Most organizations fail at problem solving. Be wise!
Whatever your role may be and industry you work at, your challenges might be related to a varied number of topics, going from financial viability to enterprise culture for example. Traditional linear and rigid approach to problem solving needs to change. Presently, it does not come up with the right answers anymore.
Design Thinking DNA
Traditional and common behaviour companies adopt for problem solving, no matter the challenge, is focused on the product or service itself. This type of approach may have worked in the past but evidence shows us that is not the wise recipe anymore. In fact, its continuous application may cause significant harm inside an organization, over people and its business model.
Design Thinking shifts completely the paradigm. Instead of focusing on the final solution, product or service, Design Thinking focuses on people. It has a human-centered consciousness across all stages of a problem solving process. This means that any step of the path we need to go through, people are at the centre of it. And this changes everything, the way we think, the way we question, the way we plan, the way we understand, the way we communicate, the way we interact with each other, and the way we decide. To build this DNA and foundation, people need to be provided good training and good practice. People need to hear, acknowledge, practice, believe and integrate. Once this DNA is consolidated within the organization, everything changes and that team will be much more prepared to be flexible, to disrupt, to generate ideas people do care about and to promote a healthy environment and team spirit across employees and stakeholders.
Customer feedback over intuition
Intuition is good to have. Though in problem solving, business model design or strategy design, should be complementary, and only when needed. Making decisions based solely on intuition is an error. Unfortunately, this is very common inside companies. This mindset exists mainly because professionals tend to miss the right problem (assuming they know it upfront) and have extreme difficulty to accept they do not know the solution and, thus, they will have to dig about it. It is very common and mentally easy for someone to consider that what he/she thinks is the right thing and unquestionable. We live in a world that hardly accepts us if we do not know about things. We have to know about everything, at all times, even if we have to assume and follow our intuition. Additionally, there is big resistance from professionals to get off the chair or from behind the computer screen and go to the field empathyze with customers, users, stakeholders, partners, staff and others. Empathyze to collect feedback and comprehend what these people, supposedly affected by the problem we are trying to solve, think about, feel about and care about. And more importantly, why they reveal those emotions. Customer feedback is to understand deeply the people we are trying to design for and bring them to the co-creation and co-design of those solutions.
Experimentation over planning
We, as humans, tend to make assumptions a lot. We make very beautiful presentations with numbers that shine or extensive and boring business plans with great outcomes’ estimation, flourished by top notch visual design that everyone loves. Though, we forget we are embarking everyone in something that was fabricated through a mind of considerations. The risk and uncertainty are massive. This is one of the main reasons why more than 70% of new startups fail while implementation. An alternative wise solution is to prototype, experiment, test and collect feedback in a very early stage. By experimenting and testing prototypes in the real world, we are able to collect feedback and understand if the test or experimentation we are going through, may or may not work in the real world when fully implemented. By experiment and test, we consequently drop risk and uncertainty of the business, as we collect evidence with the people we are designing for and we do not proceed with decisions based on assumptions, but on facts.
Iterative design over traditional “expensive big design upfront” development
How many times startups invested a massive amount of money in the market implementation and after a few months that value proposition did not fit enough customers to survive? How many times companies paid thousands of money to consulting partners to elaborate fancy business plans that, a couple of years later, never worked? How many times leaders invested hundreds of thousands in products or solutions inside their organizations, just because their main competitors did it with apparent success and, the following year, everyone realizes it did not solve the issue?
So much money invested upfront based on assumptions, compromising financial viability and timeline. This way of traditional approach is risky and unsustainable. Risky because it does not help reduce uncertainty when building a business model or designing a strategy. Unsustainable because its foundation is based on assumptions and estimations.
Iterative design helps overtake these two barriers. By applying a prototype-test-iterate cycle, practicing it as many times as needed, we collect evidence and facts, which replace assumptions and estimations. This can be done early, quick and cheap. It is a work in progress and we do not need much investment at this stage. The goal of the iterative process is to learn and think about what we want and need to design. It is not a moment to make things pretty. The process helps reduce the risk of a project and increases the probability that the final chosen solution is the right one to be developed and implemented in the market. Because it was tested and refined with real people, into the real world. And here is where sustainability steps in, as we are not putting in risk today, resources we will need tomorrow.