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.

Geoff McDonald

Share
Published by
Geoff McDonald

Recent Posts

What Designers Notice with Philippe Guichard

What do designers notice that other people miss? When Industrial Designer Philippe Guichard walks into…

13 hours ago

Your Experience Has a Use-By Date with Mark Molony

A few days after my first conversation with mindfulness teacher Mark Molony, he contacted me…

7 days ago

Experience is Just a Memory with Mark Molony

We often talk about learning from experience. But what if experience isn't what we think it…

1 week ago

What if Your Experience is Outdated With Mark Molony

You've spent years building your experience. But what if some of it is quietly becoming less…

2 weeks ago

On Experience – Why This Conversation Exists

For most of my career, I’ve been wrestling with the same question: How do you…

3 weeks ago

When Experience Works Against You with Mark Molony

When Mark Molony walked into his first day as a social worker, he thought his…

3 weeks ago