Back to Kindergarten with Design Thinking

It’s no surprise to those I work with (and those I meet at a party!) that I’m a huge believer in design thinking. While there is no perfect way to innovate, I've seen a user driven approach be the most repeatable and design thinking a best practice in engaging users.

I look forward to getting into more advanced aspects of design thinking and broader innovation topics in these articles in the future, but this post is actually the opposite - it’s about going simpler and back to basics.

Believe it or not, many design thinking practitioners, including myself, don’t love the words “design thinking”: we see the approach as not just about design and it’s much more doing than thinking. 

However, we live with the words because we fundamentally believe in thinking like a designer (why the words were put together in the first place) and the words represent a meaningful way to approach innovation in a human centered way.

The good news is that design thinking is in use across many companies and industries around the world. The bad news is that I’ve seen many of the “implementations” of design thinking miss critical elements.

The downfall of design thinking?

“Design thinking” has gone through peaks and valleys in popularity in its lifespan. If some of the noise is to be believed, we might be in a valley right now, as I’ve been reading more articles like “Design Thinking is Dead” or “Why Design Thinking is Failing” or my favorite “The Design Thinking Movement is Absurd”. 

It seems like whenever there is wave of a new idea or concept that pushes thinking forward, there are immediate counter-forces that create almost an undertow to undermine it. I suppose that’s a sign of flattery in a way.

No doubt design thinking has its challenges:

• The two words it goes by are misleading, as mentioned above
• It hasn’t been defined well: People either define it with a series of linear process steps or tell a story of it in use
• It feels exclusive: there is an amazing amount of jargon and tools that “those in the know” talk about, yet everyone else is left wondering
• It's often delivered in a (flawed) workshop: While people may enjoy the workshop at the time, nothing really changes and they'll soon be wondering "what ever happened to that work?" (While multi hour workshops are an easier ask of time and an easy sell for consultants, a magical few hours won't cut it...you have to get out in the real world and do the real work. All a workshop can do is help spark it).

People can’t seem to get a straight answer of what it really is and it’s been taken, repackaged, reworded, and reframed so many times, that it’s even more confusing.

However, I think the biggest problem is that it has grown so quickly that its basics have been lost along the way.

(By the way, I think “Minimum Viable Product” is similar in that the basics have been lost. Go back and look what it was meant to be originally…but, that’s for another article).

So, what is design thinking…really?

Back to Basics

Starting simply, design thinking is:

At the center of design thinking are people; these “people” could be customers, prospects, employees, students, and more…whoever will be the user or customer of the product, service, program, experience, or business you are designing.

Design thinking is not technology driven, though technology often plays a part. Design thinking is not business model driven, though viability matters a lot. Design Thinking isn’t really even “Big D” Design driven, though User Experience Designers are critical resources to create the experiences needed.

Adding a few more words (and removing the word “innovation” which I have a love-hate relationship with - see this article on What is Innovation...really?), design thinking is:

To do Design Thinking well, there are three critical building blocks that must be part of every project or team; these building blocks happen nearly every day on a well run team:

Collaboration: Design thinking (and innovation in general) is a team sport. It needs small, diverse teams working closely together. No one person has the best idea; it's about the combination of people, working together in a very collegial way, to get to a better outcome. This isn’t our typical “project teams” in organizations today, it’s a much more organic and less structured, yet moves faster.

Empathetic need finding: Design thinking is about getting out into the real world, observing people in the "problem space" in which you're attacking. It’s then engaging and talking to them for deeper understanding, often getting to know them better than they know themselves. That's empathy.

Creative prototyping: Design thinking then is about building early ideas and concepts into prototypes that you take out and show to users and get their feedback. These prototypes are quick and dirty and don't actually work well, if at all, but they help you learn about both the “problem space" and the "solution space."

At its simplest level, this is all design thinking is. If a team or project is missing one of these key pieces in its work, it’s not really design thinking and important things will be missed:

• Without collaboration, you won’t incorporate diverse thinking and thus won’t get to the best outcome.
• Without empathy, you might make something that seems great, but it doesn’t really solve a problem or doesn’t solve the biggest problem.
• Without prototyping, you won’t know if something will work before you spend your energy and resources building and launching it. And, perhaps more importantly, building and testing prototypes actually helps you uncover the needs you’ll be solving that aren't often obvious if all you did is interview people and ask them questions.

There are countless articles, books, playbooks, tools and more on the Internet, but these are the three building blocks that help you innovate successfully with design thinking.

Design Thinking for Kindergarteners

If you really want to see if you’ve got something simplified, take it to 5 year olds and see if they can do it. Really!

I’ve been fortunate to send my kids to a school that teaches students design thinking from kindergarten on and I’ve also taught design thinking to kindergarteners.

Putting design thinking in kindergarten terms feels something like this:

"We’re going to work on a project to help someone. We’ll first ask what help that person needs and then we’ll make something to see how it works for them."

I’m sure you can see the connections:

• Ask = empathetic need finding
• Make = creative prototyping

And, the students work in small teams of “friends,” often with the teacher helping as another team member and involving the parents at times, for example to help navigate an “ask” interview at home.

So, a kindergarten definition of design thinking might be

And yes, these 5 year olds, are using design thinking to create really cool stuff for their school, their families, and beyond. Another article to come here soon!

Small Experiments…and One for You to Run

As shared before, I’ve found people really learn a new concept best when they quickly bring it to their day job in a small way…these “small experiments” can build expertise, mastery, and confidence, when you try something small, learn from it, and then try more.

So, here’s a small experiment to try: 

Think about a current project. For each of the three building blocks (collaboration, empathetic need finding, creative prototyping), give the project a smiley face, a neutral face, or a frowning face for how you’re doing. Did you get 3 smiley faces? A few frowning faces? 

Now, for a frowning face or a neutral face, think of one small thing you can do to amplify that building block a little bit in the next 2 or 3 days. For example:

• If you’re weaker on collaboration, think about a quick brainstorm or a question you could ask the project team to spur some collaboration.
• If you’re weaker on empathy, jump on a phone call with a friend or family member and ask them an open ended question and really listen to understand, not to solve.
• If you’re weaker on prototyping, think of a quick sketch you could draw of a part of the solution and share it with a friend to get some fast feedback.

Try it and see what you learn!

And remember: we all need to grow more innovative, regardless of where we are in our career!