Design Thinking
Design Thinking is a set of mindsets and methods to discover what people really need and create rough and cheap prototypes to test if the ideas work. It is a way to solve real problems. All this to make sure we do not waste money building something that people don’t need. Traditional methods of problem solving have always used the same experimentation pattern: a loop of observing and testing new ideas. Design thinking is a creative problem-solving methodology. It can be utilized to form your own teaching practice or can be taught as a framework for real-world projects.
Design Thinking Process
A prototype provides the focus required by personnel by generating their ideas in a tangible form. You can generate hundreds of good ideas, but how do you know which one actually makes sense? That is why you need to test it with your users as fast as possible. Some usual suspects questions are:
- How might we convince our business customers to work in that way?
- How does it all work with waterfall and agile?
- How might we prototype applications with ease?
- How might we run co-creation sessions with users and business?
The innovation process must fulfill high-quality solutions, lowering the risks and costs to implement change and most important employee buy-in. Over the years useful strategies for achieving the change outcomes have been developed. But organizations frequently come across challenges and trade-offs.
Another challenge in Design Thinking is that how a problem is defined has a direct impact on the outcome. Quite often an overly simplistic problem definition leads to conventional solutions, whereas teams should discover innovative and new ideas. Using diverse team members into the process can also improve solutions.
To reduce risks and costs, uncertainty needs to be minimum but it is unavoidable in general. One should have multiple options as solutions to make the right decision. There should be constructive feedback and open to ideas approach and the brain storming team and experts should be open to criticism and innovative solutions. That is the basic idea behind decision making that will carry a minimum level of risk and cost involved.
Any innovation will not succeed unless the organization’s personnel get their back on it and accept it. The positive course of action and capturing their buy-in is to involve them in the process of brainstorming ideas. The risk is only the involvement of too many people with different backgrounds and thinking may create confusion and conflict.
Underlying the trade-offs associated with achieving these outcomes is a more fundamental tension. In a stable environment, efficiency is achieved by driving variation out of the organization. But in an unstable world, variation becomes the organization’s friend, because it opens new paths to success. However, who can blame leaders who must meet quarterly targets for doubling down on efficiency, rationality, and centralized control?
To manage all the trade-offs, organizations need a social technology that addresses these behavioral obstacles as well as the counterproductive biases of human beings.
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