We just spent six months and millions of dollars to have a big consultancy tell us the same thing.” Think small When we reported this back to HQ, they said, “oh, we wish we’d done that. They were concerned that customers were ordering less of the restaurant’s famous dishes, and more of the limited-time specials. In one NOBL engagement with a global food chain, we worked alongside restaurant servers for a week, and interviewed them about changes they were seeing in customers. Give them the opportunity to test their ideas in a safe environment before looking to outsiders or outside inspiration. These ideas may or may not work, but there’s as good a starting place as any. They probably already have dozens of ideas that they’re dying to implement. Your employees already have extensive expertise in both the organisation and their customers-after all, they work with them every day. Remember, most activities are actually safe-to-fail, so there’s plenty for your employees to improve upon. Determine limits for teams (like containing experiments to one region or customer segment) so that if something does go wrong, its impact is limited and easily recovered from. (These might be related to security, for instance, or an org restructure.) Set these as off-limits for innovation, and instead, look for activities that are “safe-to-fail”-things like process improvements and product development that benefit from iteration. Here’s what we’ve seen be effective: Evaluate what’s “Safe to Fail” versus “Fail Safe”įirst, determine what activities in your organisation are “fail-safe”-that is, any failure or disruption would have an immediate, negative, and lasting impact on the organisation. By creating space, rituals, and systems that encourage experimentation and iteration, we can achieve real, meaningful change, creating teams with a greater capacity for change going forward and a more fertile environment for ideas to flourish. Some of the lessons of Design Thinking still can (and should) be applied to the organisation itself-and as leaders, it's our responsibility to effect change, not extinguish sparks of innovation, or let red tape, regulation, and bureaucracy be an excuse for the status quo. It’s just one tool in the innovation toolbelt, and other tools, like change management, agile, and lean, are better suited for making change, depending on the organisation's specific context, needs, and challenges. But that’s not necessarily Design Thinking’s fault-it was never designed to solve that particular challenge. On the rare occasion when a new idea does make it through the prototyping phase, organisations all too often fail to implement it at scale. This brings the “rapid” part of rapid prototyping to a screeching halt, and is particularly painful in highly regulated industries and those with complex non-physical products, like Financial Services. In particular, employees struggle with the “Prototype/Test/Iterate” phases of Design Thinking, believing, rightly or wrongly, that they need approval and budget to move forward, regardless of the size or scope of the experiment. If anything, they’re designed to reduce risk, rather than support the risk-taking that’s required for any form of innovation. The real problem is that organisations are simply not set up to turn nascent ideas into reality. Teams readily took to the “Empathise/Define/Ideate” phases of Design Thinking, and now, organisations are inundated with ideas. When it was first introduced, organisations needed a framework for sharing ideas and encouraging creativity. If anything, Design Thinking is a victim of its own success. The short answer is that organisations aren’t suffering from a shortage of good ideas. We’ve all hesitantly interviewed strangers, “walked a mile” in our customers’ shoes, and done things that initially felt awkward and bizarre, but which have become part of our corporate vernacular.īut what has all that achieved? After two decades of popularity, leaders (and a recent MIT article) are rightly asking, “Why hasn’t Design Thinking made a greater impact within our organisations?” Conference rooms are littered with the detritus of endless brainstorm sessions forests have been felled to create the Post-Its covered in inspiring customer insights, breakthrough ideas, and bold provocations.
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