Design thinking: a walkthrough
My tryst with Design Thinking started with a Two days workshop at our organisation on 2017. The workshop was having lot of case studies and activities. It touched on real time issues at our workplace.
Once we were back to our work routine, the knowledge and the enlightenment we got during this workshop faded away without any trace.
Cut the scene to late 2019, again our Senior Management involved a Design Consultant who has commendable experience in Design thinking implementation in Fortune 100 companies to coach us and enable the concept to be implemented in our way of life at work. This time it started with a Master class.
Initially the session was intense and very hard to contemplate the way its going to change our perspective towards real time issues we face at work. Post completing the master class, the course was designed to have half a day session in a week, and these contact sessions were scheduled for two and half months.
The session concluded with a presentation to our Senior Management, covering on how we took a real issue at work and used Design Thinking as a tool to come up with a solution(To reduce IT related disruption in increase employee productivity) which can be readily implemented. This solution was implemented in our function and had a first hand experience in transforming the status quo into desirable state.
This inspired me to write this article on Design Thinking, which covers very basic fundamentals of this principle.
In below sections, we can see a brief overview of Design Thinking concepts and how its going to do paradigm shift to our approach.
Phases of Design Thinking:
Problem -> Discovery -> Insights -> Ideas -> Imperatives -> Value Proposition -> Low Fidelity -> Medium Fidelity -> High Fidelity-> Testing -> Launch
The above flow is a blue print for Design Thinking process from start to the end. It is a continual and agile process where we may need to do multiple iterations until each steps are refined enough and produce desirable, viable and feasible product or service.
Design Thinking helps us to solve the problems. The above approach involves ideation(brainstorming) and prototyping. The idea of MVP(Minimum Viable Product) is to “Fail fast” and apply the lessons to come out with more appropriate product /solution for the problem we have taken to solve.
This concept of Design thinking can be applied in any area where we have huge problems to solve.
In any matrix or non matrix organisation, design thinking process can be imbibed into PMO process before the solution takes shape of Project.
The problems could range from simple Meeting/Conference Room solution, improving the bottom line and to reduce wastage of Production batches in a company. Following the key process steps of Design Thinking and its principles helps the teams to experience “AHA” moment.
Below are the Outcomes of using this concept effectively:
- Airbnb — Used Design Thinking and experimented with non-scalable changes.
- Pillpack — using Design Thinking, they had human centered approach, brand vision and strategy which transformed them from in-residence-startup to being bought by Amazon for $1 billion.
- Clean Team used design thinking to provide in-home toilets for Ghana’s urban poor.
- IBM implemented Design Thinking and improved ROI by 301%.
- Stanford Hospital used Design Thinking to improve Patient experience in Emergency Room.
- UberEats adopted Design Thinking to immerse into city culture and landscape and they transformed customer experience
- Golden Gate Regional Center used Design Thinking to reimagine their assessment process.
- Bank of America using Design Thinking(with IDEO) designed a program “Keep the Change” and increased the customer base(More account opening done)
- Braun — Oral B IoT electric tooth brush
- GE Healthcare — Using painting and storytelling in MR Scanner.
- Municipality of Holstebro, Denmark — “The Good Kitchen”
With Luv,
VJ
