- For a design thinking approach to work,
your team must be able to stop, take stock,
and change direction based on the measurement checkpoints
that the design thinking process gives you.
If your organization is Waterfall
or AgileFall-based, this won't be likely to happen.
People are going to try and hold you
to your initial estimates, direction and plans,
even if it's clear those plans are wrong.
If that sounds familiar, don't worry.
There's a simple but slightly daring solution.
That is, carve out a little area
where you do things differently.
Don't ask for permission, just do it.
Follow a Lean or Agile approach.
Start with a design thinking exercise,
and then move in iterative steps,
testing and learning as you go.
Now, obviously that's easy for me to say
and probably quite daunting for you to put into practice.
However, it won't take long
before people see your team moving faster,
demonstrating business benefits sooner,
and delivering much more satisfying experiences
to your customers.
It's worth the risk.
Even if you feel like you're failing lots,
you're failing faster than ever before,
learning from those failures
and then applying a course correction
to get you back on the right track.
That whole process of failing and correcting
probably happened in less time
than most linear projects spend
writing specification documents.
So you're still ahead.
At the very worst, you can run a design thinking exercise
as a way to kick off the specification writing process.
Now, the idea of writing specs fills me with dread.
I've done enough of it in the past,
but at least after design thinking exercise,
it should be easier to write the spec document
and easier for developers to understand
what you mean by each part of it.