Design thinking has been taking the business world by storm. It has unleashed people’s creativity, won their commitment, and improved processes.
What makes Design Thinking unique is that designers’ work processes can assist us in systematically extracting, teaching, learning, and applying these human-centred techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative manner.
Design thinking assists innovators in collaborating and agreeing on what is critical to the outcome. It helps overcome workplace politics, by shaping the experiences of innovators, key stakeholders, and implementers at every stage.
What is design thinking?
Design thinking offers a solution-based approach to problem-solving. It is a set of practical methods. It is the holy grail of innovation.
Design thinking is both an ideology and a process for solving complex problems in a user-centred manner. It is concerned with achieving practical results and solutions that are technically feasible, economically viable, and desirable to users.
It is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems to identify alternative strategies and solutions that may not be immediately obvious based on our initial level of understanding.
How Design thinking contribute to business success?
Businesses should concern themselves with creating solutions to real problems. Startups tend to create solutions to problems that do not really exist. Aside from it being a waste of time and effort, you are not solving anything, and at some point, you are just creating another problem.
With Design thinking, you will be able to understand the customer, identify the right problem, the source of the problem, and produce viable solutions. It entails empathising with customers, eliminating assumptions, brainstorming solutions to problems, and then conducting rapid prototyping and testing.
Design thinking assists businesses in developing user-centric products and services by gaining insights into user needs, applying these insights to their business model, and generating innovative ideas.
“The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you’re trying to design for.” – David M. Kelley (founder of the design firm IDEO)
When should your enterprise architect be involved?
Architects can assist businesses in developing a software solution that will deliver value, empower investors, and scale.
Involve your architects as early as possible. Let them be a part of the conversation, let them understand what the problem is. They must be there with you at the beginning when you start to discuss matters because if you do not involve them when they get information second-hand, it is more likely to be misinterpreted.
Enterprise architecture nowadays entails componentizing a company’s key outcomes: products, customer experiences, core enterprise processes, and assigning clear accountability for each component. Aside from that, an enterprise architecture designs an organisation’s critical people-process-technology bundles in a way that both operational excellence and adaptability to change are facilitated.
Strategic decisions are influenced by enterprise architecture too. When responding to customer demands, empowered teams naturally identify new opportunities inspired by digital technology capabilities.
Being able to access and comprehend business capability assists individuals or business owners in identifying gaps in their business, allowing them to make more informed decisions.
Build the right team
TEAM – Who are the people involved? What are their backgrounds? How do they show they add value to the effort you are undertaking? What is the evidence that they know what they are doing? – These are the things you would want to know before jumping into working with somebody in this space.
A Design Thinking team should ideally be a cross/multi-disciplinary team composed of a variety of specialisations. Specialisation in the right areas is important in building the right, but it is not the only quality required.
While specialists may have extensive technical knowledge, they are often working on solutions for non-specialists and require outside perspectives in addition to what they already know.
A Design Thinking team needs to be ready for change, open-minded, curious, collaborative and allow their assumptions to be challenged.
Yes, that is a lot, but these qualities will create an effective team spirit and an effective work ethic.
Aside from these traits, you should also focus on the hard technical skills, and development capabilities– problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication– are the fundamental elements of a successful design thinking project.
Design thinking enables employees to hone important skills in ways that are relevant to their work, which has a significant impact on retention. Employees are more engaged in learning when they know they will be applying their new skills to a pre-existing work challenge.
To move forward with the design thinking process, you must encourage empathy, adaptability, experimentation, curiosity, courage, open-mindedness, holistic thinking, stripping away biases, and favouring ambiguity over rational clarity, within your team.
Communication is key
Accepting the existence of a problem that must be solved is at the heart of Design Thinking, and this can only happen through open communication.
Receiving feedback from the market or field, as well as being open to such feedback, is important.
Communication is a key factor in every project, whether with clients, in which we can use tools from the storytelling technique, or in internal communication within our team, company, or with our boss, with the decision-maker.
Communication skills are never taught in isolation, but always in the context of a specific situation.
Each stage of Design Thinking necessitates the use of different communication skills. As a result, Design Thinking project team members should keep this in mind when honing their communication skills for a future project.
Add value to innovation
Great design and innovation are the results of design thinking.
In getting such a brilliant design, you should have an objective and that is to create VALUE.
· You can get value if you listen and get feedback.
· You can create value beyond what a user perceives as a value.
Add something new to your business and to do that, you must consider what taking a particular innovative step could mean for your business. Ask yourself:
· what impact it will have on our business processes and practices?
· what extra training my staff may require?
· what extra resources do I need?
· how will I finance the work?
Value changes the way the company operates internally and externally. Risk-taking creates value, a great leader who drives empowerment among his staff creates value, agile decision making creates value, and so on– and they can all help drive your business to sustained and long-term growth.
Conclusion
The heart of Design Thinking is to improve products by analyzing and understanding how users interact with the products and investigating the conditions in which they operate.
Design Thinking is often referred to as thinking “outside the box” because they are attempting to develop new ways of thinking that do not adhere to the dominant or more common problem-solving methods.
“Design Thinking is the glue between all discipline.” – Arne Van Oosterom (founder of DesignThinkers group)
And when you develop new ways, when you innovate, when you solve problems, you must show passion. Show you are passionate about the solution.
