Bring Design Thinking Into Your Office: Easy Ideas For Incorporating More Creative Problem Solving

In last week’s column, we shared how biopharmaceutical company AbbVie uses design thinking to humanize problem-solving. Today, we want to take a step back and do three things: (1) explain the design thinking process in more detail; (2) demonstrate why it works; and (3) suggest ways you can leverage the power of design thinking in your everyday work.

What is design thinking?

As we explained previously, design thinking is a creative process of problem solving that is human-centered. Though the term first appeared in engineering literature in the late 1950s, it was popularized in the early 2000s by design firm IDEO and others, who began to use it for product development, innovation, and addressing wicked problems.

For example, AbbVie used design thinking to explore the patient experience. Team members went into hospitals and homes to see how health care providers and patients interacted with medicines and packaging. They also used role playing and exercises to simulate what patients with a concerning diagnosis might experience. New insights emerge through these processes that lead to new innovations, but also to greater employee engagement and connection to the broader purpose of their work.

There’s no one right way to do design thinking. Different consultants and theorists take different approaches, but most follow a pattern that we’ve simplified to include three broad phases: discovery, design, and delivering a solution. These phases move participants through Kolb’s stages of experiential learning (for a description of this, see our previous article).

Discovery: During the discovery stage, participants try to immerse themselves in a situation in a human-centered way. For example, an IDEO effort to redesign a shopping cart began with hours of observation inside grocery stores, as well as interviews with shoppers and store employees. AbbVie went inside patient homes to see how they opened medicine; they found one woman with rheumatoid arthritis who opened her pill bottle by cutting off the top with a meat cutter.

These experiences offer new ways of looking at a familiar situation and offer examples of Kolb’s concrete learning; then participants gather, reflect, and tell the stories to one another. Participants may ask questions or map the stories on a wall, using sticky notes. Through this, “you get to the place where you identify an insight. A hunch that helps you identify an opportunity,” says Lisa Ruiz, a design thinking expert and head of regulatory affairs, Latin America, for AbbVie.

Design: At the Center for Values-Driven Leadership, we use the design thinking processes of rapid-prototyping in our Appreciative Inquiry summits, to help participants move ideas from being on paper to reality. Prototypes can be a physical model, such as in the shopping cart scenario mentioned above, but it might also be a role play, an architectural illustration, or process chart. Either way, it is an example of experimentation. What is important at the start of the design process is that participants have something they can observe and interact with. Then, we ask participants to refine their ideas based on feedback they’ve received.

At AbbVie, the design thinking process led to new software applications to help patients remember when to take their medications. In our own work, we’ve guided companies to create prototypes for new organizational structures, talent recruitment processes, software systems, and client offerings.

Delivery: Finally, the design thinking process helps deliver a finished project. (In Appreciative Inquiry, we call this stage “destiny.” See here for more details.) It’s not enough to think of an innovation: the goal is to make it happen. How that happens looks different in each organization, but for design thinking teams, the mandate is clear: make it happen.

Why use design thinking?

There’s an obvious one-word answer to the question of why to use design thinking: innovation. Thousands of organizations (including AbbVie, IBM, PepsiCo, and Nike) have used design thinking in various forms to develop new products and services or make important product improvements. But practitioners of design thinking and related processes, such as Appreciative Inquiry, will tell you there are other reasons as well. We’ll highlight three.

First, design thinking intentionally humanizes business. Product development that’s done in a laboratory can fail to consider the end user. Even consumer-facing product testing can be clinical in approach, rather than meeting patients or customers in their homes and workplaces where the product will be used.

But beyond that, design thinking also humanizes business for your team members, helping them connect with clients and customers who rely on their products.

Second, design thinking approaches help us move past easy answers to find richer solutions to real problems.

“We’re risk averse, as human beings,” says AbbVie’s Ruiz. “We’ll solve things based on solutions that worked in the past. As a result, you end up with a subset of solutions, and there’s nothing innovative there.”

In contrast, design thinking pushes people to work against their own natural psychology; Ruiz calls this “getting comfortably lost.” In the process, you can find unexpected ideas.

Third, design thinking provides organizations with intangible benefits that may not lead to a new patent or product, but will lead to greater employee engagement, a clearer sense of purpose about your work, and more organizational energy.

Why? Because innovation excites and humanizing our work makes it more meaningful.

“What we know is that teams who are doing this well, they approach challenges and working with each other differently,” says Ruiz. “You can expand the empathy on your team.”

How can I get started?  

Getting started with design thinking doesn’t have to involve hiring an expensive consultant or launching a major new initiative. Firms like IDEO offer online workshops, and you can also learn a rapid prototyping process at this February 2020 session.

But more importantly, you can begin practicing some elements of design thinking today, with no further training required. Ruiz offers two tips.

First, she says, you can grow empathy on your team. You can do this through asking team members to observe or interview customers or walk through your company’s facility or processes with an eye on how it might be experienced by a customer. You can pause team meetings to imagine the perspectives of others. You can role play an experience and see what feels right, and what does not.

Second, as you begin to search for new ideas, you can avoid easy solutions. “Eliminate some of the obvious ideas,” says Ruiz. One way to probe for richer ideas is to practice better brainstorming techniques.

No matter how you get started, we hope you’ll find the same rewarding results that AbbVie and other firms have found. Tell us about your experiences on Twitter, @ValuesDriven.