Design Advantage : The Secret to Creating Long-Term Value 10

Design Advantage : The Secret to Creating Long-Term Value 10
Derived from: Roger Martin’s The Design of Business

RAP8 : Design Training
PROFIT : The best way to get your team to include Design Thinking in their work is to get them to do it in training. The goal is not to turn them into complete designers – that’s a 3-5 year course – it’s to give them a taste, a feel and the experience of doing it. It’ll change the way they work and bring your customers’ world closer.

1 Make ‘it’ Real
Grab a real design issue that’s relevant, important and significant.

2 Understand ‘It’
Develop a deep and holistic understanding of the users’ problem. Forget market research. Get down and dirty. Talk to users. Use it yourself. Break it. Get first hand experience of it.

3 Model ‘It’
Create simple explanations of your design issue. Highlight the components, the influences and the dilemmas. Draw diagrams, flow charts and words to describe the individual relationships and the whole.

4 Prototype ‘It’
Get hands-on. Build real solutions. These might be to scale or scaled-down. By making actual things you’ll get in touch with the problem at whole new level.

5 Refine ‘IT’
Test your solution. Tinker with it. Play with it. Redesign it. Destroy it. Then design ways to implement your final solution.

6 Refine ‘IT’
Test your solution. Tinker with it. Play with it. Redesign it. Destroy it. Then design ways to implement your final solution.

Wicked Problems
Wicked Problems are messy, confusing and ill-defined.
The causes are ambiguous, they don’t fit any neat categories and attempts to solve the problem merely shift it.
And, even when you’ve solved them, it won’t be clear that’s what you’ve done.
Non-designers hate them. Designers thrive on them.
The wicked challenge is to get a valid understanding of what is really going on.
Once you do this, then you’re a chance to resolve it.
But jumping ahead without getting a real understanding will simply cause further problems to arise.
It’s like grabbing sand in your hand. The tighter you hold it, the more it falls through your fingers.
Solving the right wicked problem your competitors cannot, may give you a big lead in revolutionizing your industry.