Welcome.
I'm Jeanne Liedtka and I am looking forward to exploring the topic of
design thinking and how we can use it to accelerate innovation and
growth in our organizations, and maybe even in our lives.
Let me tell you a little bit about myself as we get started.
So I'm a strategy professor at the Darden School fo Business at
the University of Virginia.
And I like to joke that I fell in love with design thinking because I am
the least creative person I know.
Maybe that's why my passion is demystifying design for
business people like myself.
so my own education is in business.
Started off as an accountant, then got an MBA and a doctorate.
I've lived in both the worlds of academia and business.
Here at Darden, I've been the Director of the Batten Institute, a research center
devoted to entrepreneurship and innovation, and a research center that
sponsored a lot of the research that we'll be talking about in this class.
And I've also been Associate Dean of our MBA program.
I started out my business career originally as a cost accountant, and
then became a strategy consultant with the Boston Consulting Group.
And more recently spent some time as Chief Learning Officer at
UTC a fortune 50 corporation.
But what really matters is that I've been studying the way designers think, and
it's relevance to organizations for over 15 years now.
I've written several books on the subject,
which you may find useful as reference material.
Again my goal has always been deciphering design thinking for managers.
My first book, Designing for Growth,
which I co-authored with Tim Ogalvie, looks in detail at the process and
the specific tools that we'll be looking at in action in this class.
It's really a how-to guide for
those looking for specific instructions about how to use design.
My most recent book, Solving Problems with Design Thinking,
co-authored with Andrew King and Kevin Bennett, is a story book.
It looks at the stories of ten organizations who
are using design thinking to solve a wide variety of different kinds of problems.
We'll meet one of those organizations the Good Kitchen later on in this session.
In this first session, I really want to explore the definition of design thinking.
I want to explore what design thinking really means, or
at least what I think it means.
It's a term that is somewhat controversial.
Particularly the thinking part.
Since as you'll learn as we talk more about it,
this approach to decision making is about a lot more than just thinking.
So what else is it about?
Well, let's start with a popular view of the creative process.
I call this view the Moses myth.
In the Moses myth, innovation is a miracle that results when
a special person raises his or her hands to God.
The Red Sea parts, the iPod is born.
Pick your own utopian outcome.
The message is the same.
It's that the innovation takes a special gift.
One that most of us just don't have.
Like most myths this just isn't true.
Of course there are creative geniuses, no one would want to
deny that truly extraordinary minds, like Steve Jobs, exist.
But genius is not the only way to produce innovation.
And believing the Moses myth undermines managers' confidence in
their own abilities.
And what I want to do is just ask for equal time to tell a different version of
the story of innovation and where it comes from.
This is a view of the creative process that was offered by an employee of
Apple a few years back, and it is one of my favorites.
Not because I agree with it,
but because I think it captures the Moses myth beautifully.
That old story that innovation is a black box.
It's a hopeless tangle.
And the ability to think creatively is the mysterious one that belongs to
a special class of people.
In this class, we are going to respectively disagree with that story and
tell a different one.
Rather than waiting for Moses to show up and part the Red Sea for
us we are going to figure out how to build bridges to cross over to the other side.
To that promised land of the new future so
that we can reliably manufacture our own miracles.
So let's look at a different view of the creative process.
In this view, the tangled mess morphs, into a systematic series of questions.
The first of these questions is, what is?
And it explores current reality.
All successful innovation begins, I believe,
with an accurate assessment of what is going on today.
Indeed starting out by developing a better understanding of
current reality is a hallmark of design thinking and
it's the core of design's data intensive and user driven approach.
Managers frequently want to run immediately to the future to start
the innovation process by brainstorming new options and ideas.
And they find it hard to focus on immersing themselves to the here and now.
We're so impatient to get to creating new stuff.
But attending to the present pays dividends in two crucial ways.
First, it helps broaden and perhaps even change completely our
definition of the problem or opportunity we want to tackle.
We can unwittingly throw away all kinds of opportunities for
innovation before we even get started if we adopt too narrow or
too conventional a definition of the problem.
Second, this attention to the present helps uncover unarticulated needs,
which are the key to producing the kind of innovative design
criteria that generate really differentiated solutions.
And those are the kind that we want to build profitable businesses.
What is saves us from having to rely entirely on
our own imagination as we move into idea development.
And it gives us solid and
ideally deep insight into what our stakeholders truly want and need.
Which reduces the risk of failure with a new idea.
Focusing on what is helps us to specify what a great solution will
look like without telling us the solution itself.
Now, having accomplished that, we're ready to ask the second question, what if, and
begin to generate ideas and explore possible solutions.
So, we've examined the data we've gathered, we've identified patterns and
insights and we've translated these into specific design criteria as
part of the what is phase.
Now we're going to use those criteria to ask what if?
Keeping in mind that we want to start this part of the process by
focusing on possibilities.
What if anything were possible?
That I believe is one of the most powerful questions anyone can ask.
So often we get trapped into starting with constraints rather than possibilities.
And then the future ends up looking a lot like the present.
This phase is where brainstorming occurs.
Brainstorming is a process that most managers have learned to hate.
But this time I promise will be different.
No more asking you to come up with ten novel uses for a paperclip.
Rather than relying entirely on our imaginations and
idea generation, we're going to go back and use the insights and the criteria
we generated during data gathering and pose a series of trigger questions.
Those questions will help us think outside of our own boxes and
generate multiple creative ideas.
In fact, we can think of each of these individual ideas as though they
were a single Lego block.
Just the kind of Lego's we all played with as children.
And then in concept development we're going to take those individual ideas and
combine them,
just the way kids do with Lego's, into all kinds of different cool creations.
And we'll call these creations our business concepts.
And now that we have a whole set of business concepts it's time to move to
the first stage of testing by asking our third question.
What wows?
In this stage we're going to treat each of our business
concepts explicitly as a hypothesis.
And begin to think systematically about evaluating them against our
design criteria.
Now if we get the first two questions approximately right
we'll find to our simultaneous pleasure and dismay that we
have far too many interesting concepts to move forward all at once.
And so we have to make some hard choices.
As we whittle the field of concepts to a manageable number, we're looking for
those that hit the sweet spot.
The wow spot.
Where the chance of significant upside for
our stakeholders matches our organizational resources and
capabilities and our ability to sustainably deliver the new offering.
This is the Wow Zone.
And making this assessment involves surfacing and
testing the assumptions about why each of our concepts is a good idea.
The concepts that wow, the ones that pass the first test, are good candidates for
turning into experiments to be conducted with actual users.
In order to do this, we need to transform the concepts into
something a potential customer can interact with, a prototype.
So finally we're ready to learn from the real world by asking our fourth question.
What works.
And trying out a low fidelity prototype with actual users.
If they like it and give us useful feedback, then we refine the prototype and
test it with yet more users.
Iterating our way until we feel confident about the value of our new idea and
are ready to scale it.
As we move through what works.
It's important to keep in mind some of the principles behind this learning in
action stage.
Work and fast feedback cycles.
Minimize the cost of conducting experiments.
Fail early to succeed sooner and test for key tradeoffs and assumptions early on.
And there you have it.
Just four questions that will help us build the bridge to more
innovative solutions and manufacture our own miracles without relying on Moses.
And so, this is what I'm going to be focusing on in our time together.
Design thinking as a problem solving approach that asks four questions, and
that is human-centered, possibility-driven, option-focused, and
iterative in its approach.
Let me talk about each of those for a moment in turn.
Human-centered is where we always start, with people.
With real human beings.
Not demographics or segmentation schemes.
Design thinking emphasizes the importance of deep exploration into the lives and
the problems of the people we hope to generate value for
before we're allowed to start generating solutions.
This is why it's often called user-driven design.
It adopts market research methodologies that are qualitative, and empathetic.
And it's also enthusiastic about engaging other human beings in co-creation.
Design thinking is also possibility-driven.
It uses this information we've learned to ask the question, what if anything,
were possible?
As we begin to create new ideas about how to serve them.
It also focuses on generating multiple option, and
avoids putting our eggs in particular solution basket.
Because we're guessing about our stakeholders needs and
wants, when we go after unarticulated needs.
We expect to be wrong a lot, so we want to put multiple irons in the fire and
let our stakeholders tell us which works for
them, which means we want to manage a portfolio of new ideas.
Finally, the process is iterative.
It's committed to conducting cycles of real world experiments rather than
running analysis using historical data.
It's a process of continuously forming and
testing and then reforming our ideas about what works.
We don't expect to get it right the first time.
We expect to iterate our way to success.
Let's learn some more about design thinking from some experts on
the subject by viewing the video, what is design thinking.
We've created that video here at Darden and I'd like you to check it out and
I'll rejoin you to look at design thinking in action when you're finished.