“Design thinking is a method for the practical, creative resolution of problems using the strategies designers use during the process of designing. Design thinking has also been developed as an approach to resolve issues outside of professional design practice, such as in business and social contexts.
The design thinking process has various stages including: defining the problem, researching, forming ideas, prototyping and testing. The steps can occur simultaneously and be repeated.” Source : Wikipedia
Apart from the definition of what it is. The question for most businesses / companies is what’s in it for me?
Human Centered Design
Well, for starters its human-centric. That means the ideas you come up with through this process if done correctly, involved the right stakeholders of your project. For example if you were building a new process for on boarding new employees to your company, you should involve the various HR functions, some new employees who have just come through the door and some hiring managers who need to on-board these new staff. This way, all the views will be represented and the final process will be optimized for all the different people involved in the whole process. The user knows best.
Collaboration and Co-creation
It’s collaborative. One plus one equals three right? You’ll be amaze how people feed off each other’s energy in the right environment and that’s how innovation and new ideas get sparked off. Solving complex problems often requires multiple perspectives and knowledge of different disciplines. Collaboration with diverse stakeholders and roles also bring a diversity of views that allow for divergent thinking to happen. This is necessary for ideation to occur and allows people to think out of the box.
Empathy
One of the most interesting outcomes of bringing people together in a workshop to solve a common goal is the ability to build empathy within the team members and for the end-customers. Traditional projects of the past are usually done in silos where the originator of the idea, project or process may not understand fully the consequences of the implementation to the different people who will end up being involved with it in their day-to-day, once it is launched.
We have seen first-hand in a process improvement project that staff from different departments didn’t used to think much about each other as they were just faceless colleagues handing job tasks over to each other. But once they were all put in a collaborative environment to improve the process, they begin to see each other’s point of view and agree that inefficiency in the current process was the common enemy.
So if you’re ready to experience some of the benefits of solving a problem in a human centered workshop or brainstorm, drop us a line.
designthinkingoutofthebox.com 