Design Thinking has ruled the major management segment for years now. But, Bruce Nussbaum (Professor at Rotman’s School of Management) says ‘Design Thinking has given the design profession and society at large all the benefits it has to offer and is beginning to ossify and actually do harm.’
There were many successes, but far too much more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all too well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. The success rate for design thinking processes was very low. Yet, the contributions of Design Thinking to the field of design and to society at large are immense.
If design thinking is a cliché thing for you, you can certainly see some more strategies for your organization to prosper.
TRIZ :
For a layman, TRIZ is an advance- structured approach to problem solving. It is the science of creativity derived from all scientific and engineering solutions. It is a Russian acronym for the ‘Theory Of Inventive Problem Solving’, which helps us to think clearly and help us to be creative and innovative. You can also use TRIZ to help us improve existing systems and increase the artistry of systems by lowering costs, removing harms or increasing benefits. The theory lies in:
Understanding the evolution of successful products.
Ways to overcome psychological barriers
Generalization of the ways used to solve problems in the most innovative inventions.
There are two groups of problems people face: those with generally known solutions and those with unknown solutions. Those with known solutions can usually be solved by information found in books, technical journals, or with subject matter experts. The other type is called an inventive problem. New Knowledge. This technique of solving inventive problems can be helpful for the young organizations to produce phenomenon results.
Design Sprints:
A Design sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process that uses design thinking to reduce the risk when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market. It typically lasts for 5 days.
For Example: With more than 500 new apps entering the market every day, what does it take to build a successful digital product? This process helps the team in clearly defining goals, validating assumptions and deciding on a product roadmap before one line of code is written. Main pillars of this process:
Business strategy.
Interdisciplinary collaboration.
Rapid prototyping.
User testing.
Six Sigma/Lean Six Sigma:
Six Sigma is a quality program that, when laid out properly, improves your customer’s experience, lowers your costs, and build better leaders. Six Sigma is a method that can provide your organization’s tools to improve the capability of business processes. This, in turn, will increase in performance and decrease in process variation, which will lead to :
Defect reduction
Improvement in profits
Increase in employee morale
Better quality of products or services.
Six Sigma was termed by Motorola in 1990’s to reduce 3.4 defective features per million opportunities in their products. Six sigma has successfully helped many such companies like GE, Honeywell, ford etc. to gain better optimization and consumer confidence in the past.
Many frameworks exist for implementing the Six-Sigma methodology. There is 2 important process that you should know are DMAIC and DMADV.
The Six Sigma DMAIC process (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) is an improvement system for existing processes falling below specification and looking for incremental improvement.
The Six Sigma DMADV process (define, measure, analyze, design, verify) is an improvement system used to develop new processes or products at Six Sigma quality levels.
On the other hand, lean six sigma is an approach to defect prevention over defect detection. Six Sigma focuses on reducing process variation and enhancing process control, whereas lean drives out waste (non-value-added) and promotes work standardization and flow. Six Sigma practitioners should be well versed in both.
Double Diamond:
Double Diamond is a process model created by Design Council, a British organization, in 2005. The model provides a graphic representation of a design process. Its development was based on case studies gathered from the design departments at 11 global firms. Four generic stages are identified and described in this process model. Each of the four stages is characterized by either convergent or divergent thinking. These stages are:
• Discover –identify, research and understand the initial problem.
• Define – limit and define a clear problem to be solved.
• Develop – focus on and develop a solution.
• Deliver – test and evaluate, ready the concept for production and launch.
In this hectic schedule of problem-solving, organizations have almost forgotten to frame problems properly. This has resulted in giving fewer conversions to success. Design thinking fails mostly because we cannot define out problems successfully. As explained by Bruce Nussbaum, creative intelligence is needed to complete the Design Thinking process. We can define Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. In the book, ‘Creative Intelligence’ bruce talk about 5 things to improve creative abilities which might be helpful for the organizations.
Knowledge Mining: Creative entrepreneurs, thinkers, and artists use their own experiences and aspirations as a starting point for making up new things. When their own experience is insufficient, they go straight to the source and partner with people who are more into in a culture than they are.
Framing: Understanding your frame of reference — your way of seeing the world as it compares with other people’s—is critical. People who understand framing techniques are better able to shift their perspectives depending on the situation, environment or community they’re interacting with.
Playing: By adopting a playful mindset, we’re more willing to take risks, explore possibilities and learn to navigate uncertainty, without the paralyzing stigma of failure.
Making: People want to make things again, and thanks to a whole host of new technologies and the democratization of the tools of creativity, we’re doing it. The ‘maker’s renaissance’ has begun.
Pivoting: Traditional notions of creativity separate the process of coming up with new ideas from the actual making of new things; but truly creative people don’t stop at the idea: they quickly make the pivot into creation.
If you have any other strategies in mind. please let us know or or leave a comment.
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