Ep 74 Methodologies: Design Thinking isn't bullsh*t. The way you apply it is.

In this revealing episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates addresses the rising frustration and criticism around Design Thinking and Design Sprints—methods that have been transformative in his own career but are now facing pushback from many teams. Stephen explores the reasons behind this backlash, unpacks the common challenges people experience, and explains why, in many cases, these frustrations are valid. Tune in to gain a balanced perspective on Design Thinking and Design Sprints, discover ways to make them more effective, and learn how to overcome the pitfalls that can hinder their success.

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Stephen Gates : 0:00

What's going on everybody, and welcome to the 74th episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and everything else that helps to empower creative people. Now, be sure to subscribe to the show, so you get the latest episodes whenever those come out. And as always, remember that you can listen to all the different episodes, you can get the show notes, all the other things that go along with any of these episodes, just head over to the crazy one calm. That's the word the crazy and the number one.com. I would have bought number one is a word but they wanted too much money. So today, you know lately, I've seen a few talks, read more than a few articles and definitely gotten some questions from people who are latching on people who are frustrated with design thinking or design sprints. You know, the popular catchy attention grabbing headline has sort of evolved into design thinking is bullshit. And like I said, very attention grabbing. And, you know, it's it does get the job done right, it gets people to stop and listen, which is the job of any opinion like that these days. And I think, you know, you have people like this, and maybe you have some of them in your company, maybe you have some of them on your team. Maybe you're even one of them, who has sort of seen this resurgence in design thinking. And it's an interesting sort of thing, because design thinking has been around for about 60 years, I've done multiple episodes explaining what that is. I've used it for a big part of my career. And I think, you know, part of this is, whenever things like this happen, you know, and they tend to happen whenever things get popular in Vogue, right, like, there's always that sort of start of a backlash against it or starting to people who want to push back against it and There is no reason why this should be any different. I think you know, even as I've been using it for a number of years now I've seen this cycle sort of repeat itself a few times. But I think this time, it's interesting. And I think this time, it's a little bit different. So instead of doing what so many other people do, which is to dismiss those people who've got a different opinion, or think that somebody that I really love is wrong. I'm always fascinated by those sort of things. I'm fascinated whenever they happen, I want to lean in, I want to learn more. So in sort of prepping for the show, and being just generally interested by where this is coming from, I started to reach out to some of these teams, some of these people to get an understanding of what was going on to get an understanding of what was their frustration to be able to see how was this going wrong to be able to lead them to that place and so in this episode, I want to look at why design thinking or design sprints or any of these methodology has sort of been getting beaten up lately. Why do people feel this way? And in many cases, why do I think their frustration actually is extremely justified? Because, you know, what we're gonna look at here is that I think there's sort of one big problem that tends to happen. And then there's probably three or four smaller problems that I see in a lot of the teams that I work with. And the reason why I want to keep coming back to this is that ultimately, the thing that I think is so important, is that design is having a moment. Now, if you follow me on any social media channels, you saw that, you know, this week brought the release of you know, what was really kind of one of the big pieces of work that my team and the design education team at envision, have been doing over the last I don't know what five or six months probably, which was what we did is we went out and we've done the world's largest study of design maturity globally. We talked to about bout 22 different 2200 actually different companies. We talked to them about, you know, in a lot of different industries, a lot of different countries to be able to get this sort of global view of design. Now, the thing that came out of that was something that I've been a little bit concerned about for a while is that it absolutely shows design is having. We'll call it a moment, right? Because I, you know, as I've talked about, the entire point of this show has been that we have this opportunity to affect business in ways we haven't seen since the Industrial Revolution. And I think that the data proves out what I've sort of been guessing a lot of us are really struggling to figure out how do we take advantage of that a lot of companies are figuring out how to take advantage of that. Because in the process of doing this study, we said okay, look, you know, generally we feel like there are five different levels of maturity whenever we talk at talk with and look at design teams. The first one obviously being the least mature, the ones that are just sort of starting out The ones that really are there in that sort of still, like, for lack of a better term, like, make it pretty phase up to the ones that are in level five, these are the ones where they're an essential kind of part of the company, they're having a big impact, they're really driving change. Now, what we saw in that was that about 40% of the companies we talked to are in level one, about 20%. level to about 20%. In level three, right? So we've got 80% of companies stuck in low to medium maturity. And so, you know, I think we see a lot of recognition. This is a moment we see a lot of recognition design can have an impact. But we're not seeing the big majority of the teams, we're not seeing that the really high end impact. And so I think, you know, my concern, and again, the reason why I wanted to talk about this is I we need to make sure that this isn't just a moment. We need to make sure that you know, again, this has a lasting impact and a real shift in the way businesses thinking and the way that we're working. I continue to believe and have some This in the past that a lot of these methodologies and you can again, pick, pick whatever version you want pick, whatever, you know, however many steps they have, it's gonna be different for a lot of people. Whatever one that version is, whatever the version of is that you liked or have tried, it can be an amazing Trojan horse for change. Because I think as we talk about the things that they tend to do, well, they tend to be really good at bringing teams together, they tend to be really good at, you know, having really diverse thinking they tend to be really good at putting customers at the center of work and realigning. You know, that sort of opinion, a few of these things. We're going to get into a bit more here in a minute. But this is an incredibly important thing. And I think that's why you sort of see me sort of continuing to revisit this in the show, because I really feel like we have to make sure and find ways of stepping up to make sure that this is more than a moment. So as I've started to look at this start to have these conversations starting to think about this stuff. I found there's sort of one large overarching problem that like I said, can be broken down into a few smaller problems. Now, the way that I will tend to think about this, and I think that the big problems comes out of, if you think about design thinking you think about design sprints. It is a methodology. And a methodology is a way of approaching things. And then it has multiple steps. And then the way that I've always sort of thought about this is that these things are essentially not terribly different from a recipe, in that you need to be able to do things with a certain number of gradients in a certain order to to get a certain outcome. The problem is, is that if you skip steps, you leave out ingredients, then the final result is a mess and ultimately will probably appeal to no one. And then I think that when you see that happen, and I think that that is the big problem, right? Whenever I've talked to these teams, I see that what they're actually using, isn't really designed thinking what they're using isn't really design sprints. What they're using is this neuter down delay loot like kind of diluted version where they've sort of taken parts and pieces and and it just isn't what it's meant to be. And so just like any recipe, if I skip steps, if I leave out ingredients, nobody wants to eat the final dish and so very much in the same way here, I think whenever this happens, then there is very justifiable anger, that this feels more like madness than a method because you skip steps. So actually it is. And this is why I don't fault most of the people who are writing these articles and saying these things, because what's happening is that one people are skipping steps. So what they're doing actually isn't the process or two, the methodology has been really badly positioned. So everybody thinks that somehow this is a magic bullet, like we're gonna get everybody together, we're gonna do this stuff and immediately everything is gonna get better. It's a methodology. That's not the way that those work. They can be misled, they can be they are fallible, and I think, you know, There look like I said before, there are also some people who like to take an opposite opinion because you know, whatever is popular, they want to be the opposite. I get that too. I can't really speak to them don't really feel like I can help them because if you're gonna be a contrarian just simply based on you want to be the opposite like go go work in American politics, because that seems to be where those people truly Excel like just in Not, not listening to either. I don't care what affiliates you're in not listening either scientists vilifying the other. So you know, do that a congratulations go have at it. But, but I think that that's the heart of so much of this is like any recipe, we're skipping steps and we're leaving stuff out. Now. That tends to be the big problem. Right. So I think that's sort of the big headline. Now, whenever I looked a little bit deeper into this, there are a number of kind of smaller problems that I would see hobbling the process. There are a number of common problems that I see that often really sort of lead to this sort of frustration as outcome. There are probably three or four of these whenever I think about it, the first one that I see and again, you have heard me talk about this if you've listened to this show for any amount of time. I have said countless times that if you want to do great creative work, you know of any quality of any quantity, you need to start with a problem to be solved, not a solution to be vetted. This is so often where I see these processes stumble, because like I said, methodologies are fallible, they can be corrupted, they can be guided they can be so if you have whenever you go into the process, you have some team in technology and product in design executives, somebody who wants a very particular outcome to happen. Look, you can then do the research, you can find the insights, you can do the brainstorm, you can do all of those things that will lead you to the outcome that you want. One of the absolute biggest problems one of the toughest things to do whenever you teach this and whenever you use it, is to stay on biased, because if you really want to do a great innovative work, two things happen. One, you have to fail along the way. This is the iterative Part of these processes that is so important. And again, as I've said, call it, I mean, ideally don't call it failure, call it learning, call it iterating, whatever that is, you need to do that to be able to do good work, you're not going to get it right the first time. And then I think the other thing whenever you come through and do that, is the fact that again, you What if you want to do something that is truly innovative, you're not necessarily going to understand what the outcome is going to be whenever you start. You need to go through, do the research, just look at the facts. Look at the insights that is the why that extrapolates the facts into that aha moment. Then from there, I need to then go in, be able to position a brainstorm, do a brainstorm, come up with those ideas, build a prototype and test it. Again, this can be three stages, five stages can have different names. I don't care about any of that, right? Like teach it however you want. Use whatever names you want. That's the basic principle of what you do. But that's the huge problem, right is that people want to run to the fun parts. The fun parts that they understand are ideation and execution. This is where as I continue to campaign against gay Again, going back to the first show light bulbs are bullshit, and other things like that we continue to create these constructs and continue to encourage behavior that is actually short circuiting what it is we want to accomplish. This is where things and I continue to drone on about this look things like dribble things like Pinterest, things like these sort of visual inspiration, sort of mood boards can be incredibly valuable. But the places where they short circuited, are whenever your executives use it, whenever product uses it whenever tech or even design, what it fetishize is what it supports is the outcome. And so all that anybody wants to get to is they want to get to the pretty homescreen they only get to that thing they can post in their portfolio or online or whatever that is. That is and again, design, great design is the expression of great thinking. So if that's the case, then the thinking is what matters. And so it is the ability to go through this process open and unbiased because that's the thing is as a creative person, you're going to be the guide. You are on This journey and you need to make sure that everyone else stays open to the process that they don't run to those conclusions that they come up with multiple insights, multiple ideas. You're looking at this from a lot of different dimensions. And every time every time I have taught these things for years, years, and every single time, there's always people at every single table on every single team that just want to skip it and just say, Well, here's what the solution is going to be. Great. Kudos, congratulations, you came up with the most obvious idea. Because again, for teaching this for a lot of years, I can tell you your first idea, never your best. You can, it may be a great insight, maybe a great thing like that. But you need to be able to work through the process. You need to iterate on it need to put it in front of people, you need to not have that arrogance or just saying Haha, superhero pose, I have the answer. So again, the place to start is to make sure that you're getting a problem to be solved, not a solution to be vetted. The next part, I hit on this a little bit already, but I see so many teams that they own. Want to use the shiny parts the fun parts, the things that they've read about in like, you know, the Harvard Business Review or they read in their seen in some TED talk and those are the parts they're going to pull out because those sounds sexy and fun and interesting. Well, the problem is that this means like, again, whenever I talked to these companies, these teams these people, I found that they were only using parts of the methodology. And they were usually sort of like I said, the cliched popular parts I've actually had teams that have told me they practice design thinking I told them to describe it to me, and they pointed to a pile of post it notes in the middle of the table. How post using posted notes can be mistaken for something like design sprints or design thinking is quite simply beyond me. Because you know, that's the thing is just using post it notes, just doing brainstorms just calling any process like a design sprint or design thinking the same way. You can call something you know, like agile. I'm amazed at how many people just sort of rebrand disorganized as agile. Let's like you know, every time you know it doesn't make sense to somebody. Oh, it's agile, like no, it's not you're just a mess. But I think That's, that's the part of this right is you can't just use the shiny parts because like I said, these are recipes. recipes only work when you use all the ingredients. And you have to follow all the steps. And I think this is this was probably the biggest reason why I found so many frustrated teams and angry people. Because whenever you you go through and you sort of neuter this down, you mutated it into a different version of methodology, you're going to get horrible results, and you're going to blame the process for being nothing but junk. And and that's what I said is, you know, you need to do each of these parts for a reason you need to do the research, you need to look at the facts. So you have a solid grounding, you need to do insights, you understand the thinking behind that, again, with each one of these, yes, everybody wants to run to the sexy part. They just want to do the ideation they want to do the prototyping. You need all of it. You can't just take the shiny parts because, you know, again, I not long ago, I read an article about a very frustrated designer who described design thinking holistically left out from the process was using consumers as the center of truth holistically left was a lot of bringing, you know the teams together and a lot of these sorts of things that are so critical to the process. But I think the other part of it whenever a lot of times that people just pull out the shiny and the fun parts, and I think candidly, look, there's, this is a really big problem. And I think not enough people talk about this, I think even like Google, and some of the people they teach design sprints, maybe don't factor into enough that another big part of this. So I think some of the shiny parts only get used, you need to look at and you need to think about and you need to have an honest discussion around what is the maturity of your design team and what is the maturity of your entire company or the teams that you're working with, because it makes a massive difference in how these things get adopted, how they get used, because that's the thing if you have a team that is mostly just used as a production resource that is in that make it pretty category if you have teams where product and and Design and Technology don't get along, or they don't talk or there's a ton of tension between those where you have that war about like who's right Again, you've heard me talk about that a lot, though that that is an immature sort of way of looking at that not in like immature and I'm gonna make fun of you. But but it's just, you know, you're still in the very beginning stages of how do we start to really elevate the impact of design? How do we elevate the influence of design? Now, whenever you're in that, you probably need to solve some very fundamental cultural problems before one of these methodologies is going to be effective. Because if you have problems with communication, if you have problems with collaboration, then again, I think this is many times why people just pull out the shiny parts, because those are the things that are easy. Those are the parts we don't have to deal with the real problems. And we can keep having that big stack of pink elephants that everybody understands what the problems are, and we acknowledge it. But instead of dealing with them, we're just going to sort of feed them peanuts and kind of just keep them going. But so again, you need to also have an honest look at is your team ready to use this stuff is your team in a place where this is going to be productive because like I said, it's not a magic bullet. It can't fix a relationship. It can't Fixed communication. So think about that. The next one. And it's interesting because you know, one of the other symptoms that I see quite a bit is that whenever they introduce one of these methodologies, either the design team, the teams, they work with the larger company in general, they don't want to change the processes that either surround or intersect with design thinking design system, you know, that design sprints, whatever that is. Because, look, if you want to make this successful, then you can't start using it and leave the rest of the process and the rest of the thinking the same as the way it was. Because in many cases, if you're coming out of waterfall, you're coming out of traditional corporate mentality, you're coming out of a much more siloed way of working or a lot of those sort of different things. Then you're gonna run into problems and that's the thing here again, each time I teach it, I tell the teams that I teach that grade we've now done a crash course we've done a course you understand the basics, you understand the motions you you can see what this is really like. But what I want you to do is to go back and actually use design Thinking on your process to see what it is that you need to change to see what it is that you need to keep. But that's the thing is that if you're going to do things differently, then you actually need to go back and say, how are we supporting this? Because if you don't, what will happen, I guarantee you is that very quickly, it's going to become that really interesting workshop that we did that time that stuff we tried to use. But then ultimately, we can only use pieces of it, we couldn't adopt all of it. And then it was just that kind of fun workshop. We did that one time that didn't go anywhere. Because that's the thing is you've got to give this stuff a chance to be successful, you got to support it the right way is you got to make sure that everybody's on the same page. And that does require change. I know that change is uncomfortable. We've gone over that before. But I think this is really what you need to do is because look this this is the part where again, I think for the work that my team does anybody like look at this point, you can throw a rock in any given direction on any design team and hit somebody or something they can teach you one of these methodologies not hard to come by the nuanced part of this is the important part. This is how do you apply it? How does it actually intersect? How is it adopted? How is it valued and viewed inside of your organization? Those are the things they're gonna make the difference in its success, just simply saying, Hey, we brought this in, isn't it great isn't gonna be enough? Because I think that that that is a really important part of this, that not enough people really think about. Now, the last sort of struggle that I've seen with a lot of these teams, and this is a really pervasive, really big problem is that either what I see is that, you know, one of the main parts of design thinking of design sprints is using a usually a customer as the source of truth. And this is a huge part of what most companies don't follow. Because what they get trapped into is this sort of traditional view of what is leadership what is what needs to do, you know, what, what should my role be? And instead of saying, look, I need to be more of a quarterback I need to be more open to doing these different things. What people say is I need to be right I need to have the answer that is the definition of what's in charge. Great, that's an antiquated definition of what's in charge. Because I think, you know, I see the team struggle, because they have executives, they have product teams, they have tech teams or design teams, who they want to be the source of all the ideas, they want to be the source of all the insights, they want to say, Well, this is what we should go do. And I think this leads to a lot of conflict that leads to the opinion war, a lot of the things I've talked about that are just simply not productive, because it's about who's right. Now, look, what I'm not saying in this is that those teams don't have a voice. They don't have an opinion, that they aren't the curators and the guides of what goes on. Because here again, on the one side, I need to balance it with if I just have the arrogance of saying I have all the answers. In many cases, I'm not building things or not creating things that can be effective as they should. On the other hand, if all I do is just simply follow the data if that's all that I'm gonna do, then I go data blind, my ideas get really stale. And this sort of goes to that really overused quote from Henry Ford about whenever he was building the car, if he just would have asked people if they wanted, he had gotten a faster horse. You've got to find the balance between those two By making customers that source of truth, puts the focus on where it belongs, it gives your work a real sense of the problems that it's solving. And a real sense of if it's going to have an impact, it is a great way to settle those disputes, it's a great way to come back and to continue to validate and understand as you go through your work, what actually is working. And it gives you a really good structure where because the problem is, whenever one person also and this is also the byproduct, right? Because when everybody comes in, they say, this is my idea. I want to be right. I'm the person that's in charge. The funny part is then when it doesn't work, amazing how that person's never around amazing how they never want to take ownership for that. And then suddenly, it was all about what was the team's idea? I know you just thought of some project or something where that's happened to you. I know you did. Because it happens so often, right? Everybody wants success. Everybody wants individual accolades. And whenever it fails, it's always somebody else's fault. But that's the thing is, is think about what is that source of truth for the work because I think those sorts of things about again, where you're not starting, starting with a problem be solved, where again, you're only taking parts of the process where you don't want to change Use the processes that surround it. Or again, there is somebody that wants to be right and your source of truth is wrong. Those are the four biggest causes of why whenever I've talked to teams, they think design thinking is bullshit. Now, that's the problem is whenever you do that all of those things are neutering or mutating that process. And I thought, like I said, is whenever you walk away from this, I need people to understand that methodologies are fallible, there are they aren't magic bullets, you can mislead it, you can influence you can skip steps, and a lot of these other things that are going to send it off the rails. And so that's the thing is that even if you are following all the steps, even if it isn't working, there are also cultural elements to this because if you want to create any change, if you want to create any good work, it cannot be just process. It cannot be just a methodology. You need a cultural component, you need a behavior component to go along with it. Because the methodology or the process gives us the steps. The cultural piece sets, the behaviors and the way we need to adopt it the mentality that we need to have whenever we Go into it. one without the other doesn't work when it's just processed, then people don't understand how to apply it, they don't have the right behaviors, to be able to adopt it successfully, whatever it's just behaviors, then again, you've got a lot of people who are trying to do the right thing, but the way they do, it becomes very happenstance and sort of all over the place, because there's not a structure to it. So again, I need an emotional attachment. And I need a structure, I need both of these to be able to do this. This is why I continue to say that anybody can teach you design thinking. But that's just such a small piece of what makes it successful. And I think this is the big piece, how it's positioned, how we change our existing process to adopt it, how we make it unique, or customize it to our team. And some of these other things are really going to define its success. And that's why I said, Look, this is not just some blind love letter to design thinking or something like that. I've used this for a long time because I genuinely believe in it. I've used it and I teach it because I've seen the power that it can have to really change companies. But out of that I also understand how fraught it is how do these different ways of the ways that it can go around This is why my team and I come in and teach this and help set it up so often, because it is so challenging. Because it man, whenever it works, it is amazing to watch people who really have been stuck in other ways of thinking people who really just didn't think that this sort of creativity was possible people who would talk about how, you know, they've heard about doing these sort of things, but they've never seen it come to life. It's amazing and sort of almost magical, I would say, to really go through and to watch it come to life to watch people change, even in the meeting when you're teaching it to watch that change. But it requires so much more than just what you name the steps or how many steps that they have. And so again, I think if you're in that place, if you're feeling frustrated, if you're going through that stuff, I make this offer at the end of every show, but like look, reach out, let's have a conversation, like I'm happy to help or give you some advice on where do I think it's going right where do may be going wrong? What are some of those things you can do differently? Because as I continue to say, you know, this needs to be a conversation because it is up to us to make sure that this isn't just a moment. It's up to To us to make sure that again, we're helping these things really have the impact that they should. Because we are the guides were the Sherpas, we're the ones that are used to, we're the ones who are used to and we're comfortable being uncomfortable used to jumping off the cliff, building our wings on the way down, and hopefully not wily coyote whenever we get to the bottom of that Canyon, so many other people don't have that so many other people don't have that ability. And again, that's not a design bias. It's just again, where you study basic human psychology, we are the reminders that everyone is creative, we are the reminders of what it was like to be kids whenever everybody was an artist, a superhero or anything else in between, where what that reminder is so, as usual, like I think hopefully this helps, I think hopefully this will give you some amount of insights. If you don't like please reach out and let's have a conversation about this. And as usual Look, if you find the show helpful, if it's something that you think you're getting good insights out of that go to your favorite cut podcast platform, take a couple seconds leave a review, brings more people into the show helps kind of get more of a movement helps get more of this information out there. Subscribe to the show. Make sure you're getting the newest episodes when there's a coming If you want the shownotes for any of these, if you want to listen to other podcasts, get the related articles learn more about that stuff head over as always go to the crazy ones calm as usual, the words that crazy and the number one.com follow me on social media, you can reach out to me reach out to me on Twitter, and probably not Instagram because they're messaging and half the time I missed those too often reach out on LinkedIn, you know, hit the contact form on my site, go to Facebook type in The Crazy One podcast like the page there. I'm answering questions there all the time, posting different things. But But reach out. And again, if you're kind of one of those people who's frustrated, you're one of those people that's going through this stuff. I'm here to try to help if I can. As usual, everybody down in legal wants me to remind you, those of us here are just my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. These are just my opinions. And finally, I say it every time because I mean it every time but thank you for your time. I know the time is truly the only real luxury that any of us have was incredibly humbled. You want to spend any of it listening to me. So go out there, prove that what we're doing isn't bullshit. prove that this is more than just a moment and do it all and always remember to stay crazy