How to Use Design Thinking to Become Future-Ready

When a company doesn’t keep up with what customers want and demand, it can flounder. Mobile customers want touchscreens and apps, but a company creates phones with small screens and tactile keyboards. People want to watch the shows they like on-demand, but the provider only allows the show to be watched at a certain day and time, and they are interrupted by commercials. Consumers want interesting or entertaining content on social media, but companies post ads.

What makes all this even more difficult is that consumer demand changes, often unpredictably and quickly. Companies must be able to react. The most successful companies, however, do more than react; they understand their customers well enough that they can innovate for their future needs.

In fact, with the right research and analysis, strategies and approaches to innovation, problem-solving and customer-centricity, these companies do better than react — they are future-ready, and their customers happily reap the benefits.

To be nimble, use agile methods combined with the power of design thinking.

A nimble company can make changes quickly. It can switch gears without suffering huge losses and avoids siloed departments and teams in order to be more efficient. Sean Carr, the Executive Director of the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Virginia, writes that three components must be in place in order for a company to be agile.

1. It must pair technical expertise with imagination.

2. It must place the right people with the right expertise in the right positions.

3. It must empower its employees to take risks without fear of failure.

An agile company will have the benefit of moving fast and iterating on products and services to keep up with demand. When coupled with the power of design thinking, it is an excellent way to make sure your company or organization is future-ready.

Design thinking is a powerful method for understanding the needs and demands of your customers. Along with agile practices, you’ll be able to execute the ideas and concepts discovered from your customer learnings much more quickly.

1. It’s all about the end user.

When you tune in to your customers’ needs, you can better meet and exceed their needs and wants. This goes beyond the basics of finding a problem, then offering a solution. It means fully understanding your customer. Spend the time and effort to conduct interviews and step into their shoes. Build empathy. Learn about the entire customer journey, not just the experience your customer has with your product.

 

For example, Parkinson’s disease affects one in every 500 people in Canada, and those with it may experience tremors. This can cause difficulties with eating: It can be a slow, messy, frustrating process for people who cannot control their movements. Thanks to innovative thinking that originated with camera and sensitive equipment stabilisation, and with advice from a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders including Parkinson's disease and tremors, technologically advanced utensils are now available. The neurologist, Dr. Jill Ostrem, explains, "I have some patients who couldn't eat independently; they had to be fed. And now they can eat on their own. It doesn't cure the disease — they still have tremor — but it's a very positive change."

The power of design thinking is in its ability to change the lives of end users. It can be in an entertaining way, such as Netflix’s introduction of on-demand, streaming content. But in instances like this, in which innovation of utensils gives people more independence, the result can truly be a benefit to society.

2. To use design thinking, learn from designers.

Design thinking is about using imagination, research, and knowledge to create a solution for a problem — sometimes this solution is for a problem customers weren’t even aware they had or could fix. This kind of strategic thinking requires cross-functional teams that include designers, or at least people with design thinking expertise.

Arm these teams with autonomy and accountability. Autonomy is a popular buzzword, but when implemented incorrectly, it can cause a team to work in a silo and potentially in the wrong direction. Instead, make sure they are held accountable to other teams and to the project. An autonomous team can still work independently, just in a focused direction.

As you create these teams, bring design and technology together to co-create options. Perhaps one comes up with a solution they think is impossible, only to learn that with a little effort and practice, it can be achieved. For example, Netflix aimed to bring movies directly to the consumer. Once it harnessed the power of the internet, its options blew wide open, and the result upended industries that seemed to be on solid footing, including cable television, television programming, movie rental stores, and movie theaters.

Finally, once you’ve successfully created these teams and given them a direction, get out of the way. Give them space to ideate, create, iterate, and start over when they need to.