I shrink every time I hear someone explaining Design Thinking and equating it with common sense.
While the procedure to follow the methods might sound like common sense, actually practicing the tasks involved is far from common sense. They are very difficult and take a lot of practice to master. Often Design Thinking fails when there is not enough know how about the 'how to.'
The fact that we Design Thinkers are forever having to justify the methodology, coaching people to adopt this methodology indicates that what is seemingly common sense isn't quite so. There are reasons behind this:
In a nutshell, I would call it, '
experience kills innovation.'
A basic tenet of Design Thinking is to have an outside in perspective. Talk to customers, end consumers, experts...
- Most often, for people working in a certain field know a lot about their domain. Hence, it is extremely difficult to switch modes and be completely open to LEARNING from customers/end consumers/experts in the domain.
- Imagine when you were a child and didn't have a clue about somethings, but were curious to learn. For most of us, this is very hard to do as adults.
- Equally difficult is to refrain from putting your ideas on to the minds of the person you are talking with. We are not there to have a discussion about our individual ideas. We are talking to them to understand how they work, their joy, problems etc.
- Speaking to customers (the decision makers in the business); end consumers (who use the solutions); experts and other stakeholders often results in diverse amount of content. This is where it becomes tricky, looking at the business motivations, user satisfaction, legal complications etc all together creates a big picture, which can be overwhelming and often shunned off as being irrelevant for project scope. It is important to keep this big picture in the forefront so there solution meets with least resistance by the people involved. There are trade offs to be made.
- One we have all this data, the challenge is to synthesize. The big challenge is to STICK to and/or clearly distinguish what was heard from the customers/end consumers/experts and one's own ideas. To begin with one has to stick to data points heard from the people spoken with and not divert into ideas coming from within the team. (there is a time and place for that later...)
While I do believe in the philosophy of '
every one can be a Design Thinker', I would not want to run the risk of making it sound simpler than it is by calling it common sense. Like any other set of skill sets that can be learnt, this too takes practice and time to perfect.
