Finally, theorists assert that paying deep attention to actual human experience—working to understand it and convey it to others—is fundamental to producing successful innovation in complex social Systems. Design thinking can play an important role in this, as New Zealand ThinkPlace partner Leslie Tergas points out:
These complex systems are usually understood from a quantitative perspective, and what this fails to provide is meaning. We then end up with policies and other interventions that don’t make sense for people, and a big gap between the intent of the policy and what actually happens. This is actually no wonder, if the design of such social complex systems has not been preceded by sense-making of the human experience in the system. What we are doing with work like Family 100 is starting to shine a light on the fact that there is a deep and reliable practice for uncovering the complexity of human experience, modeling what is happening, and then having the ability to use that in design and decision making about the future. Without this sense making and modeling of the human experience, policy makers and designers are making decisions in the dark, quite literally.
We see Leslie’s words reflected in the power of some of the deeply personal stories we have heard in part 2, such as the story of Pete’s enjoyment of ripping the sofa at Kingwood or of Tom lacking care at Monash, despite his seventy different interactions with staff. Hearing these stories changes us as it changed the innovators in those organizations. Their authenticity commands our attention; it makes what they tell us matter to us, not just them.
Increasing the Speed of Innovation
Ultimately, successful change of any kind relies on a sense of momentum. In the absence of momentum, as progress slows, even enthusiastic innovators run out of energy. How does the design thinking method outlined here help increase the speed of the innovation process itself?
To begin with, the process contains an inherent bias or inclination for action. By engaging the requisite voices, letting them shape the problem definition, and curating a set of design criteria that drills down to what really matters, we create committed people likely to seize the opportunity to act, to make small bets fast. Others, who are disengaged and/or confused, operating from a sense of compliance, will instead drag their heels and wait for direction from above. Alignment helps teams of innovators overcome workplace politics and collaborate, thus reducing the frictions that slow them down. Curated conversations help innovators to focus on specifying essential design criteria—what is truly important—and to avoid being distracted by irrelevant data. Curated prototyping eliminates the need for debates and, instead, allows stakeholders to shape and select from a set of options.
Engagement, alignment, and curation lead to speed. Inertia, compliance, internal politics, and confusion slow us down. It’s that simple. Looking at this self-sustaining cycle takes us back to Jim Collins’s famous flywheel in Good to Great, with its accelerating momentum. In the short run, design thinking’s early ethnography may, in fact, take more time than gathering people in a conference room and asking them to brainstorm from their personal perspectives. Placing small bets to start and iterating ever improved offerings may take more time than quickly scaling a half-baked solution. But, if positive impact on problems that matter is the goal, early hours invested in a design thinking process are, in the long run, both more effective and more efficient. They are time well spent.
How Can Organizations Pave the Way to Innovation II?
Having looked at the contributions of design thinking, let’s turn to our second goal—helping organizations build a widely dispersed capability for innovation. Hopefully, we have made a compelling case for the timeliness of a transition from Innovation I to Innovation II. How do we facilitate that shift? As we close this last chapter, then, we offer a few final thoughts about specific actions, at both organizational and personal levels, that leaders can take to further the progress of design thinking. What can we learn from our stories about the role that their organizations played in helping our innovators succeed?
As we discussed in chapter 1, we saw no one-size-fits-all path across our stories. What we did see, however, was a clear departure from the traditional idea that change has to start at the top. Instead, we saw entrepreneurial activism at a grassroots level. People at all levels of the organization—from senior leaders like Peter Roberts at Children’s Health to Marliza Rivera at the front line in Whiteriver—took innovation into their own hands and made a real difference in the lives of the people they cared about.
Recognizing that cultural change is difficult, we believe that small design thinking projects done under the organizational radar can be key to nudging organizations toward design thinking. Often, major change comes about because small teams try something new. When they have successful results, those metrics or testimonials become ammunition that eases acceptance of the next design thinking project in the organization. Having some examples of successful design-driven innovation may help even the most buttoned-down George better understand Geoffrey’s seemingly wild thinking, and encourage the kind of small experiments that can break through the paralysis created by a “prove it” mentality.
These innovators aren’t waiting for permission from above. And even if they get it, it is no guarantee of real change. Although most senior leaders talk about the need for creativity and innovation today, the cultural change needed to create the context in which Innovation II thrives will continue to be difficult, even for them. Many times we’ve seen senior leaders’ decrees be given lip service by staff while, below the organization’s surface, nothing really changes. Change is never easy—certainly not the kind of soul-searching changes that the shift from Innovation I to Innovation II requires.
For change to happen, it usually needs to move both from the top down and from a grassroots level up. This sounds more complicated than it is. We believe that under-the-radar projects from the front lines of organizations, over time and after successes, provide the tangible examples and outcomes that pull an organization toward utilizing design thinking on an organizational level. From the other end, senior management needs to understand how and why the physics of innovation—its natural laws—are different (as venture capitalists do) and must put in place a supportive infrastructure to help employees feel safe to explore new ways of thinking and behaving. This is done not by mandating or conscripting but by issuing an invitation. In the following sections, we discuss what we’ve learned from our stories about how management can build an infrastructure inviting employees to think and act creatively.
This is the mindset of venture capitalists. So many of the bifurcations we draw in the innovation space—disruptive versus incremental, strategic versus tactical, long term versus short term—can hinder the development of innovation by casting the choices we make as either/or. The question: Do we focus on big-picture transformational shifts in business models, on wicked problems, or do we hunker down and focus on improving tomorrow’s experience for a particular set of stakeholders? These false dichotomies become self-fulfilling hypotheses: either things change only in bits and the system is never reformed or, in the expectation of system-level change and the search for only “big ideas,” nothing happens today.
To avoid these extremes, we advocate constructing a portfolio of concepts that manage risk and opportunity by arraying ideas along the kind of impact/difficulty grid we saw in the FDA discussions. In this way, we can lay out an ambitious long-term direction while also recognizing opportunities that are more modest and near-term. IwB’s commitment to coupling big concepts with phased milestones in the Kerry story is a good example of what this looks like in practice.
Design thinking works to keep the big-picture desire always in focus while practitioners experiment and iterate with the small bets that can, over time, move the organization toward the larger goal. We don’t want to eliminate this kind of friction from our innovation processes. There will always be a tension between incrementalism and possibilities. They seem to be opposites, but they need to work t
ogether. We need to specify “What if anything were possible?” and then be willing to act incrementally and opportunistically to get there. Small bets and intermediate milestones are—ideally—in service to a longer-term possibility, as the Kerry story demonstrates. This kind of desirable tension comes from moving into action, as Luigi of IwB reminded us, and it keeps us grounded in today’s realities while still pursuing an ambitiously different future.
Design experts, schooled in the methodology and frequently comfortable with ambiguity by nature, rarely rely on a structured process, preferring instead to think in terms of general categories of activities like exploration, ideation, and testing. In our years of working with novice designers, however, we have found these categories to be insufficient in equipping them to actually integrate design thinking into their day-to-day practices. Instead, we see too many return from design school boot camps with enthusiasm and inspiration, only to fall immediately back into business as usual. Especially in the case of risk-averse managers, who are often fearful of failure to begin with and are raised in large bureaucratic organizations, we find that a more structured, end-to-end methodology of the kind we discussed in chapters 13 and 14 makes a significant difference in their ability to actually incorporate design thinking’s process and tools into decision making.
Closely related to this need for structure is the need for rigorous training. Given many people’s unfamiliarity with design tools, the often challenging level of ambiguity and discomfort involved in putting those tools to work, and the often countercultural value system underlying the process, a significant amount of unlearning of orthodoxies and relearning of new approaches is needed. As with most practices, classroom learning alone is insufficient, and hands-on work with real projects is essential to the development of competence. Yet, in our work, we routinely hear stories of organizations with excellent reputations for employee training expecting graduates of one-day seminars to actually practice design thinking on their own live problems.
Recall Josef Scarantino’s concern, in the wake of United Cerebral Palsy’s failed Innovation Labs, that design thinking could become a buzzword with little meaning, without support and training to ensure its legitimacy. We share his concern. A hackathon here and there provides a fun introduction to new design thinking tools. It does not provide the foundation needed to do quality work on real problems affecting real stakeholders. In fact, it may damage the ambition to make design thinking more than the latest fad to breeze through management circles.
Another important form of support in our stories was the availability of coaching and facilitation, which both built confidence (especially among novices to the method) and increased the quality of output. In many projects, either a consulting firm (like Peer Insight with CTAA, BIF with Children’s Health, BEING with Kingwood, or Sapient and IDEO with TSA), an academic partner (like IwB with County Kerry, or the Royal College of Art’s Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design with Kingwood), or internal design experts (like the Lab@OPM with the FDA, or the mentors at HHS) were available to support novice designers as they learned the design thinking methodology. Importantly, these supporting individuals did not do the work for the team; they did the work with team members.
Activities like face-to-face interaction with customers, deep immersion in their perspectives, the creation of prototypes, and the design and execution of experiments are not common activities for people who are new to design in business or the social sector. The easier and less scary we make these activities, the more we’ll hear “Yes” to our invitations to join a design thinking opportunity.
In the transition from Innovation I to Innovation II, we have noted, one of the most attractive features of the design thinking methodology is its focus on starting small. “Small” can take the form of modest projects or research plans, and even a single in-depth interview with a key stakeholder can hold important insights for innovation. Providing employees with the opportunity to explore small steps or to convene a few local conversations with outside stakeholders is a good starting invitation.
These initiatives don’t necessarily need a big budget; when democratizing innovation is our goal, financial resources are often not the most important contributor to design thinking success. HHS, remember, decreased the size of its grant to winners of its Ignite Accelerator project. And we see scrappy design champions across industry and government bootstrapping their way to significant impact with little internal funding. What these bootstrappers do have is competency in design methods, confidence in their ability to work with them, time to spend on the project, access to their stakeholders, and the freedom to place small bets in the real world. The challenge of building a strategic capability where everybody designs is that many would-be design thinkers lack training, confidence, time, support, and enough autonomy to conduct experiments. Some even lack access to the stakeholders they want to serve. Senior leadership plays an important role in providing these pathways to innovation.
But many of the students we work with, whether online in our Coursera courses or face-to-face in our classrooms, have never met a designer, much less had one available to teach and coach them in these new methodologies and tools. Maybe you are one of these. If so, what can you do? We have some final advice to share, organized along the four questions.
Invest in inspiration. Fresh new ideas don’t arise by themselves. They are coaxed out of hiding by deep insights about the people for whom we seek to create better value. Take the time and energy to invest in ethnography to generate new and deep insights.
Engage new voices. Personal experiences make humans the successes we are, but they also ensure we see things the way we have always seen them. Voices with different perspectives jolt us from programmed responses. From the start, look for new influences to bring into the conversation, including those voices that you don’t like, don’t agree with, or think have nothing to add.
Beware solutions masquerading as problems. Nothing discourages engagement more effectively than someone pushing his or her own solution under the guise of co-creation. It is easy to cleverly word an answer in the form of a question, opportunity, or problem. Don’t. The people whose help and ideas you need will see through the charade and you’ll lose them—and worse, you’ll miss out on more creative ideas, which never get the chance to show up.
Follow your stakeholders, not your tools. New Zealand ThinkPlace partner Jim Scully warned us against “turning design thinking into a religion.” That is essential advice. Even beloved design tools as powerful as journey mapping can blind us to the perspectives of stakeholders, rather than illuminating them. We were struck by this reality as we listened to a recent description of ethnographic work that focused on family violence. Researchers had probed tenaciously for the details of the journey experienced by the women they interviewed. Trouble was, the women themselves had not felt like they were on a journey—they felt they were trapped in a web. And so these researchers put their journey mapping interview guides aside and immersed themselves in the perspective that made sense to the women they were studying. Being willing to “drop your tools,” as our Darden colleague Lynn Isabella describes it, when they aren’t a fit for the job at hand, is critical.
Go local. When in doubt (and in this uncertain world, you should be in doubt), go to the source. Find the locals who are actually doing the work, and seek their observations. Invite them to define the problem, rather than specifying problem definitions and solutions for them. Better yet, give them the infrastructure support to do the work themselves.
Be willing to wallow. Be willing to hold off on solutions and stay in the question What is? Be willing to feel overwhelmed by your data, and then be patient with yourself as you look for patterns. Few things are harder for action-oriented people. This process can seem inefficient and frustrating, but if solving messy human problems were easy, you wouldn’t be reading this book.
Drill down to what matters most. Make the hard choices about what to pay attention to. A quote from Antoine de Saint-
Exupéry, of The Little Prince fame, says it best: “Perfection is achieved not when nothing else can be added but when nothing else can be taken away.” Creating a long list of design criteria is easy; narrowing it down to the essentials that matter is hard. But that is where the payoffs of focus, alignment, and engagement come in.
Work the tensions between seemingly opposing goals. At its best, design thinking identifies the trade-offs that stakeholders are forced to accept and comes up with higher-order solutions that turn trade-offs into opportunities. So don’t accept compromises too early. Reach for the new possibilities that puncture trade-offs. Maybe later you will find that an ideal solution isn’t possible, but if you start out believing this, your chances of getting somewhere truly new are zero.
Stop searching for the silver bullet. What is the difference between the possibility-driven search that breaks trade-offs and a nonexistent silver bullet? Mostly hard work. The search for a silver bullet seeks the perfect answer to complex problems, and we easily become discouraged when it doesn’t become evident. Simple solutions that work for messy problems rarely show up. More complicated ones evolve during concept development.
Look for analogies, connections, and new combinations. Find different angles to look at the challenge and different ways of connecting ideas into bigger-picture, more systemic possibilities for change. Look for inspiration outside of your box. “Great artists steal,” as the saying goes. Get to work on that (but give credit when you succeed).
Think of constraints as triggers, not stop signs. Overcoming barriers that others have accepted is often the route to creative solutions. It’s fun to create new ideas, and so we focus on the importance of creative answers, but creatively end-running constraints to bring a new idea into reality is often more important.
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