Design Your Thinking

Name: Design Your Thinking

Author: Soni, Pavan

Synopsis

"Design your thinking", as one may infer from the name, is a book that helps the modern day knowledge worker understand what design thinking is all about. Design thinking is more relevant in the world we live in today because many of the problems we face today from local to international levels are multi-disciplinary, amorphous and often without precedence. The premise of the book is that, unlike popular opinion, design thinking can be engineered and inculcated through deliberate practice and is not only a creative endeavour left to the artsy types.

The author takes us through a journey where he first defines the right context where a design thinking approach will be applicable and then shares the 5 stages of design thinking, dedicating a chapter to each and also illustrating the point through multiple real-life business examples. The author concludes the book by talking about how at an organisational as well as personal level we can inculcate design thinking. The book is peppered with handy frameworks that can be applied to business problems.

Core ideas

1. Businesses have traditionally relied on the stage-gate method for new product development and innovation. This method is well suited for environments of low ambiguity or when continuous improvement is needed to something rather than a complete overhaul, but when ambiguity (either of what the right problem is, or what the right solution is) increases then this method becomes sub-optimal.
1. Stage-gate processes start with an idea, while according to the author they should start with a problem to solve.
2. Concept testing happens very late in the game when a lot of resources have already gone into the process. this can lead to sunk cost fallacy.
3. Stage-gate necessitates a business case even before a rudimentary market analysis has been done.
4. Stage-gate is linear and there is no way to do iterative development, something that will be needed to optimize truly revolutionary ideas.
2. Design thinking can be the solution to stage-gate method's problems. According to the author it is a method much better suited to the chaotic and ambiguous business environments of today and introduces "discipline to the otherwise chaotic process of creativity". It must also be said that design thinking is not just a rehash of existing ideas, the author contrasts it against:
1. Lean thinking: Where the goal is iterative improvement to existing, established solution to well-defined problems. Like how to solve the traffic situation in a major city.
   
2. Critical thinking: Which is about defining an ambiguous problem properly through root cause analysis, and then solving it through existing, established methods.
3. Lateral thinking: Applies to situations where the problem is well known but the solution is not. Here the goal is to go beyond the existing knowledge base and find inspiration in other areas.
4. Design thinking: Where both the problem is ill-defined and so is the range of potential solutions.
3. Design thinking, at the same time, is not a panacea. And its use in the following settings should be avoided (or at least very carefully considered before using): Fundamental research, disruptive innovation and pure improvisation.
4. Design thinking is particularly relevant in today's business context:
1. First of all, products and services today are more like experiences. Customer's don't just want a thing, they want an experience. And this calls for design thinking.
2. Problems are becoming multi-faceted: Which means that the level of ambiguity is increasing, which then means that linear processes like stage-gate will not work. Design thinking is essentially multi-faceted thinking.
3. Every company is becoming some version of a B2C company: Since no company today can survive without thinking about the end customer. So, even if you are a B2B company, you stand a chance to win if you partner with your customer (a business) to think about their customers (humans), and you do not bring this mindset then you will risk long term longevity of your enterprise. Thinking about end customers needs empathy, and that is something design thinking does.
4. Digitization of experience: When we interact with businesses, we are increasingly interacting with machines (as intermediaries) more than we do directly with people. Machine interaction can be cold and turn people away, hence design thinking brings in the empathy to ease people (customers) into this digital transformation.
5. Customer is king: And increasingly restless. Which means that if you spend forever to create your superior product by following less agile product development processes then you may miss the bus. Since design thinking involves rapid prototyping, it reduces time to market.
6. Rate of change is increasing: Markets are changing fast, customer preferences are changing fast, business models are changing fast. Which means "our traditional approaches of understanding market forces and changing customer preferences are reactive at best.". Design thinking is a better way to do things.
5. If you want to "design think" well:
1. Understand that the thinking part comes way before the designing part: You need to be empathetic to the customer (the one whose problem you want to solve, and not necessarily the one who pays) and focus on them as the subject of the exercise (and not the object that you mind naturally tends to gravitate towards as the obvious solution).
2. Know that you don't have to/shouldn't go it alone: Gone are the days of designing a product in a lab and presenting it to the customer as the answer to all his problems. We are now living in an age where products are as much created "for" the customer as they are created "with" the customer. With design thinking "problem is co-discovered with the customer before it is co-solved with the customer". And this is a good thing.
3. Apply its principles to more than just the product: Design thinking is about the customer and not the product. The product is just one of the things that the customer uses but their experience is dictated by a host of other things, like the sights and smells in your store, how your website resolves their doubts, the behaviour of customer facing teams (before, during and after the sale) etc. All of these can benefit from design thinking.
4. "Think broad before you go narrow": Design thinking needs one to generate as many ideas as possible before even thinking about shortlisting the solutions. What you do need to ensure that the ideas being generated are within the bounds of the objective statement. To generate a good number of ideas learn to park your judgement, work in diverse settings and be rigid about the outcome but flexible about the approach.
5. Compartmentalize your thinking: Design thinking promotes creativity, but unbridled creativity is chaos. To bring method to the madness learn to instinctively introduce temporal and cognitive seperators between the three phases of problem exploration, solution generation and solution validation.
6. Assume every problem is a symptom: And that the real problem is deep and will take time to unearth. Speaking to customers is helpful, but many a times the customer herself does not know the problem, she only knows the symptom - so, it makes sense to ask probing questions and not assume anything. Another way to do this is to reframe the problem in a way that it triggers different lines of thought than usual.
7. Visuals and kinesthesis: According to the author one can truly embrace design thinking by making sure that plans do not remain on paper for too long and are instead converted into prototypes, however crude. "Engaging in physical creation is critical for the evolution of ideas". And go beyond putting words on paper (or a screen), make sure to visualize your thinking by writing, doodling, sketching. It will help you bring a problem to life much more effectively, and thus generate even more ideas.
8. Fail fast: No one ever comes up with a 100% right solution in the first try. Design thinking gives you permission to fail and even enables you to "fail forward", that is, make sure that you glean important lessons even from failure. And when one fails early, they are actually ensuring long term strength by getting to know sooner than later the weak points to compensate for.
6. Stage 1: Inspire - The goal setting phase
1. Have a clear vision: Of what you want from your design thinking exercise. Getting the design brief, which is "a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized".
2. Dream big: Nothing is off limits, create a stretch goal of what you want to achieve through the design thinking exercise. Have audacious goals that challenge you, inspire you, even scare you a little bit. Do not use this time to think linearly, use it to think exponentially. Widen the aperture of your thinking.
3. Gather diverse perspectives: Everyone toeing the same line will hinder creativity, by having participation from people with diverse backgrounds in the design team you can ensure that a large variety of ideas are brought to the table.
7. Stage 2: Empathize and define - The problem definition phase
1. In order to have a robust solution, it is important to first understand the problem. and there is no better way to deeply understand a problem than empathy.
2. Traditional means of market research that involve questionnaires, surveys, even personal interviews are not enough to build empathy. They just give you a surface level glimpse of the symptoms, while the iceberg of causes remains hidden from view. Techniques that immerse you fully into the customers life like ethnographic research are much better at building empathy. If you want to understand your customer and her problems, then you have to live like you customer and face her problems.
3. Gathering diverse perspectives, not just from different kinds of customers but also from customer facing teams, internal teams, and even partners/vendors can help understand and define a problem much more sharply.
4. Leveraging technology one can gather real-time or near real-time data on a large scale (the "what"), that can then be filtered through human evaluation to get to insights (the "why"). Technologies like AI/ML models that can train on big data (and almost every company today is generating big data) can be a very powerful complement to human researchers who will know what to make of data, but will not have the cognitive ability to parse through large amounts of it. So, man and machine can be brought together for superior problem definition.
5. Know that you can engineer empathy even if you are not a particularly empathetic person by nature. It all starts with being present and mindful: listening with intent, observing with purpose and deferring judgement are some of the ways to do this. More structured ways are: mind mapping, stakeholder map, customer journey map and empathy map.
6. Apply the pareto principle and the MECE rule to problems and ensure that you are picking the right problems to solve; both in terms of your ability to solve them as well as the impact solving those problems will have on the customer.
7. It is not only important to define a problem in terms of "what needs to be done", but also in terms of "within what limits". And defining the constraints of your problem can lead to a lasting solution, or a solution that just solves one problem to create another.
8. Impact, constraint, equifinality: Use these three as yardsticks to gauge whether you have rightly defined the problem. The problem, if solved, should be able to impact a large number of customers. The constraints defined on the problem should be such that the solution does not create another problem you're not okay with creating. And, the answer or the approach to the problem should not be mentioned in the problem statement itself.
8. Stage 3: Ideate - The solution generation phase
1. Use hybrid brainstorming: Which is basically is when people first independently think about a problem and possible solutions, write down or sketch those ideas before coming to the larger group for showcasing and discussion. Once everyone has got a chance to showcase their ideas is when the forum opens up for further discussion. Another technique called "plussing", where you are only allowed to critique an idea by offering a better idea or adding to an existing idea.
1. According to the author, the ideal team size for ideation is two people as it prevents the idea plateauing that an individual faces while also avoiding the fear of evaluation and free riding that groups of 3 or more will have. Of course, once the ideation is complete, the couple can bring their ideas to the larger group.
2. Invite serendipity: By exploring the same problem across disciplines and avoiding the trap of being too analytical or data oriented as it can kill creative solutions early in the process. This is also sometimes called "analogous thinking" or "analogous design".
3. There's nothing wrong with imitating or getting inspired from existing ideas that have worked well, as long as you are doing this intelligently and not just blindly copying without context.
4. Break the pattern of "safe" or conventional thinking by; challenging assumptions, looking across the value chain, looking beyond current users, designing for extreme/edge use cases and thinking laterally.
5. In today's hyper connected world, one should not forget the power of crowdsourcing ideas/solutions.
9. Stage 4: Prototype and test - The "let's see if this will work" phase
1. It is important to prototype early and often to guide decision making. the earlier you are in the processes the faster, rougher and cheaper should be our prototypes. The author talks about achieving a "goldilocks quality" with your prototypes where the prototype is neither too low in quality (that prospects don't even get the idea of what its about), not too high (so that it takes ages or lots of money to build).
2. If the problem is too complex to prototype a solution at once, then break it down into smaller components and build prototype solutions for the parts. Once the parts solutions are working well enough then you can bring them together and see if the combined solution works for the entire problem (or not).
3. Also, if you are reasonably confident that a solution exists to a part of the problem and will work, then no need to prototype that. What you do need to prototype is the part of the problem that is most critical to solve to achieve success and whose solution you are not entirely sure will work (or even exists). The author calls this "doing the last experiment first".
4. For services and other intangible concepts you can also use storyboards and scenarios. Scenarios can be brought to life using AR and VR.
5. Whether its physical objects or services, its best to bring them alive through a story.
6. One of the best ways to check if a prototype has a chance is to first use it in your own life. This practice, called dogfooding, is when companies adopt their own technologies and products first to rigorously test and improve them before releasing them to the public.
7. Keeping in an inventory of failed prototypes and experiments can be more useful than the successful ones as it can serve as a guiding light as to "what does not work".
10. Stage 5: Scale
1. Adopt lean methodologies and six-sigma during scaling to lower variance and achieve replication.
2. Define what scale means to you. Does it mean revenue? Does it mean sales volume? Does it mean geography? Whatever it means, make sure it is the right metric and that you consistently stick with it. Also, it is important to have some objective measure of scale to know whether the project is moving in the right direction, something like OKRs. These objectives must be designed in such as way that common business sense is not sacrificed at the altar of innovation or customer centricity.
3. Organisational culture must be not only tolerant of failure but also celebrate it as long as the failure meant growth in learning (the author calls this "failing forward").
4. An innovation evangelist is a person who is well connected within the organisation and deeply passionate about the topic or the organisation's mission. Such as person can spur innovation in the company and drive connections between innovators and people who can act as catalysts.
11. Design thinking is best done in a workshop format where the participants are inoculated from business-as-usual and are able to think freely.
1. Deeper workshops can be done over a five day period with each day dedicated to each design thinking stage. But if that is excessive, or you expect your participants to get restless, then the author recommends having a two day workshop.
2. But really, a design thinking mindset cannot be achieved through a workshop alone, if it is to percolate as organisational culture then the leadership must deliberately place avenues for practicing design thinking and in a sense champion the cause by training employees in design thinking and holding events that celebrate it (successes and failures both). Further, the organisation's physical space can be designed in the way to encourage serendipity, collaboration and blue-ocean thinking.
3. Particular to the Indian context, we must understand that improvisation is not the same thing as design thinking as it's not often repeatable, and hence, not scalable.
12. The five traits that every design thinker needs to embody are: empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism and willingness to collaborate.
1. Being curious helps, once can develop curiosity by travelling and reading widely. Combining curiosity with active, purposeful observation is powerful. A lot of things are not said but gestured.
2. Listening with intent and suspending judgement are also important traits to cultivate. And so is having a tolerance for failure and viewing it with the right perspective. One can get more tolerant towards failure by choosing a single or only a few areas in their life where they are willing to take disproportionate risk, while other areas of their life are largely stable.
3. Having multiple affiliations (interests) are also helpful in cultivating the skills needed for design thinking. This will allow you to become a "T-shaped person", that is, someone who has expertise in a particular area while also being reasonably versed in a range of others so as to be empathetic towards them and draw on them in time of need. A T-shaped personality also makes us more appreciative of what other disciplines have to offer and less judgemental and stiff in accepting cross-domain solutions.
4. Reducing one's levels of latent inhibitions can boost original/lateral thinking and reducing associative barriers. According to the author, even if a person does not have a high IQ, if they have lower levels of latent inhibition then they can still be more creative, original and innovative in their thinking compared to someone with a higher IQ.
5. "The key attributes of a design thinker or an expert problem-solver could be summarized into three core characteristics: a clear head, a deep heart and a thick skin. A clear head would help you think through a complex problem, a deep heart makes you more empathetic and a thick skin is necessary for failure tolerance."

Notable quotes

• We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience
• Can thinking be disciplined? Yes, very much, and this book is a humble attempt in that direction.
• design thinking process model, comprising these stages: inspire; empathize and define; ideate; prototype and test; and scale.
• Ironically, it turns out that the only way to contain the type-B error is to allow for more type-A errors, which is to say, ‘Fail faster to succeed sooner.’
• We need a model that is flexible, closer to the users, open to feedback on an ongoing basis, lowers type-B errors, contains the cost of type-A errors, does not swear by the business plans, and is fast. Design thinking can just be the approach.
• Design thinking could be viewed as a method that introduces discipline into the otherwise chaotic process of creativity.
• Quality has moved from being an art to a science. But sadly, innovation remains limited to the realm of art, if not magic.
• Design thinking, at its core, involves humans: their desires, emotions, pains, aspirations, behaviours, kinesthetics and other dimensions of being, and a problem that does not involve such elements is best not approached with design thinking. By this argument, there could possibly be three contexts in which design thinking might not be very effective: fundamental research, disruptive innovation and pure improvisation.
• People, rich and poor, are going beyond amassing stuff to seeking experiences, and that is visible among a wide cross section in India and in several other emerging economies.
• Firstly, do not just think of delivering a better product, but instead think more broadly in terms of offering a better experience. Secondly, you do not have to do everything by yourself; instead, tap into the ecosystem for complementary assets.
• ‘If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.’
• MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive). If you cannot break a problem down into three or five mutually exclusive but collectively exhaustive, components, you have not sufficiently thought through the problem.
• ‘The sparks come from ideas rubbing against each other rather than as bolts out of the blue.’
• Design thinking is a series of divergent and convergent stages. You apply divergent thinking while empathizing and convergent thinking while defining the problem; and once again divergent thinking when ideating and convergent thinking to pick the most promising ideas.
• 'The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.’
• Judgement is the unwanted side effect of expertise.

In closing

"Design Your Thinking" is one of the first books I've read in a long time from an Indian author. This book is a good primer on design thinking and gets one started on the right path. The author has drawn from multiple sources to create this book and it shows with the range of examples and frameworks cited.

The writing is nice and crisp, not a lot of time is spent repeating the same point over and over. Unlike some other books I have read where the same point is spread over multiple chapters, here the author packs a lot of lessons in each chapter. However, strictly speaking, the actual "points" in each chapter are a few and fairly simple to understand but the extensive  examples given by the author to support and explain them makes for long-ish chapters, but the book remains easy reading throughout.

Personally, I also liked the fact that the author gave a lot of examples from the Indian market, and being an Indian I was able to relate with immediately, quite refreshing.