Design thinking is about empathy.
I had the opportunity to participate in a design thinking workshop where we were examining the areas of diversity and inclusiveness in a large multicultural organization. It doesn’t matter what is the specific focus because every topic can benefit from a healthy dose of empathy and that is the first thing design thinking brings into the picture.
Far too often, we bring on board our biases and the accumulated insights from our own experiences when looking at a problem. Now that is not to discount the quality of those experiences nor to say they bear no relevance to solving a problem at hand. Rather, it is to say hang on, that may not be the best starting point to look at a problem and should not be the only starting point. It is an extremely useful exercise to surface underlying assumptions that can blindside a design team in comprehending the real problem at hand and latter restricting their idea generation.
Design Thinking and Systems Thinking
Design thinking is a mindset, a way of looking at problems and finding creative solutions that may have been missed from a purely analytical problem solving approach. In practice it is then backed by processes and tools to help you go through that thinking process to develop innovative ideas. In some ways it is similar to systems thinking in looking at the interconnectedness of various factors to understand there is a bigger picture. Unlike systems thinking, it brings far more human centeredness to the problem solving process.
I remember when I was studying systems thinking and tried to model systems, we would approach it from a level of detachment. We will start off with what may be the apparent issue we are focusing on and then draw a bigger and bigger circle to understand what may be the other factors that influence the outcome that may not be immediately apparent. The intent is to identify all the relevant factors and so identify the whole system. There is a certain amount of work to try to identify the relationship and run models to see how we may optimize the system towards a desired outcome.
Design Thinking Demands Empathy
In design thinking, you first take a walk in someone else’s shoes and the world looks very different after that experience. That change in perspective and that additional perspective change the way you will approach a problem.
For example if you model a healthcare system and try to see what are the factors and how you can tweak the factors to achieve a desired outcome – say constant healthcare cost for the next 5 years. Design thinking will add a rich layer of understanding of the system we are trying to model by forcing us to take the perspective of key stakeholders in the system. The design thinking process demands of you the modeler or whoever it is that is trying to “solve the problem” to first take the time to understand the people in the system you are trying to model and to understand how the system looks when they are inside it, how the problems affect them and how they would benefit when the problems are resolved.
If we continue with the case of the healthcare system modeling, you will build out the persona of patients and healthcare providers. Supported by available data, you will start to build personas that are representative of the people in the healthcare system and also build out the world around them and their mindsets and priorities as they go through their roles in the healthcare system. This additional layer of persona development is invaluable in helping the systems thinker understand and develop more accurate relationships among the factors as well as their impact in the overall systemu. The stakeholders participating in the process emerge from it having walked in one anothers’ shoes, develop a deep empathetic understanding of the issues and take ownership in designing the solutions.
Empathy leads to better and more innovative problem solving
Beyond building out more accurate system models, the process of building the personas imbibed the system modelling team with a far greater understanding of the people in the systems than they otherwise could have. This vastly informs the whole systems view that is critical to good systems design and can lead to a far more strategic way of looking at problems. Without the complements of design thinking, a systems thinker may look at how we will adjust the factors we have modeled to achieve a better outcome. With the layers of information from the design thinking process, we have the additional depth of understanding of the whole system such that we can (and we dare to) generate more out of the box ideas that may build new feedback loops and change the system we are observing.
The combination of design and systems thinking can deliver a truly holistic understanding of a current system, generate ideas that will transform the system while yet continue to maintain a whole systems view to ensure the new system is sustainable. The two clearly work so well together it is surprising we have not seen a more prominent growth of integrated design and systems thinking as a single discipline.
In 2009, Tim Brown from IDEO gave a Ted Talk that first introduced the terms “design thinking” and “human centered design” to a wider public. He is a LinkedIn Influencer and you can follow his posts here.
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