Four Design Thinking principles anyone can learn
By: Jason Cyr
Tags: Product Design, Design Thinking, UX, Design

Are you interested in having your teams adopt Design Thinking but just don’t know how to start?

Have your teams attended training or workshops but you are still not seeing a change in behaviour?

I am responsible for design transformation within the security business at Cisco and I have focused on Design Thinking as an important tool to develop a strong culture of creativity and innovation.

In rolling out this set of skills to a massive organization I have experienced the above mentioned problems many times and as a result have started to focus on four simple principals that make the framework really easy to understand, which in turn leads to faster change in behaviours.

Empathy

Design Thinking is essentially a human centred design process, and as such empathy is probably the single most important principle to adopt.

To illustrate the importance of empathy, all it takes are a couple great case studies to help people understand why it is so important. The key here is to help them understand what they can do in their current role to develop more empathy as part of the work they are doing. Sometimes this is as simple as helping people realize that no matter what they do at work, chances are they are aiming to deliver value to someone. Figure out who that someone is, and then take some time to understand what their needs and motivations are.

Start with Empathy and you will produce something more desirable – I guarantee!

Going Wide

Another key behaviour we are looking to introduce is the notion of going wide before going narrow. Some people might know this as divergent and convergent thinking and essentially all it means is that regardless whether we are picking a problem to solve… or whether we are picking a solution to a problem… there is a ton of value if only we take time to explore multiple options while also trying to reframe things with different perspectives.

In terms of helping people adopt this principle – letting them experience some structured exercises is usually all it takes to help them see the value quickly. More importantly, I try to help them recognize that this does not need to be a massive undertaking in the form of a full or multi-day workshop. We can infuse this way of working into almost any meeting and can be done in as little as 10 minutes.

Real World Experiments

Now this is a component of Design Thinking that is most often overlooked, and as a result is a reason why teams struggle to sometimes see the impact of their efforts.

Experimentation is the Ying to empathy’s Yang. Experimentation and empathy are meant to work in connection with each other and together they form the iterative dance that Design Thinking is all about:

Understand your user, develop a point of view on how to improve something for them, and create something to test that point of view quickly. The experiment allows you to learn something more about your user, and may change your point of view which leads to another experiment… you get the idea.

I try and simplify this principle by getting people to think about risks, questions and assumptions:

What risks exist – how might the solution fail?

Can we identify key assumptions that are being made?

Do we have big glaring questions that need to be answered?

Now figure out how to create prototypes or experiments that will allow you to address the above items.

Diversity

Diversity is critical, because by bringing together people of various backgrounds, viewpoints, gender, ethnicity, and roles, you have a much better chance of fully adopting all the other principles.

Diversity leads to a broader perspective that:

allows for more empathy

generates more ideas

and identifies more aspects that need to be tested with experiments.

A good way to look at it, is to ask yourself, does the diversity of my team reflect the diversity of my users.

These principles encourage behaviours

Often when people teach Design Thinking they focus on the process which can be vague or abstract to many people who are new to it.

I have found that by focusing more on these four simple principles it allows people to develop a much quicker understanding of why we are doing these things, which leads to the changes in behaviour that we are looking for. We often end our training by letting the students reflect on how they might adopt these principles by changing even very small behaviours and then follow up 30 days later to see how they are doing.

Lets chat! Are you trying to develop these skills on your team or within your organization? Drop me a line and let’s compare notes.