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Design Thinking & Innovation

26/04/2017 by Alberto Pezeiro

The main goal of this article is to help Organizations perfecting the current Management Model by the incorporation of Design Thinking in Innovation projects and in the launching of new Products, Services, and Businesses.
Although the Design Thinking concept is not new to the Organizations and has been applied for decades in some of the greatest companies of the world, its application was unquestionably renewed in these last years, especially in the quick launch
of startups or by its use in great organizations in leaner versions, allowing the development of new products and services in record times and at much lower costs than the ones historically practiced.
Organizations that already have mature Management models that contain Routine Management, Continuous Improvement / OPEX, and Strategic Planning are being presented to the opportunity of incorporating Design Thinking as a catalyst of Innovation projects and perfecter of the current Management Model.
Multipliers and facilitators of the current Management model, such as Green and Black Belts and Kaizen Leader, have been trained to incorporate this piece of knowledge to their current facilitation skills, helping the organization develop Innovation projects and, eventually, use Design Thinking to improve its current processes.


The basic concept of Design Thinking
The main concept of the lean Mindset is to draw a process, product, or service based on the user’s experience with it. Searching for relationship configurations and methods never tested before or completely out of the usual standards and gradually improving this model through interaction with the user is the main part of the work of those who use Design Thinking.
 
Design Thinking is not a linear model, such as the Six Sigma DMAIC (improve existing processes) or DMADV (to launch new processes) methodologies. Its main goal is to observe the user experience and his/her relationship with the Design object.
 
Sometimes, you need to return to the starting point, for example, when you notice that a tested configuration did not please the user or does not satisfy his/her needs.
 
You begin the work creating an empathy relationship with the user, first by gathering the knowledge you have about your relationship with the current product, service, or process and, then, complementing it with interviews, observations, and visitations to the user’s performance environment.
 
Then, you make efforts to understand the user’s journey of relationship (or how it would be) and all the items he uses (or would use) in said journey, deepen this relationship, sometimes by asking the user to take part as a co-creator.
Once the user information is collected and once you dug deep into his interaction journey, you begin to build prototypes, which will be tested with the user. These prototype tests help the group decide if it should move on with the tested configuration or if it should take a step back and test a new configuration.
 
The cycle of prototype tests and experience collection will continue until the group knows it has a product / service / process with a minimum configuration that deserves to be launched to a bigger user group.
 
An important point here is to continue gathering information from the users and always test new configurations, allowing the group to perfect the product / service.

 

How incorporating Design Thinking can benefit the current Management Model
These are some of the main benefits of incorporating Design Thinking to the current management model of the company:
 
I) Creation of an Innovation culture throughout the organization - the creation of a culture of launching new products and services in less time and with fewer costs than the traditional methods has been achieved through the reinterpretation of the Design Thinking application, such as the application supported by authors like Tenny Pinheiro (Service Startup) and Eric Ries (The Lean Startup).
Innovation projects can complement products / services that already exist
(incremental Innovation) or are totally new (disruptive Innovation).
 
II) Focus on customer / user experience - bring the Customer’s Voice into the company’s current Management Model and make of it an essential part of the organization’s process, product, and service design;
 
III) Generation of new income and opportunities - search opportunities that were not internally perceived to generate a new collection of products and services to be offered to the market;

IV) Creation of new businesses - either the creation of a company entirely new (startup) or the creation of a new product / service in an existing organization. Applying Design Thinking creates an environment that generates new ideas that can, under the right organizational culture, create new Business that complement the existing ones;
 
V) Digitalization - increasingly more new processes, products, and services are being designed with the advantages of digitalization. Incorporating the stimulation and challenge of digitalization at the initial stages of a project are essential to generate value to the user experience.
 
The role of Design Thinking in the Management model - Process Innovation and Improvement

The graph above represent an interpretation of the incorporation model of Design Thinking into the company’s current Management model.
 
I) Innovation as an essential part of the current Management Model - in the last few years, several companies around the world claimed to have incorporated the Innovation process in their daily activities, but examples of how it systemically happens are still exceptions.
 
The application of Design Thinking in the organizations and the development of products and services based on its principle can be the key to make the Innovation Process become the protagonist of the current Management Model.
 
II) Design Thinking to improve processes that involve user experience - perhaps one of the most controversial Design Thinking applications and that gives rise to much disagreement.
 
Nevertheless, in cases that seek to improve the processes that involve user experience, the Design Thinking concept can generate better effects than the use of traditional methodologies based on variation analyses, such as Six Sigma, or methodologies based on process value flux analysis, such as Lean Manufacturing.
The idea is not replacing a Process Improvement methodology by Design Thinking, but working with both, complementarily.
 
III) Project Management - you can use Design Thinking over the implementation a project to make said implementation more efficient and decrease the probability of future rework if it fails to satisfy the user’s expectations.

Using the current multipliers to facilitate the Innovation projects that use Design Thinking

The organizations have an “army” of Belts, Kaizen Leaders, PMOs, and all kinds of multipliers and facilitators spread all over the company and whose purpose is to implement and support the application of the current Management model.
 
I strongly suggest that these people are trained in Design Thinking and incorporate their practices into the company’s current Management model, making themselves available to facilitate Design projects in the Organization.
 
Since these multipliers already have the skills of facilitation and influence, essential to lead work teams in “projects,” they surely can become great Design Leaders, as long as they keep an open mind to base their decisions more on the relationship with the user and less on the process itself.
 
The traditional “Designer” position will continue to exist and will be essential to help train these multipliers and facilitators. Their role is now more important than ever, since many companies are choosing to share and value a type of skill that was restricted for a long time to a small group of people in the organizations’ Design or Engineering department.

Design Thinking as part of the Organization Leaders’ training

When startups are being created at a staggering speed and traditional businesses are being eclipsed by companies that grow exponentially overnight, we wonder if it is not time to rethink the traditional methods we use to train our Leaders.
 
Incorporate the Design mindset to the abilities expected from the current and future Leaders of the organizations will be essential in the next years if we want to remain competitive.
 
Our Leaders need to maintain the proper attitude to create a culture in which taking the chance of frequently launch new products and services and allowing ourselves to make mistakes will be an essential part of the Business.
 
Finally, I believe that the idea supported by the authors of the book “Exponential Organizations” (Salim Ismail, Michael Malone, Yuri Van Geest) of having an Innovation department, totally isolated from the rest of the Organization, with its own structure and indicators, is essential to make of the Innovation process something robust and evidence of “traditional Business mindsets.”
 
“Build small, make tiny mistakes, fix fast, and get it right on the big stuff.”

Images by: Pexels