I read the book Change By Design — authored by Tim Brown, Chair of IDEO (A design Company). Below are my learnings and takeaways from this book which teaches how design thinking isn’t just about following the set of steps in a process but more about “Thinking”
Outliers shouldn’t always be scrapped out
I am a machine learning enthusiast. There is one critical step in building great ML models i.e. cleaning the data. Removing outliers is one big step executed by many budding and experienced ML engineers/Data science experts to prepare their dataset for running advanced models. However, this doesn’t work well in every case.
Change by Design emphasizes the importance of the most extreme users who can help bring the right/unique insights to the table. The idea is not to develop solutions only for marginalized and extreme populations but rather to be able to find globally acceptable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.
Diverge and Diverge until you can’t diverge more
Divergence and convergence are terms anyone who has read about Design Thinking would know. The concept is very simple — Create many choices and make choices based on 3 key factors of design thinking (Desirability, Viability, Feasibility)
I tried practicing this concept in my regular day-to-day work. However, I realized the concept of Divergence and convergence is not an easy one to execute. Either you don’t have time to diverge and create many choices or you already have choices made by the senior management to follow up. But there is always scope of executing it in every little aspect of your work — Example: How might I make my employees adhere to meeting guidelines? How might I explain the product vision to the team so that everyone is aligned on work for the next 6 months?
In our everyday work, we come across little things to solve. It can be really interesting to look at them from the lens of convergence and divergence i.e. go a little beyond the usual to create choices and then make choices that best suit your situation.
Change your frame of reference
As branding students, we learned to write brand positioning statements. These statements are critical to any brand as they help define the purpose, vision, and execution of a brand.
The frame of reference (FOR) is one element in this statement. FOR represents a category with which you are comparing your brand with. If you have the right FOR, your positioning statement is more clearer.
Similarly, when dealing a design thinking problem it is very important to define your problem statement correctly. Moving from Nouns to Verb is the right approach.
Example:
How might we develop an advanced car that is eco-friendly? (Noun)
How might we make mobility more sustainable? (Verb)
Lift others and rise together
As kids, we are always surrounded by a competitive environment where we imbibe this inherent need to provide our worth, to prove that we are better than others. Sadly, we carry forward this attitude incorporates and in our personal lives. Well, it is high time we bring the right change for a better world.
In design thinking, an idea being identified too closely with a person who first thought it up is threatening. Why? Because if an idea becomes a piece of private property, it is likely to grow stale and brittle over time. However, if it migrates throughout an organization, undergoing multiple permutations, combinations, and mutations, it is likely to flourish.
We need a culture where we lift others and rise together creating a diverse culture of collaborative ideas.
IDEO has multiple quotes floating around the organization, one such is “All of us are smarter than any of us”
Chaitali Bansal
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