My company has been doing a lot of work recently around Customer Insight(s) - that is, trying to help our clients develop useful processes to better, more consistently understand and address the evolving requirements of their markets.
Through this work, I have done a lot of reading and thinking about concepts like creativity, innovation, knowledge management, etc. One of those concepts that I really like and want to learn more about is called simply "design thinking".
If you are a "knowledge worker" and haven't yet run across this term, you will soon. It looks to be an emerging discipline with lots of both solid research and examples of practical implementation behind it. It began with product design (famous early promoters include the IDEO group out of Silicon Valley and various industrial design and engineering groups at Stanford University) but is now being more broadly applied to problem-solving, including business issues.
As with most good ideas, this one appears quite simple on the surface but is immensely difficult to pull off in practice. Traditional analytical thinking channels us toward inductive or deductive reasoning - that is, connecting the dots from various data sources (market research surveys, field force feedback, past trends & experience), drilling down from the general to the specific or vice versa, straightlining from cause to effect to "identify the roadblock" and offer a fix. I agree that in many cases this limits our potential field of view. (I can recommend a good
first article, written by Sara Beckman, faculty director of the MOT Program at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, that outlines the benefits and limitations of Six Sigma types of analytical approaches.)
In contrast, design thinking, encourages abductive thinking - thinking about the possibilities of what could be. Wikipedia says abductive thinking "comes prior to induction and deduction... the colloquial name is to have a 'hunch'. Abductive reasoning starts when an inquirer considers of a set of seemingly unrelated facts, armed with an intuition that they are somehow connected."
Sounds like this Mr. Hunch could live somewhere near the Customer Insights family I am searching for. Let's go a little deeper...
1. Define the problem - easy to say, but here emphasis is on questioning the brief (e.g. are we expressing the problem correctly) and becoming aware of the various "filters" that might be clouding our perceptions.
"Observation" is a key aspect of this step - back in business school I saw a video of IDEO cross-functional teams getting out in the field, questioning users, and challenging all assumptions with why, why, why...
2. Create and consider many options
3. Refine selected options
3.5 Repeat / reiterate
4. Pick and execute
Well, steps 2 through 4 seem the opposite of deep - so obvious as to hardly warrant comment - but again tough to do in actuality. (My friend and colleague
Henry Andersen at Nihon University has assisted me in helping clients develop some good techniques to get through these steps in the past.) But here at least I find good confirmation of something I think I knew before getting started on my research:
There is potentially more power in properly defining a problem than in solving it.
Not quite satisfied with the Fast Company definition, I found another
article by Alice Rawsthorn (also carried in the International Herald Tribune - the finest newspaper on Earth, in my opinion) that talks about the concept in reference to a new book out,
Change by Design: Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO (those IDEO guys again...).
She writes that
"Mr. Brown describes...the shift from old-school 'design,' which he regards as 'technology-centered,' to the 'human-centered' discipline of 'design thinking'...the application of the traditional skills that designers develop, often without realizing, to identify problems and invent solutions in collaboration with experts from other disciplines, their clients and the people who will use the results."
OK, so this is the cross-functional and creative team aspect... But again, how to get it done - that is the magic... Will pick up the book and continue my search...
One other quick footnote: I came across a powerful quote from Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto: “Reality is the enemy of innovation.” I think this is exactly right in most business cultures (and especially in the more risk-averse cultures I often encounter in Japan!). What people did yesterday and the week before and the year before - whether that worked particularly well or not - proves to be such a crushing burden that new ideas are formed hesitantly, expressed reluctantly, and almost never moved forward (until a competitor does something similar and the company jumps to play catch-up).
