Hi, I'm Randy Salzman,

Jeanne's co-author on Designing For The Greater Good.

I'm a 20-year communications broadcasting and journalism

professor who always worked at small colleges without staff or help,

and therefore I had to be versatile and creative.

Today we are introducing the design thinking methodology,

a methodology for collaborative creativity to solve problems.

Our innovation practice focuses on four simple but critical questions.

What Is, What If,

What Wows and What Works.

In our book, Design Thinking For The Greater Good,

and especially in the Designing For Growth Field Book,

we outlined the approach in detail.

Here an overview.

The first question What Is explores current reality.

All successful innovation begins with an accurate assessment of today.

So we develop a deep understanding of the present situation for actual human beings.

This is core to designs information intensive and user driven approach.

But it's difficult for most of us having deep seated efficiency and action biases,

we want to immediately begin brainstorming new ideas.

We tend to be impatient.

We want to implement the solution,

but that haste can make us forget

the human element and cause us to design more for ourselves,

our existing biases, than for those we seek to serve.

Using human centered research to develop a deep understanding of

the current experiences and the unmet needs of stakeholders is critical.

It helps to broaden and perhaps even change the definition of the problem itself.

We can unwittingly throw away exciting opportunities for innovation if we don't.

This attention to the present as experienced by our stakeholders,

not just captured by quantitative numbers,

helps uncover unarticulated needs.

That's the secret sauce for producing

innovative solutions that stakeholders actually value.

Exploring What Is, saves us from having to rely on

our imagination or on impersonal consumer data.

As we move into idea development it gives us new insights,

built from the empathy and a view of

our stakeholders as real people rather than statistics.

We pursue what they truly want and need,

even if they don't know it.

During What Is, we gather information from stakeholders we want to create value

for using time tested ethnographic tools like open-ended interviewing,

job to be done analysis, and journey mapping.

We pay close attention to the stories and quotes that vividly illustrate humanity,

then we seek patterns in the information with the goal of

developing deep insights into unmet needs.

In the final phase of What Is,

we translate these insights into

design criteria that identify what a great solution will look like,

its attributes without stating any specific solution itself.

You involve a broad team to identify insights and write them as design criteria.

It is difficult to dwell deeply into this qualitative data and information on our own.

We need others who see things differently to nudge us outside our normal mindsets.

We need diverse teams working together.

The payoff here goes even further.

Teammates views of current reality also align as we explore stakeholder needs together.

This alignment pays dividends throughout the remainder of design thinking.

Our design criteria, the attributes of a great solution will

be the parameters for brainstorming in our second question What If.

Four Questions and What Is?

Design Thinking for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector

Meet the Instructors