Not All Design Thinking Solutions Need To Be Disruptive
Part five of five in a series co-written with DiMitri Higginbotham.
Design Thinking has been applied to various business problems for decades. Regardless of vertical or context, there is a persistent challenge: the perception that solutions involving design thinking need to be disruptive. But what do we mean by ‘disruptive’?
The definition of Disruption can be elusive. Disruption is often subjective, a function of how constrained a vertical or platform is, combined with how difficult it may be to drive change. Essentially, a mix of limitations and fortitude.
The perception that design thinking is only good at driving table-flipping ideas born from moments of epiphany in user research is the sort of disruption we are referencing. Disruption is great for PR. Designers read disruption stories and dream about an opportunity to have an outsized impact, coming with an outside-in perspective and driving an outcome no one else could have imagined.
Opportunities to fundamentally re-think business challenges are rare, but they aren’t the only scenarios to leverage design thinking.
This article will discuss misaligned expectations of design thinking, constraints, solutioning, and outcomes. This article is the last in a series on design thinking and where it has room for improvement. All topics below will provide context as to how we arrived at this moment, where design thinking practitioners and partners are talking past one another, and what we can do about it.
Context is king/queen
Most software organizations run a ‘feature factory,’ meaning the primary measure of success is the number of features shipped in any given release cycle. KPIs may vary given the complexity of delivery, roadmap, etc., but the feature factory doesn’t care if design thinking has been applied. It only cares about output and, sadly, tends to be more focused on quantity than quality.
A feature factory is a production environment that thrives on speed and efficiency. Speed and efficiency are essential for delivery, although they aren’t criteria that take into account user value, which is typically an upstream driver of priority and scope. Design thinking can negatively impact speed and efficiency when it has been miscommunicated by designers and misunderstood by non-designers who may have had bad previous experiences with the framework.
There are common misconceptions that design thinking ‘slows down the process,’ which is fair when initial conditions are less than ideal. These conditions include:
Practitioners lack support from their management or leadership
Design management or leadership are not designers or researchers
Executive leadership does not understand the difference between UI and UX
Lack of patience or belief in design due to prior experiences
Any of the items listed above result in organizations applying the framework without clarity of purpose and/or structure. Additionally, if design thinking is only applied to the most challenging problems, it’s easy to mistake the framework for only being effective in that context. Applying the framework to every feature/capability, including basic production work, in the same way results in disruptive thinking that goes beyond the constraints of a system. Designers can over-think basic tasks when given little/no guidance.
Imbalanced framework use increases the perception that it cannot be flexibly applied. The more design thinking is narrowly applied the more significant the misconception that it is only good at disruption and coming up with big ideas–or that design thinking slows down the production process. Neither are correct.
The Big Idea Factory
There is an activity in design thinking called Big Idea generation. We enjoy this approach because it drives alignment towards a unifying concept, a ‘Big Idea’ for a group to come together and support. The double-edged sword here is that a Big Idea can be subjective.
For some people, a truly Big Idea may be too big to deliver. It might be so big, so far out, that it is not achievable (without an M&A or a platform overhaul) with current resources. Some Big Ideas are too small for designers, as incremental gain can be boring. Yet incremental improvement can have an outsized impact and is still worth investing time and effort.
When we diverge and converge in the concept generation process, it’s easy to understand how we fall in love with wild ideas. Great facilitators encourage concepts that push boundaries. A solution becomes better when it’s closer to the limits of constraints. Plus, anyone pushing a boundary understands the nature of a system, increasing the collective level of technical knowledge across a team.
Bad participants shut down Big Ideas or roll their eyes and often start checking their phones or hopping on their laptops to address the constraints of day-to-day delivery. When facing a scenario where answers aren’t straightforward, it's easy to return to a comfort zone with variables that are easy to control. When faced with this type of scenario, the best thing a design thinking practitioner can do is take a time-out/break and address the affected individual 1:1. They might just be having a bad day and don’t mean to give off a negative impression. It happens.
Constraints and Restraint
Yes, constraints are a good thing. They help us recognize what is and is not out of scope for delivery, keep us grounded, and aren’t necessarily the enemy of disruption. Constraints can also be questioned and should be discussed to drive understanding. Constraints also lead to the misconception that there is only one way to approach a problem.
‘Knowing‘ the best way to address a problem before discussing the intended experience leads to missed opportunities. Engineers, product managers, marketers, and, yes, even designers can be guilty of making assumptions about how to approach delivering an experience.
Constraints are one thing, but pre-determining a solution before identifying potential alternatives damages morale and relegates design and development to a ticket-taking role. And outcomes suffer over time.
Non-technical audiences learn by discussing what drives constraints. Understanding constraints is essential for growth, encourages designers to be more technical, and results in better outcomes. No one celebrates constraints but they should encourage creative thinking–not prevent creative solutions.
Innovation can take place within constraints. Not having constraints is just as bad as having too many non-negotiable limitations. Too much blue-sky thinking results in solutions to problems that are so disruptive that efforts can be thrown out wholesale.
Design thinking doesn’t need to redefine a problem to provide value.
Chasing the vibe,
not an outcome
Well-facilitated and orchestrated design thinking efforts result in memorable moments. Applied design thinking takes a pedestrian meeting and makes it fun. Post-it notes and Sharpies (the stereotypes of the design thinking world) are different tools that distract us from writing emails or squinting at each other’s thumbnail images to see if we have a mutual focus. Design thinking is inarguably a lot more engaging than using a spreadsheet.
Well-crafted design thinking efforts can have lasting impacts on designers, developers, and product managers in multiple ways. Developers get to educate Product Managers and Designers on technical items, resulting in higher tribal knowledge about users and technology. Attendees align around a problem and rally behind a solution. Design thinking isn’t a workshop, and can be right-sized to address an opportunity.
Even poorly coordinated design thinking activities are memorable. The outcomes may not be consistently positive, but even lousy design thinking is better than a typical meeting. Well-intended yet poorly delivered design thinking efforts create false perceptions that include but are not limited to the following statements:
All designers do is think about un-constrained solutions
I didn’t get anything out of the time spent but it was fun
We just talked about things that I already knew
That designer doesn’t know enough about the space to deliver
Designers need to clearly communicate their goals to non-designers before applying the design thinking framework.
What to do about it
Designers and design thinking practitioners need support to drive outcomes with clarity and purpose. Non-designers deserve transparency of method and an understanding of their role in the process. Expectations need to be set, constraints need to be clarified, and outcomes need to be defined and objectively measured.
Design thinking does not need to be disruptive in order to be effective. Not all concepts need to be Big Ideas in order to have an impact. Meaningful, lasting transformation takes time and effort to drive value beyond the workshop.
None of the items we just stated are easy to accomplish but are essential for scaling any approach to driving value. We'd like to encourage you to revisit our posts on 01, 02, 03, and topic 04. This series is now complete, but the work in question is just getting started. Thanks for your time and attention–we look forward to hearing what works, what doesn't, and where the application of design thinking can improve.