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What is Design Thinking?

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What is Design Thinking?

Welcome to the first week of Design Thinking in the Social Sector! This week, we provide an overview of design thinking: what it is, why it is different, and why we need it in these uncertain times, especially in complex organizations. We’ll examine the four simple questions at the heart of the design thinking methodology, and illustrate that approach with a visit to the Kingwood Institute in the UK. We’ll conclude this module by giving you a chance to hear from some other experts – Angela Meyer on the visualization tool and Dan Pink on six abilities that matter most.

Do you work for a nonprofit or in the social sector? Are you struggling to solve the problems and meet the needs of the people you serve? Come learn more about how design thinking, a human-centered approach to problem solving, can help you truly understand an issue, generate ideas worth testing and iterate to find solutions that make a real difference. Through global stories from areas as diverse as government, health care, and education, we’ll show you the tools, techniques and mindset needed to use design thinking to uncover new and creative solutions in the social sector. The development of this course was supported by the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. For more about the Batten Institute, see: http://www.darden.virginia.edu/batten-institute/ @BattenInstitute @DesignatDarden

Skills You'll Learn

Prototyping, Problem Solving, User-Centered Design, Design Thinking, Social Issues

Taught By

Jeanne M. Liedtka
United Technologies Corporation Professor of Business Administration

Transcript

It's time to get to work.

Let's begin by talking about what design thinking is,

and equally important, why we need it.

We live in a world of increasingly wicked problems.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the social sector.

Whether we look at private or public efforts

across sectors like healthcare, education, and government,

globally or locally, organizations of

all sizes and stripes are struggling with a set of really tough issues.

We often have a collection of stakeholders who can't even agree on the problem,

much less the solution.

We have employees who are reluctant to change behavior and take risks,

who've been rewarded, more for compliance than performance.

We have decision makers who have too much data,

but little of the kind they really need.

And leaders who are more likely to have short tenures and

whose every move is scrutinized by funders,

politicians, and the media,

and users of their services,

students, patients, customers, citizens,

whose expectations are sometimes rising as

fast as the resources to meet them are declining.

To add to this situation,

let's consider what innovators have to work with.

Mostly, it's an outmoded toolkit that assumes predictability and

control in a world that offers us less and less of either.

Our goal in this course is to offer you something new.

A new set of tools.

Ones that are much better suited to

the complexity and the messiness of the challenges that you face.

Because, let's face it.

Standing still is no more an option in

the social sector than it is in the for-profit world.

Innovation is an imperative.

But how does design thinking really help us to deal with all of this?

Well, design thinking is a problem-solving approach with,

I think, a unique set of four qualities.

It's human-centered, it's possibility-driven,

it's option-focused, and it's iterative.

Let's unpack those qualities one at a time.

Human-centered is always where we start,

with real people, not numbers.

Design thinking emphasizes the importance of deep exploration into the lives and

the problems of the people whose lives we want to

improve before we start generating solutions.

It uses market research methodologies that are

qualitative and what researchers call empathic.

And as we go, it's enthusiastic about the potential to

change even our definition of the problem itself as we learn more.

And then, to engage our stakeholders in what designers call co-creation.

Design thinking is also intensely possibility-driven.

We ask the question,

"What if anything were possible?"

as we begin to generate ideas.

And I think that is the most powerful question I know.

As we answer the what-if-anything-were-possible question,

we want to generate multiple options and avoid

putting all our eggs in any one particular basket.

Because we are always guessing about stakeholders needs and wants,

we also expect to be wrong sometimes.

So, we want to put multiple irons in the fire and then

let our stakeholders tell us which ones work for them.

We want to manage a portfolio of new ideas.

Finally, the process is iterative.

We'll conduct real world experiments to refine

our ideas rather than running analyses using historic data.

We don't expect to get it right the first time,

we expect to learn our way to success.

And that's design thinking.

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