Design Thinking for the Greater Good

by Jeanne Liedtka

  Most of us find ourselves somewhere on a continuum between George and Geoffrey, depending on circumstances. Perhaps we are naturally more like Geoffrey, an optimistic blue-sky thinker open to possibilities. We see ourselves as well suited to an Innovation II world but are constantly frustrated by colleagues who always seem to slow down our action with their endless questions and demands for more “proof” that our ideas will work. Or perhaps we are more like George, a grounded, skeptical thinker, and have taken on behaviors that succeeded in Innovation I, when innovation was someone else’s job, but have no idea where to start when it becomes ours.

  So, what does this tale of two managers mean in a world where everyone designs?

  In working with leaders charged with accelerating innovation in their organizations, we find that those who identify with Geoffrey are tempted to write off the innovation capacities of the Georges of the world. Let them worry about keeping the existing organization running, they suggest, and find more Geoffreys to provide innovation. We think this strategy is fatally flawed, for a number of reasons:

  1. Generally, there aren’t many Geoffreys working in the big bureaucracies that characterize many areas of the social sector, like government, education, and health care. If they join such mature organizations at all, they don’t last long before frustration with the slow pace of change and the levels of permission needed to act send them to greener pastures.

  2. Even if bureaucracies could find enough innovation-driven Geoffreys, their ability to drive significant innovation is likely small—because George is usually the boss (large organizations tend to promote based on George’s solid, predictable competencies) and he will find their efforts risky and questionable. End-running the boss is never easy.

  3. What the Geoffreys of the world do best, perhaps, is create social innovation start-ups. Why not let them, instead of larger organizations, be the drivers of innovation? Certainly, much good work is being produced by entrepreneurially minded Geoffreys focused on making the world a better place by starting up new organizations. But is it realistic to think that social innovation start-ups can do the heavy lifting to solve the social sector’s wicked problems? We think not. Big organizations must participate as well, and their potential for impact is too large to ignore, given their clout and capabilities and the magnitude of the challenges we face.

  But achieving change in large bureaucracies, whether in business or in the social sector, comes with special challenges. Most are still firmly ensconced in an Innovation I worldview and are slow, siloed, risk averse, and data obsessed, all qualities that are anathema to successful innovation. You simply can’t succeed against these obstacles with all the Georges on the sidelines. The potential innovation capacity lost in writing off George is tremendous—and unnecessary. To accomplish the creativity we need in the social sector, George must be invited into the innovation conversation. He can make a valuable contribution. But how? How do we move innovation forward in a world where Geoffrey and George are often at odds? In ten years of teaching, we have almost always found an innovator hiding within George, waiting to be invited out. George has the commitment, the discipline, and the good intentions, but he needs support, direction, and new mindsets and tools. And Geoffrey needs help too—but of a different kind.

  We see an opportunity to enhance the skills of each—to help George envision more creative futures and to help Geoffrey better navigate the bureaucracy. The point is not that we need George to become Geoffrey. The task is much simpler: we need to reduce George’s anxiety in the face of uncertainty and teach him some new tools to help him navigate the innovation process.

  Cue design thinking.

  What Geoffrey enjoys intuitively—a learning mindset, empathetic understanding of stakeholders, an experimental approach to solving problems—is what design thinking’s methodology and tool kit are all about. Design thinking can help George comfortably emulate the innovation-oriented behaviors that make Geoffrey effective, and Geoffrey can learn how to better utilize George’s analytical and testing skills.

  Improving the dialogue between George and Geoffrey is essential, so that they can work together and bring their individual strengths to innovation conversations rather than regard each other with suspicion and create gridlock. The merger of ideas and everyday realities in successful innovation requires both the expansive thinking of Geoffrey and the hard-eyed critical analysis of George. George’s gift is his ability to see clearly the constraints limiting any idea’s feasibility. Trouble is, his timing is often wrong. He rushes to point out constraints as soon as an idea surfaces. This kind of skepticism prevents initial concepts from being developed into something better and casts a pall on the enthusiasm of the idea generation process itself. Innovation, in its earliest stages, is fragile. A gust of negativity will often kill it. The key for George and Geoffrey is to learn respect for what the other brings, so that George’s analytical approach is introduced at the right time—during idea testing, not idea generation. Design thinking offers a method for taking this inherent tension and turning a seeming negative into a positive.

  We wrote this book mostly for the George in all of us. Design thinking’s human-centered front end will build his creative confidence and transform his ability to see new, more innovative possibilities. But we also wrote this book to help Geoffrey deal effectively with George and recognize that analysis can minimize his mistakes, not just limit his freedom to explore. The experimental orientation at the back end of design thinking makes this possible, not by giving Geoffrey carte blanche and ignoring George’s desire for data but by transforming George’s veto into carefully constructed experiments that address his concerns. Taking this hypothesis-testing approach breaks the debates that lead to gridlock in conference rooms and moves ideas into action—but in the form of inexpensive assumption tests that George helps construct, rather than costly pilots he grudgingly OKs.

  How is design thinking going to do this? By giving George and Geoffrey the tools to work together to answer a simple series of questions: What is?, What if?, What wows?, and What works?

  In previous books, such as Designing for Growth and The Designing for Growth Field Book, we laid out our four-question tool kit and approach. In part 3, we will review that process in detail and illustrate each step. For now, we just want to provide a brief overview of the process as a foundation for the stories in part 2.

  The first of the four questions—What is?—explores current reality.

  All successful innovation begins with an accurate assessment of what is going on today. Starting by developing a deep understanding of the present situation is a hallmark of design thinking and is at the core of design’s information-intensive and user-driven approach. With only statistical data in hand, efficiency-minded would-be innovators frequently want to run immediately to the future, to start the innovation process by brainstorming new options and ideas. They are impatient to get to what feels like action: generating solutions. They often forget the human element. Consequently, using ethnographic research to develop a deeper understanding of current experiences and unmet needs of stakeholders is critical. It helps to broaden and perhaps even change completely the definition of the problem itself. Otherwise, we can unwittingly throw away all kinds of opportunities for innovation.

  This attention to the present as it is experienced by stakeholders, not statisticians, helps to uncover unarticulated needs, the secret sauce for producing innovative solutions that stakeholders value. Exploring What is saves George from having to rely on his imagination as he moves into idea development. It gives him new insights—built from empathy and a view of his stakeholders as real people rather than spreadsheet numbers—into what they truly want and need, reducing the risk of a new idea’s failure.

  What is?

  During the What is stage, you gather information from the stakeholders you are interested in creating value for, using time-tested ethnographic research tools like open-ended interviewing, jobs-to-be-done analysis, and journey m
apping, while always paying attention to the stories and quotes that vividly illustrate your findings. Then you look for patterns in the information you’ve gathered, with the goal of developing new and deep insights into unmet needs. In the final phase of What is, you translate these insights into design criteria that specify what a great solution will look like, without yet stating the solution itself.

  Involving a broad team in the identification of insights and the specification of design criteria is critical. Remember who designs in an Innovation II world? Diverse groups from inside and often outside the organization. It is difficult to look deeper into data on our own—we need others who see things differently to push us to think outside our normal mindsets. The bigger, hidden payoff of this inclusion, however, goes beyond pushing you to think more creatively; it also aligns colleagues’ views of the current reality, creating a common mind. This alignment pays dividends throughout the remainder of the design thinking process, as we will see in our part 2 stories.

  Now, armed with the criteria that any good solution should meet, you are ready to ask our second question—What if?—and to begin to generate ideas. In What is, you examined the data that you gathered, identified patterns and insights, and translated them into specific design criteria. Now you will use those criteria to focus on identifying new possibilities. What if anything were possible? is one of the most powerful questions anyone can ask. Too often we get trapped into starting with George’s constraints rather than Geoffrey’s possibilities, and then the future ends up looking a lot like the present. Design thinking insists that we start with possibilities and address constraints later.

  This is where brainstorming occurs—a process that many Georges don’t enjoy. But in design thinking, brainstorming is a disciplined, repeatable process. Successful brainstorming helps you create many possible alternatives, from which you’ll select only a few for further development. But rather than relying entirely on imagination during the idea generation process, a team will use the insights and criteria generated during data gathering in What is to pose a series of questions that guide creative idea generation.

  What if?

  Think of each of the ideas generated during brainstorming as a single toy Lego block. After brainstorming, you combine them (the way kids do with Lego pieces) in different ways to produce different creations. These are your concepts, or coherent clusters of ideas, organized around themes. You want to develop multiple concepts so that you can offer a choice to your stakeholders. You want a portfolio of concepts because you are going to let the stakeholders tell you which ones best satisfy their needs. Whereas brainstorming is best done by a diverse group that includes people outside the innovation project, concept development works best with a dedicated core team because outsiders often lack the context of the project and the time it takes to perform concept development. Again, design thinking offers the best of both worlds: it invites others into brainstorming to share their diverse insights and ideas, but it relies on a small, dedicated team to do the heavy lifting of concept development and to maintain momentum.

  Now that you have a set of concepts, you are ready to move into the first stage of testing by asking the third question: What wows? In this stage, you consider each of the concepts a hypothesis and begin to think systematically about evaluating them against your design criteria. You will usually find that you have too many interesting concepts to move them all forward, so you have to make some hard decisions. Here, George excels. As you winnow the field of concepts to a manageable number, you are looking for those that hit the sweet spot where the chance of a significant upside for your stakeholders matches your organizational resources and capabilities and your ability to sustainably deliver the new concept. This is the “wow zone.” Making this assessment involves surfacing and testing the assumptions about why you believe each of the concepts is a good idea. The concepts that wow are good candidates for turning into experiments to be conducted with actual stakeholders.

  What wows?

  In a traditional analytic approach, this is where you would start asking people whether they like the new idea. You might convene a focus group or send out an online survey, with a description of the new idea, and ask them to tell you what they liked and disliked and whether they would use or want the new offering. But that approach, we know from many years of academic research, is high risk, because most people don’t know what they want until they see it—and sometimes not even then. Decades of research in psychology affirm what most of us already recognize—we often are unable to accurately describe our own current behavior, much less make reliable predictions.

  Through a number of methods, design thinking addresses this problem. One happens during the What is stage: ethnographic tools like journey mapping and jobs-to-be-done analysis ask users to describe what they are trying to accomplish and to walk through an actual experience, describing their thoughts, reactions, and satisfaction at each step, to get at needs that they can’t articulate—instead of asking them what they want.

  In What wows we will look at another powerful solution to this problem: prototyping. Prototyping helps to elicit effective feedback by creating a more vivid experience of the new future. Psychologists have found that helping people to “pre-experience” something novel can be an effective proxy for the real thing and significantly improves the accuracy of forecasting. New evidence emerging from neuropsychological research shows that human reactions to imaginary events activate many of the same neurological pathways that the actual events later will.

  So prototyping is really about creating a pre-experience by providing a concrete and tangible artifact that allows your potential users to imagine the future more vividly. Whether in the form of storyboards, journey maps, user scenarios, or concept illustrations, the low-fidelity and often two-dimensional prototypes used during What wows and What works offer specific tools to make new ideas more tangible and allow you to solicit more accurate feedback.

  When many of us hear the word prototyping, we think of fully featured versions almost ready for prime time. Design thinking prototypes start off much simpler. The goal of prototyping is not perfection, or even getting it right; it is to bring concepts to life in others’ minds in order to reduce the risk of innovation failure by learning from and adapting to the best feedback we can get. We seek the bad news, the disconfirming data, while providing as much space as possible for humans to fill with their own realities. Psychologically, it is easier for people to co-create with a penciled drawing than with a polished PowerPoint.

  Prototypes in hand, you are ready to learn from the real world by asking the fourth question—What works?—and trying out a low-fidelity prototype with actual stakeholders. Your early tests will be one-on-one conversations with selected stakeholders, a process that designers call co-creation. If stakeholders like it and give useful feedback, then you refine the prototype and move it into a more realistic set of experiments that we call a “learning launch.” Always testing your assumptions, always seeking additional data, you continue iterating in this way until you feel confident about the value of the new idea. As you move through What works, you work in fast feedback cycles and minimize the cost of conducting experiments.

  What works?

  These testing activities—the surfacing of assumptions in What wows and the design of learning launches in What works—demonstrate the power of bringing George’s natural skepticism into the innovation conversation, but in the productive form of designing good experiments. Geoffrey’s optimism helps him to see opportunity and develop concepts, but it often blinds him to the key assumptions embedded in them. George’s more analytical bent requires human-centered design insights to fuel his imagination in the idea generation process, but it renders him an outstanding designer of experiments.

  And there you have it. Four questions that build bridges to more innovative solutions, that help George find the innovator inside and help Geoffrey put his best ideas into action. We like to think of it as a systematic, data-driv
en approach to creativity. This might sound like an oxymoron, but we don’t believe it is. By breaking the process into four questions, potential design thinkers can explore the “how to” in a way that feels safe and structured to George, and that allows him and Geoffrey to work together in powerful ways.

  The four-question design thinking approach.

  In the remainder of this book, we will look at design thinking tools in action. The ten stories in part 2 highlight the use of different design tools and approaches in different social sector organizations. Some of the stories involve all four questions, others only one or two. We’ll meet a lot of people solving a lot of problems. Some of them will remind you of Geoffrey, others of George. All of them, we believe, have something to teach us about how to succeed at innovation amid the uncertainty and complexity of life in the social sector.

  PART II

  The Stories

  CHAPTER THREE

  Igniting Creative Confidence at US Health and Human Services

  THE CHALLENGE TO THE GREATER GOOD

  The idea that everyone in an organization is invited to innovate may be intimidating, rather than empowering, to those who don’t think they have the capabilities or permission to succeed at it. How do we encourage and support people to join design conversations, to step into uncertainty and ambiguity—especially staffers who don’t believe themselves capable? The Georges among us, especially, schooled in bureaucracy and anxious to avoid error, may have ideas and enthusiasm but not know where to begin.