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December 4, 2017 - July 8, 2018
Being successful has always relied on the ability to work together and be creative.
Purpose-driven, design thinking organizations and enterprises create more meaningful innovation and customer experiences.
Among the more powerful aspects of motivation and human behavior are the needs for predictability and safety.
What has stood out over the past decade is the way in which organizations were increasingly relying on design thinking to get higher levels of involvement and engage a broader set of stakeholders and competencies. More and more, they were using it as the means to attain higher levels of collaboration to solve problems and generate new ideas, resulting in an increased capability to create innovative solutions.
the three Ps (people, planet, and profit).
The first is a quest to identify the right problem to solve, coupled with a deep understanding of the user.
This is achieved through observation, fieldwork and research, an empathetic approach to discovering stated plus unarticulated user needs, and open inquiry.
The second tenet of design thinking is empathy coupled with collaboration, both with the users and through the forming of multi-disciplinary teams.
The third is to accelerate learning through hands-on experimenting, visualization, and creating quick rough prototypes, which are made as simple as possible in order to get usable feedback.
Exploring how the organizations use design thinking in different ways provides insight into the significance of being able to implement and integrate design thinking in a manner that aligns to the organization’s culture—a mighty reminder that one size does not fit all is an incredibly powerful truth.
In our synthesis, we identified a set of 10 attributes that give remarkable power to the human-centered aspects of design thinking in these organizations.
THE 10 ATTRIBUTES
Design thinking cultures are not about just brainstorming or ideation, they are about developing a competency to identify and then focus on what is important, and to solve that.
Curious Confrontation Because design thinking is a way of leading with creativity, it encourages embracing ambiguity, uncertainty, and curiosity. One of the greatest challenges any organization or team will face lies in how it effectively manages competing interests, differing views, disagreement, and conflict, all of which are natural contributors to innovation.
The companies in our study demonstrate an increased competency to communicate in highly creative ways. We were pleasantly surprised to find that they are great storytellers, and creators and users of visual information. They appear to understand that innovation does not happen by doing surveys and writing comprehensive reports or slide decks with facts and figures. Innovation happens by contextual inquiry, discovering unarticulated needs, synthesizing, creating with empathy, and communicating solutions in methods that embrace the emotions underlining the concepts. The visualization of
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what is more important is to understand the powerful influence that leaders convey through their involvement, role modeling, and strategic support. This
the external focus on the customer and the internal focus on their cultures and how they do things.
FIRO-Theory suggests that all human behavior and interaction is motivated by three fundamental desires to feel: 1) Important and significant. 2) Competent and capable. 3) Liked and accepted.
In innovative organizations, we see the collective imagination at work through the behaviors of involvement, collaboration, and cooperation that result in the sharing of ideas, people paying attention to each other, and the subsequent sharing and leveraging of differing viewpoints, inferences, and opinions.
Fearless exploration is often at the heart of extraordinary innovations.
Richard Buchanan’s Four Orders of Design. Buchanan, a professor of design, management, and information systems, is cited as being one of the first people to talk about the development of the Four Orders of Design. As an organization matures in its use of design, it tends to move from communication and visual design, to products, to brands, to systems.
In the Third Order, Interaction, attention turned to the design of the client or customer experience and application in the design of services, user experiences and interfaces, and information.
in the Fourth Order, attention shifts to the design of systems in which people interact with one another, including businesses, organizations, education, and government.
THE FIFTH ORDER OF DESIGN This brings us to recognition of the potential for the intentional design of cultures, and the design of learning itself,
When we talk about designing culture, we’re setting the stage for designing the intentional interaction of people. And, we move from the intellectual exercise of organizational design to the emotional aspects of human behavior. This involves a keen understanding of who and why, resulting in the creative expression of how. The big upside to this pursuit is that we find ourselves with the opportunity to not only better integrate design and design thinking into culture, but to create more organizational learning and knowledge sharing, as well as create greater levels of emotional awareness.
Design thinking organizations are learning organizations, and use design thinking to increase understanding and ultimately awareness—of the real problems, of customers, of obstacles, of options, of knowledge, and of one another. In effect, by using design thinking to empower creativity and collective imagination, organizations develop the means to step further toward what lies at the core of human-centered design: our basic human needs and motivation.
from product-centric to customer-centric, and from marketing-focused to user experience–focused.
“The new headquarters will be leaner, faster and more open with a constant flow of industry partners, customers and innovators.”
one of the more powerful traits of innovative people is their ability to think like beginners and avoid always thinking like and being the experts.
What culture does more than anything else is inform and reinforce its members how to individually and collectively attain success. It’s how to behave.
Culture informs people how to individually and collectively achieve success, communicating and reinforcing what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
The 12 keys also provide the framework for defining culture and the key traits that are critical to guide the implementation of design thinking in a way that the culture will accept, implement, integrate, and embed.
Even more important is to recognize how each influences the use of design thinking in a particular unique culture.
The origin of power and influence is one of the aspects of culture that is a major contributor to culture.
The second distinctive source stems from one’s ability to include and pay attention to others.
It’s paramount to understand how engagement in problem-solving affects how individuals relate to their own sources of motivation to feel heard and competent, and how open and honest they can afford to be. This is what makes design thinking such a valuable asset to any organization and its culture.
one of the major sources of conflict in companies and teams stems from the lack of clarity and alignment on how decisions are made.
It’s important to know what the prevailing form is that is unique to a culture.
it’s important that people within any organization enjoy the clarity of knowing how they will be rewarded for their efforts, performance, and contribution
The clearer the purpose, culture, and values of an organization, the more it is able to attract individuals that are good fits.
members of an aligned culture are more apt to share their experience with others,
Some of the best recruiting isn’t always achieved by human resources or by external recruiters. It is accomplished by the employees of companies who are their true believers
it’s very important to remember this. How people feel about the culture of the company they are a part of will directly or indirectly influence its customers.
There are two interesting aspects of how many leaders go about designing and structuring their companies. One is that they do it from the inside out. Though this allows for companies to focus on the operational elements of how it creates and delivers a product or service, it often fails to put the most important aspect of the business out in front: the customer. As a result, the organization’s structure can end up misaligned to the customer experience, and not agile and responsive enough to the constant changes that customers drive.
it’s simply not good enough to hang the words on the wall, post them to your website, or repeat them at company meetings.
requires leaders to talk about them constantly and consistently. It requires leaders to explain what the values mean, what they represent, and how significant they are to the culture of the company.
The core values of a culture cannot be overstated, overcommunicated, or overly reinforced. It is that important.
values define the core of culture. They describe the intended human experience.
