The Crazy One
The Crazy One
Ep 35 Methodologies: Design Thinking P3 - Implementation phase and how build it into your culture
In this third in a 3-part series, we will look at implementation which is the final phase of Design Thinking where you bring the insights and concepts to life in prototyping, testing, and final delivery. Then we will look at some of the ways you can bring Design Thinking into your team.
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What's going on crazy people. And welcome into the 35th 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 a whole host of other things that matter to creative people. So today, we're gonna do the final episode talking about design thinking. Now, this has been a three part series and an episode 33 and 34. We covered off on the first two parts of this methodology. We talked about an overview of just what is design thinking. We talked about the inspiration phase, and we talked about the ideation phase. And just like last time, you probably have slept a few times since then. So I want to do a quick refresher just to remind you of what those pieces were. Now, same morning as before, if you're one of those people who jumps around and goes from episode to episode, and things like that, what I will tell you is that you need to listen to these three in order you need to go back and go back to Episode 33 and start there. This is the Cliff's notes version. Trust me this is not going to give you everything that you need and the detail that you need. So do yourself a favor, listen to him in order. For those of you who have been listening, we roll on. So a quick refresher. Now we started by talking about the inspiration phase. And that was the first part of the very, very beginning. And how important was that we got the design challenge that we're going to use this methodology on write that we had to make sure that we were getting a problem to be solved, not a solution to be vetted. Because if we get that wrong, right, from the very, very beginning, this whole thing is going to fall apart. So how important it was to make sure that we were putting a problem into this process. Now from there, then we talked about the three different types of research that you needed to do. This was going to be immersion, interviewing and observations. You remember me getting banned from gas stations and a whole bunch of other things. And how whenever you do this, you wanted to look for the extreme users extreme behaviors, people who hardly ever did anything, and people who did it basically professionally, because those are the places where you're going to find the best insights and then Then out of that, we talked about how you can then synthesize or pretty much just make meaning out of those observations. What are the the insights that you needed to pull out of that? Because remember, this is incredibly important that observations are just the facts. They're the what? And the insights. Those are the why they're the interpretation, and how hard it's going to be whenever you're doing observation to just keep it to the facts before you then go do the interpretation. Then the last episode, we talked about ideation. And we talked about how important it is how critical it is, to be able to craft a really great, how might we statements, that these are those statements that took us from insight to brainstorm that they were the bridge that brought all of the great research that we did forward into that brainstorm, but how tricky those could be how to make sure they aren't too broad, but they're not too specific, and give you some rules of the road for being able to do that. And then finally, we talked about the seven rules for running a better brainstorm what were the seven things that you needed to do? You wanted to run a much better brainstorm. So all of that sets the stage for today. So today we're going to move on to the final phase, which is implementation. And once we talk about that the last part that I want to do for this show is I'd want to do a wrap up to really talk about how can you integrate design thinking into your culture in your company, because I've taught this enough to know that that last piece is insanely critical, because so often you'll teach this methodology people get really excited. And then you kind of get these follow up emails, you get these follow up questions days or weeks later, basically saying, now what, how do I put this into practice? How do I put this into the culture? How do I put this into my team? So I'm gonna spend some time giving you some tips and tricks some of the things that I've learned to help do that. So today, we're going to finish off with implementation, and then we'll talk about how you can actually bring this into your group implementation. This is going to be made up of four distinct parts. We're gonna talk about prototyping, testing, refining, and finally delivery. Now implementation, the way that I would tell you to think about this is that this is basically the part. It's the path that leads from the project stage out into people's lives. This is where we stop, start going from just going through and doing research or doing brainstorming, where a lot of this has really been just enclosed into our team. It's been enclosed into us. And I think that this is the part where design thinking becomes incredibly powerful. Because in a lot of ways, if you know, if you're being totally honest, I think as we look at inspiration, and as we look at ideation, most processes follow that part of it. But it's this last part where you do implementation where we try to get it out into people's lives as quickly as we can. That makes the real difference. This is where the real power is. But this is also where it can get uncomfortable. Because a lot of people like to keep the creative process precious. They like to keep it nice and nice. tidy the light to keep it inside of their own group where nobody can look at it or criticize it or have an opinion on it, because then it can stay pretty, it can stay nice, it can stay unblemished and perfect. This was always the part to me where whenever I worked on the agency side, I don't know what I guess I just had a laugh, because it always kind of pissed me off where i a lot of the agencies would go through and there'd be like an agency version of our project. And then there'd be the client version. I just kind of always felt like that was lazy. It was a breakdown in the process, where you kind of had to felt like whether it's a good smart agency version. But then there was the part where the client version where they kind of dumbed it down. So I think that this part of really design thinking helps to fix that. And it helps you to be able to bring the two together. So you can go out with something that is really good, really strong, really smart. But it's something that clients also going to be happy with. You don't have the divide between those two things. So let's start by talking about prototyping. What the hell is a prototype and the easiest way that I would tell you to think about this I think that a lot of people think that these have to be these kind of big elaborate, you know, sort of things that people can interact with or things like that is that, you know, a prototype really is just the first step to a tangible, something, a tangible design, a tangible product, a tangible experience. It's just something but the power of a prototype really is that it's anything that takes you forward that moves you forward, fast. Now, I'll tell you a story about just how simple this can be and how I think that a lot of people may need to rethink what they think a prototype is. So whenever I had the chance, a few years ago to go out and work with Apple on Apple Watch. I actually created a prototype during that process to be able to work with and what it was was that whenever we actually started working with this, that the actual technology wasn't quite ready, but they wanted us to start designing for it. The challenge was that, you know, you can kind of give somebody the dimensions of something, what's the screen resolution, something like that. But I don't necessarily understand the physical size of it, I don't understand its proximity to me as a person, I need something I need some sort of, well, basically a prototype that I can use to help understand and help start to move forward. So there was a developer who was with me, and he and I basically had come up with this idea that we looked around the room, and what could we use to prototype with? And what we ended up with was a sugar sugar packet and a rubber band. How the hell is that a prototype? So what we did was that we would take the sugar packet, and whenever people would come in who had seen the actual hardware, we would hold it up and kind of say, Okay, well, is this about the size of the watch? And then go well, no, it's probably a little bit smaller than that. So we would start to take the edges and we would start to fold it down. And the next time they'd come back in, we'd hold it up again, and kind Go Okay, was it this big? And they go? Well, you know, maybe it's not quite that wide, we'd fold it down a little bit more. And you know, I don't know, however many iterations later we came in. And finally they said, Well, yeah, you know that that's probably about the right size. So what we would do is, then we would take the sugar packet, and we would rubberband it to our wrist. Because what that would do is it would give us a really basic, incredibly crude prototype to understand some idea of what we're going to be working with, what are we designing for what possibly could that interaction look like? But that really was a prototype. It wasn't clickable, it didn't have any screens. It didn't have a user flow, but it was a prototype. And so one of the things that we're actually going to talk about here in a minute are what are actually the different stages of prototyping because I think a lot of people when they hear the word prototype, they think it has to be something that we're basically going to go out and test right before we launch it. And I think that is a massive, massive mistake. So we'll talk here in a second about what are the four different stages of that, but I just wanted to share that That story because it's like I said, that was a prototype, as simple as it was it got us going. But why? Why do we need to do this? Why do we need prototypes? Why do we need to be able to kind of have something like this? And I think that the reality of this is, and for me, I would say it's for two main reasons. The first one is because we need to learn, we need to fail fast. And we need to fix what it is that was broken. And I think that it's this idea that we need to fail fast that we need to get this experience in front of people. That's incredibly critical. Because what it does is it takes all the preciousness away from your design, because I think so often people wait for user testing or focus groups or something like that, where they have a finished product, they can put it in front of people. And it's just so much easier. It's so much better. Whenever you can do this and whenever you can fail fast. It was one of those things where i think that you know, that was one of the great successes that we had when I worked at Starwood Hotels was that As a company, we really came to embrace this philosophy. If you looked at kind of one of the big innovations that we did, which was the ability to actually open your hotel room, with your iPhone with your Apple Watch, you could check in that way. Well, the right way that we did that was that we broke the mold. Traditionally, big companies launched these big things all at once in this big bang, and big tons of fanfare. We said, Look, we need to do something different, we need to be able to fail faster. So instead of picking 1500 hotels, we picked two. And we started with those two. And we start to work through those problems. We started to realize what are all the different nuances and all the different challenges that we were going to have that it wasn't just about the door to your room? Because in a lot of hotels, it was about the key that you needed to use to activate the elevator. It was about maybe the key you needed to get into the laundry facility or the pool or how far away should it be for security or should we actually turn it off when you're on the inside of the room. So if you walk out of the bathroom with your phone in your pocket, you don't accidentally unlock the door. There are tons and tons of these learnings. But the only way that we were going to do that was to be able to do this sort of prototype to fail fast to try it out. Because then we could see what worked, what didn't what were the things that we never thought about, like when we initially conceived it. We never thought about the elevator scenario, what was going to be like if you're in a crowded elevator with a bunch of people, and you have to activate your floor, or the security issue about the fact that that Bluetooth reader will read the outside and the inside of the door. So how do we deal with things like that. But these were a lot of the challenges that we had to overcome, to be able to really do this to be able to really kind of get out there and fail fast. Now, the other reason that I think that this becomes really important, and I think especially if you are an in house team if you're an agency that has a new client, we've talked a lot of the other episodes in this podcast about the importance of trust about how important it is for a client to trust what you do. Now the best way to be able to do That, I think, is to be really open with your creative process to be to let them in to let them be a part of it. But the other thing that you'll find is that some clients really good at this. And to be honest, some aren't. And for some of the ones that aren't the biggest challenge that design faces that the creative team faces is the fact that in many cases, our product is debatable. style is debatable. Taste is debatable the way something looks or acts or behaves or sounds or anything else like that is debatable. And too many times we have too many clients who think that they are the consumer. We talked before we talked in Episode 33, about the danger of the arrogance of simply thinking and assuming that you are the client no matter what. Well, I think that this is the other reason why I think prototyping is so critical, because what it allows you to do is in very regular intervals, put the work in front of people to let them use it to let that be the Truth, because then all of a sudden those things that were debatable, were a button goes or that you wanted to use a color, like no matter what part of the process it is, when all of a sudden, that's not as debatable, because we put it in front of people, we put it in front of consumers, we've done it often. And now that thing that maybe we were arguing over Well, now we don't have to do that anymore. So I think that the ability to prototype really gives you tremendous power to be able to settle those issues quickly, so they don't keep coming up. So it doesn't become this, you know, executive lead design, I guess, which really can become a problem where all of a sudden is just simply designed by dictation rather than designed by Consumer need. So these are the reasons why prototyping is so incredibly important. And just like that sugar packet,
Unknown Speaker :I think
Stephen Gates :it's also good to remember that a prototype might honestly look nothing like the final product. They can be small, they can be big, they can the size and scale of them really don't matter. It's just to be able to start to get in Do some different things to test your thinking. And I talked a minute ago about wanting to talk about what are the different stages? What are the different types of prototyping. And so let's go into that into a bit more depth as we're talking about this. Because what I think most people do, is they really jump to the last type of prototyping. And what I think that is, is that this is whenever I want to go test it right before I launch it, right, like I want to validate something. And that's really, really not the right way to think about it. And so I will say, I will argue, I will encourage you, I will implore you to actually do prototyping in four different ways. The first one is to do it, quite honestly, as just designed research. This is building something to think because what I want to do is I want to understand the boundaries, the patterns, the pain points, the opportunities that maybe we can go explore. Because that's the thing is is Every company has to Tons and tons of data. But very little that data usually looks at Where are the edges? Where are the opportunities? Where are the things that people aren't thinking about? Because a lot of cases, the reason why I like to do this design research, it could be design research, you can call it concept testing, you could call it a lot of different things. But what I want to do is I want to get a good idea of where the edges have a consumers willingness to do something. How far can I push it before it's too far? It's uncomfortable. It's asking them for too much. It's something that they don't want. It's and because that's what I'm looking for is I'm looking for where's the too far, because I want to sit really close to the edge of that. Because that's where innovation that's where opportunity sets is it sets up the place where I'm not doing what everybody else is doing. I'm thinking about something differently. But it also helps me in framing some of that research and framing some of the brainstorms is to understand where those edges are, and we talked before about how you know, we're We're going to teach this as a linear process. But this really is not a linear process at all. And I think especially there gonna be a few points as we go through this episode, we're going to talk about that. And I think in this case, prototyping and that design research needs to sit much, much higher up into the process. I think that this really almost should be part of the inspiration phase, whenever I'm starting to go through and I want to start to look at where some of these edges, I'm doing this really almost as a form of research. But I think it's an incredibly important thing to figure out. Where is the opportunity? Where's that thing that I think that's really cool, that maybe consumers don't want it, maybe they're not ready for it, maybe that's something that they just don't want to do yet. I think the next part of this is going to be rapid prototyping. And this is just building to learn. And what that means is that what I really want to do is I just want to test my initial hypothesis. And so what this is, is I've identified several areas of opportunity. I've found where the edges are. I've gone through and we've looked at and we found some interesting insights. What I want to start doing there is I'm gonna start kind of just rapidly prototyping some things, to really see if these initial thoughts if these insights are really gonna hold up. And so what I want to do there is just again quickly and just rapidly prototype, something that's going to help me see if these insights are true. Now, the third one is going to be we'll call it live prototyping. And this is something where what I want to do is I want to build, I want to build something to be able to kind of communicate the actual idea, this is no longer a hypothesis. This is starting to become something that actually starts to resemble a product or an experience. But because what I'm really looking to do is I'm really trying to examine, like, well, the product, the experience that whatever this is actually fit in the market. Is it something that people will use is the way that it's starting to come to life and the way that it's starting to be executed the way that we're thinking about it. Is that right? If this was a digital experience, maybe this is just coming out kind of sketches that we can just have people go through and touch on the buttons. If it's I don't know. What a retail experience, maybe I'm just building that entire retail experience, out of boxes and foam core just so that I can quickly be able to just try to prototype what that experience is like. But again, do it cheaply. And then the fourth one, and I think this is the one that most people tend to go to this is whenever they hear the word prototyping, this is what they think. And this is where I'm actually going to do like a live pilot. This is where I'm building to launch something, I want to validate the idea, I want to validate the execution, I want to make sure that this is going to work at scale. But that's the part of it where most people do is they This is kind of that user testing focus group, that sort of an idea. But I think that there's so many other opportunities along this way to prototype to try things out to be able to get it in front of people and just see how they react because there's a tremendous amount of truth in that. And I think that it worries some creatives, because you have something that you think is really cool. You have an idea that you really like and it's hard. It's really hard to see when people don't Want it? Or they don't like it or they don't understand it. But the reality is going to be is that that reaction is going to come at some point. And for me, I would so much rather that it come early in the process that it comes in a form where it's just sketches, or it's just working with clients or it's just testing an idea so that I can understand where the failure is where the boundary is, was it a failure in the insight, was it a failure in the way that insights being executed, but it gives me the ability to not be precious about my creativity. And I think that's, that's a really hard thing. And I think it's a hard thing for a lot of creatives to be able to do. I think it's a hard thing for a lot of leaders to be able to sell that in that this is the fate the place we're just going to go explore and see what the reality is. But I've said this in other episodes, I'm going to say it here again, because I think it's incredibly important. If you want to find genuine innovation, and I use the word genuine for a reason, because I think a lot of people want innovation, but they want to find innovation. But they really don't want to change with what they're doing. They don't want to change any processes, they don't want to change their products, they don't want to change the way they think that's not innovation. But if you want to do something that is genuinely different, the challenge with that is, is that you don't necessarily understand where you're going to land. Whenever you start with this problem. Whenever you actually start, you have to go through the process, you have to get things wrong, you have to prototype it, you have to put it in front of people, you have to have successes whenever it connects with people and you have to have failures when it doesn't, but all of them are important. And you have to be able to understand that and you have to be able to be willing to be open to that process to just simply see where it's gonna go and not get blinded by one idea that you really, really love. So, we'll move on from prototyping. And for the next year is we'll take test and refine and I think we're probably talking about these together because this here again, this is sort of a symbiotic relationship between the To things, because really what this is, is this is taking the idea and really experimenting with it in a real context, right? Because tests help you take small quick steps towards learning and ideas potential. This is what we just talked about, because this is the natural extension of why you want to do prototyping. Because the prototype whenever I get that I actually want to test it, I want to refine it. And because the other part of when you do this is whenever you go in and I want to take this prototype and I want to test it, I want to make sure that there are very specific questions that I really want to look at that I want to meaningfully evolve the idea I always will describe it as I want to actually try to actively break what it is that we've come up with. I want to find its weak spots. Because in a lot of cases, the reason why I think you need to test and the reason why you needed to find refine these things. The reason why you need to do all of this is because you probably have blind spots. You've probably made some assumptions that could make or break your idea. Here. Again, I think this is why creating empathy. This is why creating this kind of Human Centered Design is so important is so that you don't have these sort of blind spots or these sort of assumptions. And the reality is that you could have, you probably have made assumptions about the way a consumer behaves, you could have made assumptions about technology or any number of different things. Partially, this is why I think it's important to do prototyping, testing and refining throughout the entire process, not just the end. Because what I really want to do is I just want to quickly get a read on this, I want to see what's working and what's not. And I want to be able to just kind of go through and do that so that I can test these assumptions. I want to see where their blind spots were there things that maybe I never thought of. This is going back to the Star Wars in the keyless example. We didn't think about the elevator we didn't think about a lot of different things what like on the Apple watch one of the The funny technology things that we never thought of was. So I'm going to use my Apple Watch to open my hotel door, which means I'm going to hold my wrist up, I'm going to launch the SPG app, I'm going to go in, I'm going to hit the button that says, unlock my door. Now at this point, I'm going to take the watch, turn it away from me and hold it up to the pad that's on the door, so that it will actually trigger it'll send the key and unlock it. Well, here again, a technology assumption that we never thought about until we actually were prototyping it was the actual watch hardware. Whenever you turn your wrist away, it turns the watch off because it thinks it needs to go to sleep because you're not looking at it anymore. So it stops the app. It doesn't send the key. Trust me there were many, many nights where we were spending banging our head against the wall about why I did this app, which seems like it should be running perfectly, not work. And that was a technology assumption was that we never thought Thought about the fact that Oh, as soon as you roll it away, it turns the screen off, and it turns the key off. So again, this is why you need to go out and you need to test this sort of stuff. So let's look at if you're going to do these tests, I would say that there's probably a couple guidelines that I would give you because I also want to make sure that these don't become too big, they don't become too cumbersome. These should be quick, these should be easy, easy to build, easy to run, you know, it's something that ideally you could will say, in one hour, set up and run. Because what the biggest problem what you don't want to do is to get into these huge research studies, these huge sort of things where it's like, okay, we're going to go and we're going to test I want to get a cross sample, and we're going to do all this stuff. And we'll get results in two weeks like no that that that's completely defeats the purpose. What we want to do is we wanted to be able to do things to test things quickly. So that whenever you're doing these experiments, you're doing these tests. First off, they need to be quick and easy. The other thing thing is that they should be low risk, conduct them conducted with a safe audience at a minimal cost, we'll say like under $100, to be able to do all of whatever this test is tested with, anybody internally tests it with your secretary, your mom, your wife, your, like somebody who obviously isn't working on the project, but you can just make it easy and low risk. It doesn't have to be this massive sort of a thing. And the other thing that it should be is evolutionary, it needs to help you learn and it needs to help you grow your idea. It can't just again, be going in and just saying, okay, we just want make sure everybody loves it. And so we just want to talk to people who love it. No, you actually want to go in and again, try to actively break this stuff so you can actually see if it's working or not. And like I said before, we talked about how I'm teaching this in a linear example. But here again, this process isn't linear, as you talk about prototyping, testing, refining. This overlaps up with ideation and overlaps up with inspiration. A lot of this crosses in and out of each other as this is an iterative cycle. This is one of those places again, where I just want to kind of call that out that you need to think about how can you actually go through and be able to kind of get this to that place. Now, then the last part of this is going to then be delivering the product. And so you know, delivering the product is is honestly pretty much self explanatory is just this is whenever you've tested it, you've refined it, you've got it to the place where you really feel good about it, and you want to ship it. Now the thing that I'll say is that there is the potential for you to get caught in that ideation, prototyping, testing refining loop for too long. And what I would say is that what you need to do is to target at maximum that you will ship something at least every eight months. Now there are some projects that can go on for an incredibly long amount of time. But I think that the thing that I've seen as eight months is about the magical number, where anything less than that you probably haven't spent any Enough time really getting it right. And anything more than that the team is just going to start to get fatigued, they're going to start to lose their energy, it's going to start to become that you've just simply been grinding on it and refining it for too long. And extreme examples, all of a sudden, you're Radiohead and you come up with an album, like every eight years, because you're just so neurotic about fine tuning every little thing that you just don't put out any music. So this is, like I said, spend enough time to get it right. But don't be like kind of just a super neurotic sort of thing about that. Because you want to make sure that when you're delivering is at a good enough cadence, that it's keeping the team inspired, that it's keeping them motivated that they feel like they're seeing their efforts go out the door. Because that's part of the challenge of leadership here is to make sure that you're protecting the team morale, that you're protecting the energy that they're putting into this because if it drags on too long, it's going to start to wane and the product ultimately is really gonna suffer. So those are the basics of the three phases. insanity. ideation implementation. And like I said before, there's no part of this that you probably go, Wow, I've never heard this before. Wow, I've never thought about this before. The challenge with this is going to be for you. How do you actually do it? How do you actually take it into work? How do you start to work this way? How do you stay disciplined about doing the research? How do you stay disciplined about continuously working on crafting better? How might we statements? How do you make sure that you're running better brainstorms that you're prototyping, you're testing, refining? And that that's really where a lot of the nuance in this is? Because the methodology in itself is straightforward enough. You can listen to these episodes, you can write it all down, you can say, Okay, look, I get it. But now let's talk about this last piece that I said I really wanted to kind of touch on. And that's how do you actually build this into your culture? And we talked about this at the beginning. And one of the biggest challenges that you're probably going to have is the word design that In the word design thinking, because a lot of people are going to hear that and think, Oh, I needed to know how to draw I needed, you know, I'm not a designer and things like that, right? So what you need to do is to make sure that first and foremost that you're explaining that this is a human centered methodology, that it's a way of solving problems that yes, it has the word design in the title, but that that isn't going to be exclusionary for anyone that anybody can come in. And anybody can come in and do this. Because and we talked about this in Episode 33. But I want to say it again, that we are in a time right now, where creatives have the opportunity to affect business that we haven't seen in a really, really long time. And what design thinking does is it gives you the ability to bring creativity into a team into a company or into your client. And that is a massively massively powerful thing. Because that's what companies ultimately are looking for. They're looking for creativity. They're looking for ways to solve problems. They're looking for to how do you activate everyone so that they can contribute. But this is where too many of us are getting caught up on the fact that we confuse creativity with design. Creativity is problem solving. Design is a byproduct design is how that problem then looks whenever it goes out into the world. And so design thinking meshes both of these together, it lets us go out to do the research, do the ideation to be able to do the actual thinking behind it. But then prototype the design to prototype the experience, so that we're sure that what's going out there is right. And it meshes those two together. But it's that core, it's that creativity where there is incredible power for you to be able to come in and change a company. So how can you bring design thinking to your company? And so there's a few things that I would say, and some of these are key opportunities. Some of them are questions that you should be thinking about and you should take This back to your team, to your company, to start to think about these things and start to look at these things, whether you're doing it for the first time, or whether you're already using design thinking as a way to keep the knife sharp. And as usual, I'm going to post all of these in the show notes. So podcast, Stephen Gates calm. So don't feel like you've got to scribble all these down. But these are some things that I think you need to think about as opportunities and questions. You really should think about, how are we really doing this? And so let's do this in parts, kind of like the phases. So if we think about something like inspiration, and you want to take this back to your team, how do you and your team actually get inspired? Have you even begun to think about this? Has there ever been a conversation about it? have you spent any time trying to fuel the engine or is it just heads down? Work, work, work, work work? Because if inspiration is the fuel for innovation are you actively seeking it on a regular basis, are you running on empty? Because that's the problem is all of a sudden it's like, well, why aren't we being more creative? What if you're not actually taking the time to seek any of this out? That's a real problem. I mean, is inspiration design into your work lives? Or are you just simply waiting passively for it to just kind of fall out of the sky? Because we've talked about this in past episodes, where especially the more senior you get, the more successful your team is. I did an entire episode that talked about going out and seeking inspiration about seeking opportunity that this was very much like an athlete that you had to constantly do it. This is the work in the offseason, they got you ready for game day, they got you ready for the moment whenever you needed to go out and be great. But for inspiration, that's really what it is. And so, like, what could you and your colleagues do in the next month to be more inspired? So let's just start there. Let's like before we even before we even got into design thinking just simply how Can you start to get people more passionate? How can you get them more engaged? How can you get them more inspired? Because that's the other part of it is that you know, that they're going to be some people, if you try to bring design thinking in, he'll be very, very excited about it. You're going to have the other ones who are going to be skeptical, they're going to be scared. They don't like change. They don't like things to be different. But that's the thing is how do you start to get them more inspired? How do you get them more engaged? How do you create a culture we're sitting on the sidelines is no longer an option, where if you just aren't going to be that person that's engaged, if you aren't contributing, that everybody the team, the culture will start to reject that behavior. And I think that that's an incredible thing about that sort of inspiration piece of it. Then we can talk about the human centeredness of all of this, right? And that's things like do you spend enough time in context with specific people that are really you're trying to be able to kind of figure out what Isn't there doing? This could be? Are you like, are you getting effective and really good with your customer knowledge? And do you really have that empathy built up? And if you do, how are you actually done taking that back into your organization? How are you teaching people that? How are you not just simply letting the old assumptions sit there? And as a part of that, are you good at telling stories? How are you going back and relaying this information? How are you actually telling these people, you know, telling the people in your company about the people that you're meeting about the challenges that they have? And what can you do? What can your team do, to continuously work to stoke to improve, to really make sure that you have that empathy with your customers that you don't just suddenly get to that point where it's like, okay, we've done that we've talked to them and now we get it. And so, then we can move on to things like ideation. How can you deliberately and clearly Separate idea generation from idea evaluation. We talked about this in the ideation phase that so many people immediately want to rush to judgment, they just want to rush to kind of say like, okay, now that's not going to work or they're immediately going to go to that evaluation mode. How are you working with your team to make sure that it really is just about idea generation, that it's free from judgment that you're using those seven rules? To really make sure that that's working? I guess you can take on a lot of different forms. Can you think of something that's particularly challenging for you at work? Maybe it's part of the challenge that you have right now, for your one of your clients. Maybe it's something that's part of the team or part of the company. Can you go in? And can you actually think about, okay, well, if I'm getting stuck with this, if I'm having trouble finding a way through, can I get everybody together? Can we spend an hour we'll say, on Monday, and can we come up with a 50 or 100, new options, new ways of solving that problem, to really be able to be about ideas Generation, and we're not going to stop, we're not going to leave. And the target we're going to set is that 50 to 100 ideas, we're going to be that bold about it. And can you do that? Are you going out? And are you experimenting? Are you prototyping early? And often enough? Do you build your prototypes to explore fledgling ideas? And it's really just as they're taking shape? Are you doing it only to communicate those well formed ideas to other people? Are you embracing failure? And are you building on it? Like there's a lot of these just sort of basic things that I think you need to think about? Right? And that these are just some of the things and the reason why I say these questions is to purposely challenge you to think about what are the answers to those questions? If there are a lot of yeses, you're probably in good shape. If it's a lot of nose, then you need to think about and use this as a guide for how do you evaluate how much work do I need to do? Because ultimately, what you're going to want to do is to start to look at how is your team acting? How is it that They're really going to be ready for this. How can they take this on? And so there's a couple traits that I think great teams have. And so I want to go over just what kind of what those are. And, and and if your team is doing this, make sure that you keep that knife sharp. If it isn't, try to figure out how can you start to shift the way that people think, to be closer to this because this is going to get you closer to a much stronger design thinking mindset. And what this is going to be is, first off, and like I said before, keep consumers users, whatever you want to call them, keep them at the center of what you do, stay connected to them throughout the design process. If this is something where you're doing it in a bubble, you're doing it on isolation, you have to change that. It's just a basic thing. You need to think about it that we need to build to think to get tangible to do it quickly to use this mindset to safely take risks and explore ideas. But we're going to build and we're gonna prototype to think, to be able to get this stuff that like I said, in the very beginning that creativity is a team sport, that we have to invite diverse perspectives to the table, you have to regularly collaborate with people who have different skills and different perspectives than you do. Because it's one of those things that may seem contrary, it may seem difficult, but it is incredibly important to be able to do that. Because I need Opposing Viewpoints, I need opposing opinions, I need the business, I need development, I need product, I need these people at the table, to be able to push and pull against all these different things. You have to and especially for if you're part of an in house team, you have to stay curious. You have to explore what's possible and you have to go out and actively seek inspiration. You have to go out and live and create empathy and find the inspirations and the opportunities that are out there. It has to be a part of what it is that you're doing. You've got to iterate quickly and frequently. This is part of build to think. But do it quickly. And frequently. You have to continually explore, design and experiment, learn and iterate, you have to keep doing this sort of thing. So if those are sort of the ideal way the team should act. And you're going to come in, and you're going to kind of say, Okay, look, we're going to use design thinking now. How can you change the culture? How can you get this adoption? What are just some of the basic things that you can think about that will help start to make this shift, right, because you can bring in the methodology, you can teach it to people, but it's in the way that they think it's in the way that they behave. And it's a few other things that I think really make the difference for how much it gets adopted, or if it becomes that, like, Oh, yeah, that thing that we took that time that sounded really interesting, but never really went anywhere. And I think that part of it, the start of it is to really think about and look at what are just simply the tools that you Do you go through? And do you have post it notes everywhere? Do you have the ability to sketch? Do you have materials so you can quickly prototype are they're just kind of like the basic building blocks that encourage quick ideation that encourage collaboration. Are you all off, separate in your rooms just kind of doing your own individual thing. And I think that that then kind of leads into the next one, which is to really look at the space that you occupy. Too many times. I go in, I see companies, I see design teams, you want to talk about how they want to be more collaborative, how they want to work together, and you go in and they're in these like cubicle farms. That doesn't exactly promote a tremendous amount of creativity and ideation. I think one of the things that we did at Citi, which was massively massively successful is we went in and on the design floor, we stripped out all the offices, there aren't any offices anymore. We took those rooms, we covered them with whiteboard paint, and we turn them into huddle rooms so people can get in there. They can sketch they can work, they can do this sort of ideation and creates a massive, massive change in the culture. It really encourages this design thinking way of going in and doing these brainstorms of finding these things, a building of doing the sort of things that we've talked about. And I think that the last part is, and this depending on your level can either be the easiest, or the most challenging part of this, is to really think about what are the norms that you want to establish? We talked about the way that the team should act. Those are norms, those are expectations. We've talked about this in the past when I've talked about building culture in teams about how I go through and write beliefs and things that people need to adhere to. These are things that we believe and this is the way that we act. This is the expectation that we set, none of it is rocket science, but actually writing it down, putting it up on the wall, and holding people to it seems to be something very similar to rocket science. But that's part of it, is how do we actually say that these are the things that we believe in, these are the things that we're going to do and and be able to do Take those five things to be able to take, keep users at the center build to think invite diverse perspective, stay curious, iterate quickly, even if you start with those as the norms and kind of say, Okay, look, these are the five beliefs that we have, that as a team, these are the things that we're really going to believe in, that will start to help shift the mindset that so you can get to a place where you can actually use design thinking more regularly. Because that's the challenge. We've talked about this in leadership. We've talked about this in culture episodes, we've talked about this a lot. That what ultimately I want to do that what design thinking at its best does is that it shifts the way people think not just the way they behave. And because that ultimately is going to be your challenge. Because if what you do is you bring in the methodology, and you guys start to do that, but everybody still has the same old thinking they're just simply behaving a little bit differently. The results probably aren't going to be that different. Because what you want to do is you genuinely want to change the way People think you want to get rid of the arrogance that they understand the consumer, you want to get rid of this idea that we're going to build it and take it all the way to the end. And then we're going to test it. There's so many of these things we've talked about through these three episodes, that you need to change the way that people think, not just the way they behave, because that's going to be the challenge in this is that it's a methodology. But a methodology is only as good as the leadership that brings it in. It's only as passionate as the people who use it. It's just like any process or any methodology. It can be a really interesting piece of paper, or it can be a culture changing business defining way of doing things. It's the people that bring it to life that make the difference. And I think that that's the part probably of design thinking that most people don't get that they don't understand is that it's the belief. It's the way that you use it. It's the way that you hold your team accountable to using it. That makes the difference because what it does is It gives creativity shape, it gives it form, it gives it a structure in which anybody everybody can participate. But it also requires leadership that allows all those voices to be heard. That allows you to stay neutral in the process to be able to look at where generally the opportunities to not fall in love with one too quickly to not have a preconceived solution going in, but to be open to those possibilities. Because ultimately, that's what so much of this is, and I see this time and time again, whenever I teach this methodology all over the world, is that whenever you do it, two things are going to happen. And you need to pay attention to this part because when it happens, this is going to be what you're going to have to break through. The first is that in a lot of cases, to a lot of people, this is going to feel a lot more like madness than a method whenever you first start doing it. Because it is very different people aren't used to going into stuff like this and not knowing the answer. That makes them very, very uncomfortable. But that's the second part is that you're going to have to get everybody yourself included, comfortable being uncomfortable. Because that's going to be the challenges that we're going to have to take this challenge. And then we're going to go out, and we're going to explore, we're going to ideate, we're going to see what possibilities are, we're going to have faith in ourselves in this team in the talent that we have, that collectively, if we work together, that we're going to find the right solution. But that's the other part of this challenge, right is that we all have to be invested and understand that there are going to be bumps along the road, that we may test things that work out great, we may test things that completely fall apart. But that that is an expected outcome. Because the other thing that you find in too many company and corporate cultures, is the fact that these teams who should be invested in each other, who should be invested in finding the best solution, the best idea? Well, whenever those bumps start to come whenever Maybe the ideas don't flow quite as easily. Whenever things get difficult whenever tests don't go well, whenever you have to go back to the drawing board, what you see is instead of investing in the best idea and investing in each other, what those teams do is they invest in covering their ass. They invest in whenever things don't get well, whenever, whenever some executives gets upset that they have the documentation, the paper trail, the emails, the conversations, the whatever it is, that proves that they're not the ones to blame. This falls on leadership. This falls on the people who are doing this process. This falls on you to not let that mentality prevail, to reach across the aisle to be able to tell everybody that this is fine, that this is okay that this is what is supposed to happen. But that we're going to work through it together and we're going to find a solution together. That this is the road to innovation. This is the road to different to new to better to ultimately what the company wants us to do. And that's hard because like I said before, A lot of people get very uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. And that if they don't necessarily understand where it is they're going, they don't like that. And that those are going to be probably ultimately, the two biggest challenges that those are the places where whenever I've seen people try to take this into their culture, those are the places ultimately why it doesn't fit or why it doesn't work. Because that fear, those concerns just simply become too great for people to overcome. At the end of the day, they simply just find it easier to go back to the old status quo way of doing things to know what the solution is before they even start. And then somehow, years later, inexplicably wondering why their portfolio is full of mediocre work that nobody cares about why they're unhappy, why the team keeps turning over. But that's the thing as creatives, this is our opportunity to bring creativity to everybody to remind people just like when they were a little kid, what it's like to be and just really enjoy and revel in that certainty, because too much education and society and business has taught too many people to forget about creativity, to just simply fear the unknown. Instead of embracing it and enjoying it and saying that, look, this is the fun part, we're going to go do something that nobody's done before. And that's the possibility here. And design thinking is the way that can help get you there. But like I said, and like I've said, in so many of these other podcasts, it's not a magic bullet. It's up to you to believe, to teach, to guide to help to use these rules to use this basis to use this outline as the starting point. And then to go from there to go into your company and start to put it into practice, and to guide people through the bumps and the uncertainty and the confusion. Because once they start to see the output of this, trust me it becomes incredibly contagious, and that is incredibly powerful. So I talked about this in a few other places. We covered a lot of ground covered a lot of things. All of this, all the show notes are going to be up at podcast, Stephen Gates calm. So head over there you can see some related articles, you can get all the show notes, everything that you'd want for there. If you like the show, I always ask us every time if you can please take just a few minutes, go to iTunes, go to your favorite podcast platform, please leave a review, it makes a huge huge difference. I can see there are tons of you who are listening to the show, just keep do me a favor, just take a minute, go out write a review, it makes a huge difference. If you have any questions, if there's some things you really want to find out more about, if you're starting to use this and you're finding that you're having some struggles, the place that I would tell you to do is to go to Facebook, search for The Crazy One podcast like that page. That's where you can get updates, the latest shows will get posted there. And you can go in and ask questions and I've had a lot of really good questions that are on there. And we've had some really good discussions about that. So if there's anything in here as you start to go through and do it that you're not sure about that you struggle with go in there and I I try to as quickly as I can, unless I'm on an airplane or stuck in a meeting, I'll get back to you as quickly as I can. If you want to connect with me on any other social media platform, easiest way, usually just search for SD gates, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever else you can find me in all those places. As always, the boys down illegal want me or want me to remind you that the views here are my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. And finally, I say it every time because I mean it every time. But thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only luxury that any of us have. And I'm always incredibly humbled that you want to spend any of it with me. So hopefully, you've enjoyed this three part series on design thinking, hopefully, you're going to go out and go back to work a little bit more enthused with a little bit different perspective, willing to go try to change your team. And because of that, and so much more, stay crazy.
