By: Hugo Gatsby
Tags: Collaboration, Design Thinking, Team Building, Behavioural Science, Branding

The design thinking process

Design Think for Your Business

Design thinking evolved from humble beginnings. The invention of the wheel, the automobile, all the way to an iPhone, airport security, life design and even Uber. With the introduction of each invention, the world becomes more accessible and, by default, more crowded with competition.

Design thinking originated as a designer’s approach to problem-solving, yet over the years, it grew in intricacy and complexity. Regardless, the natural allure of this methodology is that anyone can be a design thinker. It can be done anywhere and in any industry. With the recent state of the world, most of the designing will be done in the safety of our own home, and that’s perfectly fine. Being creative happens everywhere. By practicing the though process of reframing a situation, iterative testing, a bias to action, playing with Lego, drawing on whiteboards and playing with playdoh, you will start to Think Differently (yes, this is a play on Apple). In short, we are all design thinkers. We just don’t know what it feels like yet.

How do we begin?

Innovation is the new marketing. We know and agree with this. Great.

Now what?

Design thinking starts with a deliberate attempt to expand our scope instead of narrowing it. Traditionally, marketing was seen as a shotgun. A massive campaign rollout to reach a wide array of people. With digital marketing, it’s become more selective, like a game of duck duck goose. Small finite specification, culminating in a specific, personalized experience. Marketing is now small and personal, so where does the shotgun fit in now?

Design thinking is the new shotgun. The goal with ideas is to go wide and think of as many as you can.

Often the genius ideas are the easiest ones to think of. When we started Stradea, it took us 2,058 km of driving to come up with the name. We went from Toronto to New Orleans. Yet, it was in our living room listening to BB King on vinyl where we thought up of one of our greatest ideas. (It’s in the design phase now). Some ideas take time, and others come instantly. There is no rhyme or reason for creativity. You just need to try.

Design thinking will open the room to possibilities and create amazing ideas. They will explore where no one has gone before, or at least ask the questions that will get you there. Just imagine, adopting design thinking practices in a board room setting. Asking people what they really thought and having everyone build up the ideas into tangible solutions.

Questions are Currency

Some really smart guy once said — If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper questions to ask. Designers like to say they fall in love with the problem and not the solution, and with a reframe like this, it pushes people to ask questions to get to know the problem. For example, dating before Tinder or Bumble, you spent time getting to know your partner by asking questions and experiencing enjoyment with them.

In a sense, digital marketing is like that by way of focusing on the customer, defining their persona, learning what they do for a living, where they like to shop, what they like to eat, who they talk to on Instagram and voila!

Fail early, fail often

Let’s just say, failure is not a bad thing, as long as you learn from it. Nothing is wrong with failure as long as it happens early in the process. A vibrant design-thinking culture will encourage prototyping — quick,

cheap, and dirty (Note: we are no longer using the dating reference) — as part of the creative process and not just as a way of validating finished ideas.

The trick is, prototypes need to be experienced and focus on real-world feedback loops, not within quality control processes. Make it functional, make it feel, taste and smell real and have it solve for the problem. If you can’t test it in the field, act it out. Improvisation works in any scenario, and as Rory Sutherland said in his book “Alchemy: The Dark Art,” — ‘don’t forget to scent the soap.

Learn and grow

There was once a girl who said: “I never get old; I grow.” You’ll never be the smartest person in a room, and if you are, find a new room. Your team is always a lot smarter than any individual one of you. Learn from each other and grow with each other. Virtual collaboration is quickly becoming the new norm. Challenge your organization to think about how to bring your team together remotely. With the world in a COVID-19 tailspin, this has become a primary concern for most businesses. It is also a perfect opportunity to sink deeper into projects, listen and engage with your teams, learn from them and their experiences to drive collaborative innovation.

Make the experience as productive and creative as possible. Building on the ideas of others is always more collaborative and engaging. Much better than listening to a 4-hour lecture on the intricacies of a scorecard matrix and its functional process in winning teams.

Trust us, we know.

Take a human-centred approach

Design thinkers observe how people behave. We love to study people because people are interesting. But if we are making a product, and people are the market we are selling to, shouldn’t we understand how they engage/love/hate the experience?

Look at the entire process. Take Sake, for example. How would a consumer go through their journey of buying sake? How does that experience change if the consumer is highly educated in Sake (like our researcher James), or less educated (like our CEO Hugo)? Prioritize the emotional connection with your product as this is where loyalty begins.

User Experience (UX) looks at the behaviours that drive engagement. It’s more than buying a bottle in a store. The human-centred approach of a design thinker can increase the prospect of a consumer’s acceptance of your product by connecting the existing behaviours to the solution (in this case, your product).

Design Thinking is about problem-solving, yes. But its origins are on human-design, learning and understanding their pain points and creating solutions. We encourage you to think more like a designer, sculpt beautifully crafted marketing campaigns, products, services or even redesign your life. This isn’t a fad; it is a mindset that has existed for ages. Fortunately, now we have learned how to harness the benefits and apply to whatever human-centred challenges you are facing.

We’ve covered a lot in part 1 of our design thinking for businesses. In our next phase, we will introduce four new areas of consideration. To close out the series, we will discuss design thinking for you (the individual design thinker).

We felt it best to inform, but not overwhelm. To sum up, design thinking is a choose your adventure. However, when an organization looks to implement design thinking, they should adopt a gamification approach. Like all role-playing games (RPG’s), each character has their own attributes, skills, and strengths that will benefit the team. An organization’s goal is to build a team that can grow with experience together. That’s the sign of a real design thinking environment.

When thinking of growth and innovation, organizations feel nervous or uncertain. The act of innovation means that you won’t necessarily know where you’ll end up. You just know that you have to start. But the start is the fun part.

More Pollock, less Van Gogh

There is no perfect equation for innovation. We like to think of it as a painting. Jackson Pollock is a perfect example. A variety of approaches that lead to innovation. There is no straight line. But there is energy, intention and a sheer shine of inspiration. Innovation comes easily in this form. However, the downside is that fewer of these projects may ever go to the market.

However, those that do are likely to have a lasting impact. Encouraging experimentation is easy in the right environment. Encourage your team, collaborate with them, heck, even let them play with Lego to design their prototype. For my company (Stradea), I actually used Lego to design our website and layouts. Change the medium is an easy way to challenge the status quo.

The design thinking lifecycle.​

We wanted to introduce a model we absolutely love. This is a perfect example of the design thinking lifecycle. The illustration breaks down the model and planning stages of design thinking and dives deeper into design thinking’s role in developing the natural experience.

We won’t jump into the lean user experience of lean most viable product/prototype (MVP) development. We wanted to include it to let you and your team start thinking about the bigger picture when all things are connected.

Find help wherever it resides

Not like “professional help,” but help from a professional. I do not fix my car when it’s not running properly. I probably could troubleshoot it, but I call my neighbour (he’s actually a performance automotive mechanic). There will be times when it makes more sense to go outside your organization and look for opportunities to expand the innovation ecosystem.

One of Stradea’s core values is to co-create (like Einstein and Picasso). By this we mean, working with partners to solve big problems. How are Einstein and Picasso relative? Think of the relative theory and cubism; the similarities are uncanny. Sometimes co-creation will happen with customers or new

partnerships you build. Other times, you may need to hire an expert to help take the reigns.

The goal is to find help wherever you can. Perspective is a great motivator. Try asking your accountant to solve a problem you’re having. You may be surprised by how creative they are. Our accountant, well, let’s just say the Dos Equis campaign was probably just a chapter from his life.

Budgets, yeah we’re talking numbers

Design thinking is fast-paced, unruly, and disruptive, and those are its high points. Not the most efficient process when allocating budget cycles. We once managed a $2.5M portfolio budget for a bank and tried to introduce design thinking in our plan. Try justifying a budget of $250k — $1M as a line item.

Learn from our mistakes. Rather than sabotage your most creative asset, be prepared to rethink budget schedules. As projects unfold, teams will learn more about the opportunities before them. Share that information throughout the organization. Your budget will now positively impact other departments. In our case, we leveraged an agile resource allocation process.

Our design thinking process started with planning the budget. We were design thinking about how to design think as part of our marketing plan. That’s some 4th wall design thinking, but it worked. The trick is to accept that milestones cannot be predicted with certainty and that each project will grow or shrink depending on what’s uncovered through the testing and design phases.

The key to agile budgeting is a review process that relies upon the judgment rather than some kind of algorithmic process mechanically applied on an excel sheet.

Don’t ask what. Ask why.

Toyota does it (5 times consecutively), 5-year-old children do it (constantly), and Simon Sinek is the best example of how to do it correctly. Ask Why? For design thinkers, asking “Why?” is the chance to reframe the problem. It allows you to question what is the root cause of the issue.

Toyota’s five whys is the best example of this. Five whys (or five whys) is an iterative interrogative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. The goal of the technique is to determine the root cause of a defect by repeating the question “Why?”. Each answer forms the basis of the next question, which eventually leads to the right question and better still the right set of solutions. Note, there is never just one solution. There are strong and weak solutions, but with design thinking, quick iterative testing is the way to discover the best solution for you.

In short, design thinking is pretty much a choose your adventure. However, within an organization, design thinking becomes more gamified, similar to a Role-Playing game, where each character has its attributes and skills that will benefit the team. Build a team that can grow with experience together. That’s the sign of a real design thinking environment. Always challenging, always learn, and if you have the option, watch a little Golden Girls.

There is something purely gratifying about putting something new out into the world. For some, it is an award-winning piece of industrial design or a streamlined mathematical proof (thank you, Ed Witten). For some, it’s the mathematical proof of validity for life on a moon around Jupiter (true story, the person was 9).

Personal accomplishment is a powerful driving force. Think of your past managers. We all have that “one” boss you’ll never ever EVER want to work for again. But also, we have those bosses who inspire us and encourage us to explore our skills and ideas even further.

Don’t ask what. Ask why.

We talked about this in our last article, but felt it is a perfect point to repeat. It’s that important.

Do we have to paraphrase our own work? Oh well, let’s do it anyways. “Toyota does it with asking why 5 times consecutively. Asking “Why?” is the chance to reframe the problem. It allows you to question what is the root cause of the issue.”

For example, our team travels all across the continent, meeting with clients and producing work in collaborative environments. But at night, all we want is a good night’s sleep. Now, my wife, she prefers only Hilton (her company has some great perks). Now when design thinking on how to improve a Hotel’s experience, think about the importance of a fancy hotel lobby over a good night’s sleep in a comfy bed.

Asking “Why?” may annoy your colleagues who just want to move on. But it will delight the end-user (the real ones paying your salaries). Sure, balance is important, but discoveries happen most often by accident. Why not leave a little room to grow in your process? Besides, there is nothing more frustrating than coming up with the right answer to the wrong question. Start with the why. Your branding team will love you for it. We promise.

See the sounds. Hear the colours. Open your eyes.

We spend most of our lives not noticing the important things. Think of marriage. The more familiar we are with a situation, the more we take for granted. Innovation begins with attention to detail.

Good design thinkers observe the problem at hand. Great design thinkers observe everything. I knew precisely when I became a design thinker. I wasn’t even in the room when it happened. But, the story goes: a now ex-girlfriend asked my mother why I am so different. My mother, a person who I wouldn’t say, had the best relationship with me, turned to her and said.

“You and I are very much the same. We may look to the sky and see a star. We may think of that star and how there may be people on a planet, living around it. We may think of who they are, what they look like, and maybe what life is like for them. That’s us.”

“Now, my son, he looks to the sky and understands how all the stars and all the worlds are connected. He’ll appreciate things we never thought to ask. He will categorize and comprehend things we may never understand if we live to be a hundred. Just because you can’t understand it doesn’t mean you can’t love him. It just means you’ll never know him.”

Since that day, I’ve been my mom’s number 1 fan (my brothers may fight me on that thought though). It took over 35 years before I heard that, but when I did. It changed everything. Besides, she told me not to waste my time with that girl, and now I’m happily married, own an asterism (thank you NASA for the help) and have a baby on the way. Maybe I learned my design thinking way of life from my mom? That was some long game strategy she played.

When design thinking, start with easy questions. Why are wheels round (ok maybe not that easy)? Why are the maintenance hole covers round? Why do Canadians apologize so much? Why are pizzas round, cut into triangles and served in square boxes? I still ponder about that one regularly.

As accessible designers, our team takes it a step further. When we design websites, we think of things like contrast, fonts types that help people with dyslexia, even what would it be like to be colour-blind? Sure, Google Page Speed is an issue and making things accessible isn’t always the most optimized option, but there is integrity in what we do when we create inclusive solutions. Take pride in your thoughts and choices.

*****We’ve included a free Dyslexia font type download at the end of this article.

Make it visual

Record your observations and ideas visually. Every designer on our team has notebooks upon notebooks of ideas, images, sketches. That will never end. Being visual allows us to look at a problem differently. If you have a problem, draw it out. This little change in your daily routine can yield great rewards in your progress. Think of how impactful infographics have become over the last decade. This is design thinking at its finest.

Build on the ideas of others

We mentioned this earlier; all of us are smarter than any individual one of us. When working in collaboration, no idea is a bad idea. Try building on each idea. Give it the ol’ college try. Seldom, if ever, would the original idea be the end product, and if it is, you’re doing something wrong.

Think through it with others. Look for support in your thought process to help you grow. Don’t settle for the first good idea that comes into your head. Work to achieve greatness.

Build a balanced portfolio

When you design something, document it. Archive your process and add it to your portfolio. Be sure to document the process as it unfolds. In design thinking, the journey is just as important as the destination. As your portfolio grows, look at the work that inspired you the most. You’ll begin to see your style blossom and take shape.

To design or not to design, is it even a question?

We don’t know all the answers, and that’s ok. What we are looking at is how to find answers to specific problems. Design thinking has its origins in the training and the professional practice of designers. That doesn’t mean that it is only for designers.

Design thinking is meant to engage with people on a personal level. I am proudly autistic, and I would love to discuss the challenges I’ve faced with my disability. Relating to people, it’s tough bananas. But, when people take the time to understand me, something magnificent happens. I make a friend, and that friend introduces me to another and another.

Like any good design team, we can have a sense of purpose. I used to think making friends was a singular event in my mind. However, I’ve come to realize, we collaborate and grow with each discussion, and I am now also a friend to each one of those amazing people. We help each other overcome obstacles together. If that isn’t design thinking at its finest, well, I am not sure what is.

Designers work within the constraints of nature and are learning to mimic its elegance, economy, and efficiency. If you don’t believe us, we can introduce you to Scotty. He’s currently working on a Ph.D. in chemistry, and his depiction of the biology of the universe will make you ponder every decision you’ve ever made. He’s intense and awesome!

As design thinkers, we can conduct experiments, make discoveries, and change our perspectives. Perspectives are never meant to be finite. We can look for opportunities to co-create and build on ideas.

We can learn that reward comes in various ways to each of us. It could be by developing a prototype, improving on an old design, or working with a team to solve a problem no one thought to ask.

In closing

We thought we’d revise our initial thoughts on design thinking from article 1. Design thinking is a role-playing game (RPG), where each character has their own skills and strengths that will benefit the team. A team grows with experience. Always challenge the status quo, always learn, ask why, and, if given the option, watch a little Golden Girls.