Design Thinking as a Mindset

— with a touch of systems thinking

Design thinking has been hyped as the magic process for innovation, often described as a linear process in 4–5 steps. Often with an emphasis on brainstorming, ideation and tons of sexy post-its. Some suggest it is losing its competitive advantage and others are trying to fix it now more than ever; Combining it with systems thinking, defining the rule of 3, explaining how it will fix itself, and making it “full stack”.

These articles all shine the light on how difficult Design Thinking can be to understand and master. I’m not here to fix it, more to add some perspective. I like to think of it as a mindset — how to look at challenges around us. A mindset that can help us master the process to be more innovative and create long-lasting solutions.

The beauty of a mindset

Mindset: perspective and cognitive function to how we asses situations and solve problems. (dictionary layout)

• You can practice it daily
• You can practice it on small as well as bigger challenges
• It can help you master the various phases of the design process

So here we go, nine traits you can work on starting today:

Look for empathy

Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

When creating something new, it is vital to understand the people you are designing for. That can be difficult when most of us tend to assume other people experience the world as we do. That’s why seeking empathy is so important. You need to get a sense of their mental models and how the world looks from their perspective. Seek to understand how they think, feel, and behave in their every day, and especially in environments and situations that relate to your product or service. Why do they feel and behave like that?

The best approach to gain empathy is by engaging directly with the people. Co-creation methods, ethnography, and interviews can help you uncover why they don’t see any value in your product. Analysis of the digital behavior can help you understand how people behave and what they might expect from your product or service. Data often won’t tell you why they behave as they do, but gives a much larger perspective of what and where you might want to do more research.

Focus on value, not product

Refocus: the value a solution brings into the human life.

It is very easy to get caught in the specifics of what we are making, and easy to forget why we are making it the first place and blindly adding new features. It is a natural response to jump to solutions, to want to fix something right away. It’s tangible. But customers don’t buy your product for the sake of the product, but for the value it provides.

Values can be tangible like money and time — easy to define and measure. Or they can be abstract such as flexibility, belonging, community, identity, security — emotions and experiences that relate to a person state of mind and are harder to measure and define.

When you focus on the value, you focus on the why — and that will allow you to make better decisions around the things you put on the market. Focusing on the value enables you to create something that customers want to pay for, share and come back for. It helps you innovate to deliver that value in new ways when your current method is outdated in tomorrow’s technological landscape.

Value is experienced at its highest in the beginning, when you get a new product or start using a new service, and when it is taken away. E.g., when you get a new phone that allows you to talk to any friends around the world for hours, for free. When the battery the starts to die after an hour and the screen shatters, that’s when you start noticing what you need that phone for. Why it is important to you. What the value of it is.

The Kodak Example
Even though they captured ‘The Kodak Moment’ — which is all about value — they did not understand why people actually loved their products. They were obsessed with the film and thought people loved the film, so when they invented the digital camera technology, they didn’t think much of it.

Be curious

In it’s deepest sense, design thinking is about being curious. Curious about why things are the way they are, why systems don’t work or why people behave the way they do. When you become curious you let go of judgment, loosen up and seek to better understand everything around you. When you are curious about yourself and your behaviors you can even improve bad habits.

It is about paying attention to the finer details, asking questions when you start assuming and seeking to understand what you don’t know. Like noticing how your daily routines feels or the energy, you pick up from various friends. It can be the facial expression or hesitation a customer makes when answering a question about your product, which actually tells more than the reply itself. It’s about looking into the way current systems are set up and be curious — why do they fail to work optimally?

Curiosity will help you gain empathy for both the people and systems in place, help you connect with people, deepen relationships and see problems from new perspectives.

“If I asked what people wanted, they would say ‘faster horses.” — Henry Ford

Challenge your assumptions

Every day we make assumptions based on previous experiences, and a lot of those are based on a ton of experiences, are more or less accurate and help lower our cognitive load. However, when solving problems in new and innovative ways, a designer must challenge assumptions and constraints that are often unconscious. The assumptions of what you can and cannot do, how it’s done today, unwritten rules you set up for yourself and so on. Challenging your assumptions helps you challenge the status quo and ask “How can this be done better?”

It is ingrained in us in the way we talk and ask questions, and it’s about changing the thought from “this is just the way things are” to “why is it this way?” and “which assumptions am I being constrained by right now?” Be aware of your potential blind spots, defaults and seek out people who see the world differently than you — “Who can challenge my perspective?”

”When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.”

Search for the underlying problem

What we call a ‘problem’ is often more a symptom of an underlying cause. Looking to systems thinking it can be described as cause and effect. The effect is what we experience first-hand, the root cause is the reason for what we experience.

When we dive in too quickly to fix a symptom, the effect will eventually come back or happen again. Instead, we need to address the cause to create more permanent change.

Look for the nuances of what you are experiencing as a problem, why it is arising and what the underlying reason for that experience could be. It is about asking “why?” — often on repeat to map the first-hand experience to the root cause.

• Fact: A state of how things are, that is not in itself a problem.
• Effect: This is often what you experience. It is a symptom you can treat, but it will keep occurring if you don’t tackle the cause. Also known as a ‘quick fix.’
• Cause: A real problem is the cause of why we experience these effects — and are often much harder to understand, define and solve. A problem is something we can solve to eliminate the symptoms more permanently. It may relate to the fact that we blame in the first place.

When we get stuck on the fact or current state of things, it becomes hard to look beyond it and create meaningful change.

Be playful

Think big, dare to fail.

Innovation comes through trial and error, again and again. And that requires the courage to take risks where you may fail. You must learn to be OK with not being right the first time, and instead, learn from failures and try again. Like a toddler learning to walk. It requires you to come up with crazy ideas and bold visions, and then figure out how to create it. Be ok with experimentation and learn as you go.

Being playful help you to loosen constraints and think bigger, bolder and more creative. Makes you less judgemental of initial “stupid” ideas. It can also alleviate some of the fear of being wrong — because playing doesn’t always have one right outcome. It can help you forget common assumptions and standard go-to solutions and instead broaden your imagination to combine knowledge in new ways and see new opportunities.

Be cool with saying “I don’t know, but I will find out.”

If you can learn from failure, it’s a success.

Embrace the unknown

Have faith in the process — it will get you there.

It is also about being OK not knowing exactly where you end up and what kind of solution you will have to create. It’s about trusting the process and your skillset.

Design thinking starts with understanding problems and from there finding the best way to solve it. It requires you to be OK with the unknown, and learn to trust the process and that you will get there. It is part of what makes design thinking so hard to master, because most people get uncomfortable when they don’t know the exact outcome, yet.

It can be both big and small unknowns — from doing a workshop and not knowing if it will provide valuable insights and ideas, to not knowing what the big problems are and if you can solve them — which is why you got to get out there and try, experiment, test, and iterate.

Remember the big picture

As much as design is about understanding the weird little details about the human beings we are designing for, the big picture is just as important. Understanding that people use products for various purposes in many different contexts. That they are part of many technological and social systems that have a significant impact on their belief systems and mental models. Consider how these systems in play will influence the innovation, and how the innovation will influence the systems.

By keeping the big picture in mind and understanding that nothing is isolated, we can better set the right constraints, tap into the right values with solutions that fit in seamlessly and make an effort not to create new problems, when solving the current.

Work with integrity

Doing what’s right, not easiest.

Designing products that end in the hands of real people carry a responsibility. As a designer you need to have the deepest sense of integrity. So many shitty products and services out there were created based on what someone asked for, not what they needed.

Working with deep integrity often means asking ‘Why?’ and saying ‘No.’ It is putting up the fight for what is the right thing to do, instead of taking the easy road for a fat cheque. And there’s a lot of ethical questions to consider when you create a something new. “What are the potential negative consequences of making this?”

As a designer, you have a set of skills and expertise that you need to honor to create great products, by not just creating what people ask for, but help them understand what they need, and then make that. Or not making anything at all.

“Often people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve jobs

Not just in product development

I believe designing new solutions starts with a mindset. One we shouldn’t confine to business context, but in everything we do — family and relationships, to culture, politics, and society — to have a positive impact and create change. If more of us got a little better being empathetic and curious, we could better at provide value in other people’s life.

Finding that curiosity whenever you feel judgemental can help you challenge your assumptions, expand your worldview and grow as a human. And if we work with more integrity and understand the bigger picture of things, we can create long-lasting solutions instead of changing it every time we realize that the last quick fix didn’t work.