Challenging the Process

The act of challenging evokes images of a duel, an impending fight, or opponents up in arms; however, 'challenging' as a descriptive word brings to mind words like demanding, difficult, and requiring effort.

So what would 'challenging a process' encompass? According to Kouzes & Posner, to challenge the process "you search for opportunities by seeking innovative ways to change, grow, and improve, and you experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from mistakes." 

Image source: http://lollypop.biz/media/1929/12d65a162c9f74809ba4205dda62c55a.jpg

With an intention to find new ways to help my organization, I had a brain-picking session with a few colleagues about ideas and innovations we could use. Some ideas we tossed around were Appreciative Inquiry, Complex Adaptive Systems, Design Thinking & Action Learning. We zeroed in on Design Thinking for a variety of reasons elaborated further in this post, the most important ones being innovation, agility and learning from mistakes.

Image source: http://inchoo.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/design-thinking-3.png

These two websites provide the history or design thinking: Website_1 and Website_2. When we think of design, we automatically co-relate it with aesthetics; however Tim Brown, the guru of Design Thinking defines it as "...a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity." (https://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=49). However, he questions if there is a general definition of Design Thinking and whether it is useful to have one. This concept now has a wide variety of application besides just in the technological field.

Image source: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/design-thinking-23211111.jpg

As the two websites about the history of Design Thinking suggest, it began as a method or a tool, but is now come to be a mindset. In his HBR article titled Design Thinking Comes of Age, Jon Kolko, VP of design at Blackboard; founder and director of Austin Center for Design; and the author of Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love (HBR Press, 2014) refers to Design Thinking as "applying the principles of design to the way people work" and identifies these principles as "empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure (as) chief among them". He takes this a step further to having a "design-centric culture".

I think at this point, my organization would most benefit from having a design-centric culture. Using the evolution of design thinking explained in this blog cited earlier, my organization is probably doing the rounds between Participatory Design and User-Centered Design, maybe sometimes Service Design; but where we need to get to is Human Centered Design. 

Very Brief Summary of the Evolution of Design Thinking (Ref Blog: I Think Therefore I Design)

This transition is important given the changes that are taking place in organizations today (our client organizations), especially in the field of learning. Social learning is playing a big part in helping employees learn informally; employees are leveraging instant messaging to gain information and are surfing the internet as well for quick "how to" videos. Content curation is rising and will continue to do so, thereby increasing the need for creating learning solutions in collaboration with the users. The speed at which things change is so quick that there is hardly time to go through the normal development cycle to create solutions/products; stakeholders demand quick iterations which they can review and provide feedback on, so Agile is the need of the hour. What's more important that design thinking needs be a "culture" and not a department in the organization because all employees in my organization are involved in bringing the solution to life.

Implementing this innovation is sure to bring about disruption in the organization and its way of functioning but it will certainly help handle market uncertainty and complexity much better. Here, the design principle of tolerating failure (from Jon Kolko's article) will of utmost importance to the organization . As noted by Jon "a design culture is nurturing. It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time." 

 My organization will probably have to remind itself of this principle once it is on the path of adopting Design Thinking. This also goes back Kouzes & Posner's point about challenging the process being all about taking risks and learning from mistakes.

Disclaimer: All images have been taken from google images and are used for educational purposes only.