- Most business is about problem solving,
for your consumers, for the bottom line,
towards a vision of your company,
or towards a metric like your net promoter score.
Design thinking is a mindset that teams
take towards problem solving.
While it's both a personal skill
and a mindset that one individual might take,
you'll often hear design thinking described
as a collaborative multidisciplinary approach.
That's because when you're addressing wicked problems,
those problems that don't have a clear solution,
or where you're creating something
that's entirely without precident,
you probably need to completely transform
a business model and often even impact
the organizational culture of your company.
You need people on your team who can
empathize with users' needs, prototype solutions,
and drive the changes needed to bring products to market.
This often includes researchers and analysts,
engineers and developers, creatives and strategists,
and business or product owners.
We're often tempted to think of these roles
as what they output or a title.
The developer outputs code, right?
For the purposes of design thinking,
I encourage you to see these roles as
perspectives on problem solving.
The developer may write code,
but in team collaboration,
they're bringing a perspective on what's possible,
and soon to be possible via technology.
Just as the researcher will help extract
people's unstated needs, they also help maintain
and shepherd human empathy within the team.
For a product to succeed, the perspective
of what will make something work for your business,
that the product owner represents,
is a necessary balance to the needs of the user,
and what will make an experience
meaningful and delightful for them.
In addressing a wicked problem,
you want to get all of those perspectives
working together and inspiring great ideas.
That's what you need in the room.
So let's think about this.
You have your team and they've developed a great idea
that they want to bring out to market,
to bring to the user.
But to make that happen, you need the business
to help you deliver it.
Without the business, a great idea
won't get to the user.
There's a role that I often think about on the team,
and it's usually not a formal role.
Nobody has this title.
But I think of it as the socialization manager.
This is somebody who works with
understanding the rest of the business
and makes outreach to the business units,
the stakeholders, and kind of leads the negotiations
to help people in the business understand that great idea
and why it's going to be so meaningful to your end users.
Once that idea is socialized,
you still need to get it out to market,
to get it out to the end users.
You need everything in the business
that's around delivery.
I often find that innovation teams
focus on generating the big idea
and they sometimes want to leave out
the messy part of delivery.
That might be manufacturing, development, or marketing.
But making it real really requires
acknowledging the reality of what's going to make
something successful for the business.
Because your end goal in design thinking
is to make something real for the end user.
As leaders, formally or otherwise,
for modern product service development,
we need the insights and engagement
and problem-solving collaboration
of many people from many disciplines.
I encourage you to work to see these individuals
by more than their title,
but as the perspective they bring to the problem.
And don't forget to engage in socialization
with the wider business, and the messy edges
of making it real.
This holds true for communities as much as businesses.
To see this in practice in a setting
which you might not expect,
take a look at this case study
where we brought together young adults in Myanmar
to solve problems in their community.