How to become a design thinking advocate (part 3)

In Part 1, we encouraged you to begin with yourself and to focus on the doing. It is important to establish your own personal foundation of design thinking practice by finding small opportunities in your daily work, deliberately asking questions and exploring solutions.

In Part 2, we focused on the Process of Design: looking at design thinking as a systematic practice for creativity and innovation will help you graduate from individual, isolated endeavours into a thoughtful frame of thinking for people-centered problem solving.

In the final part of this series, we are going to look at a space where design methods truly shine—at the heart of your organization and business. When people look with admiration at companies that have leapfrogged the competition — say, Apple or Nike — they are not looking at isolated, heroic efforts of valiant individuals. Instead, what they see is an organization that has fully oriented themselves around design as a strategic differentiator and competitive advantage.

Sabine Junginger is a noted design management researcher and professor. She studied the roles that design played in “best practice” organizations and identified patterns which were consistent. The Design Management Institutehelpfully broke down Junginger’s findings into a 3-part model:

You can view these three steps — tactical to organizational to strategic — as a continuum of sophistication, maturity and depth at which design operates within an organization. For the vast majority of organizations, design is applied towards product development and delivery where it aids in creating more functional, more beautiful, more effective products. No surprise, since this is where design has clear and easily measurable ROI: better products get you better sales and happy customers.

However, what Junginger and the DMI saw is that the best organizations went beyond that. In “best practice” organizations, design wasn’t just a driving force for products or services, but also helped propel the creation of integrated customer experiences. And to do that, design needed to be an organizational driver, providing the method and medium for collaboration and strategic development.

The big opportunity for design is to become the common language for collaboration between different functions and disciplines, working together for superior customer experiences. For best results, design has to be a strategic driver for an organization, with includes significant investments in infrastructure, headcount, and — in particular — process. IBM and Intuit are bothexcellent examples of organizations that have over the years successfully made this transition to great effect.

Why is design as a strategic driver so valuable? Because it lays out a framework that helps organizations understand their future trajectory and what steps they need to take to reach their goal. It answers the question of “What should that integrated, design-driven team or business look like?” For every organization, the answer to this question would look different. But one thing is certain: as we move from left to right on the continuum of design maturity, design thinking and its methods move beyond tactics and methods, becoming cultural hallmarks in the process.

Now that we know what our goal looks like, here are some lessons I have learnt on my own journey, working with clients and internal teams, inching them ever closer towards becoming that design-driven, people-centered organization:

As I suggested in Part 1, start with everyday tasks. You don’t need permission! Apply design thinking principles and methods in your own daily work. Practice the qualities essential to any design practitioner, most importantly: the humility and curiosity to hear and learn from the experiences of others as the foundation of our solutions.

Zurb’s Friday15 are all about creative play. Set aside 15 minutes every Friday for fun, creative exercises that you can do as a team. It might be rough going the first couple of times, but I have seen these exercises soften even the most stoic hearts! They are an incredibly useful tool for teams that find exploratory design methods difficult to wrap their heads around.

As your team warms up to creative play, you can start applying some of the activities I’ve shared in Part 1andPart 2of this seriesto actual challenges you are looking to resolve at work.

It is always more fun to learn together. Consider booking in-person or remote Design Thinking Training with our team. IDEO.org and Acumen+ also run online design thinking courses for teams regularly. Sign up with your colleagues!

Offer to run a workshop where everyone gets to practice design methods on a real business challenge. Domain7 has developed a guided audio co-design experience as well as a handy facilitator guide for co-design workshops.

As you work bottom-up, sometimes the unfortunate reality is that introducing a design-driven, people-centered culture is near impossible without leadership support, though popular team support makes the case much easier.

The secret to winning executive support: measurable outcomes. They are notoriously difficult to capture for design, but the commercial success of organizations like IBM and Intuit makes the case easier. Articles like this one might help you make your case.

There isn’t one design framework or process that will be a perfect fit for your organization. In fact, shoehorning your team into the confines of a cookie-cutter framework is the perfect way to spark a mutiny. Instead learn from the various frameworks out there — our own resources, IDEO, Stanford and IBM are all great places to start — and tailor them to your organization’s unique needs, culture, products and services.

I might be shooting myself in the foot here after all that talk about process, but as you succeed more and more at transforming your team and organization, its application becomes increasingly organic. A good design-centered team operates less on following a checklist, but instead possesses a natural curiosity for people and an optimism for playful exploration of solutions. All that is to say, process and frameworks can provide us with the foundation, but the culture shift should be your end goal.

If you still feel a little out of your element, don’t worry! We’ve all been there. If there’s something you like to talk about: shoot me an email or tweet. Or even better, let’s have a conversation over tea if you ever find yourself in Vancouver.