Review of Design Thinking and Innovative Problem-Solving

Before we conclude the Design Thinking and Innovation topic, let's review what you have learned so far.

You have now learned tools and frameworks for all four phases of the design thinking process - clarify, ideate, develop, and implement. You have moved from concrete observations to abstract insights and ideation, back to concrete development and implementation of an innovation concept.

The clarify phase focused on deep observations and cultivating openness to new ideas and problem framings.

In the ideate phase, you used the insights from research to create a vast number of innovative ideas. You learned to break cognitive fixedness, encourage divergent thinking, defer judgment, and build on each other's work.

The develop phase is where you switched to convergent thinking, to combine ideas into concepts, identify critical questions, and test them rapidly and purposefully. You explored how to progress from simple to complex prototypes as critical questions evolve and your concept grows closer to validation. The critique tools and frameworks helped you rigorously and honestly assess your innovations.

Finally, in the implement phase, you learned to keep in mind the status-quo bias among people unfamiliar with your innovation, as well as their motivation and ability to adopt a new product, service, model, or strategy. To sustain innovation over the long term, you need to build teams with the right culture, motivation, and ability to succeed.

You were introduced to numerous tools and frameworks throughout. It will be worthwhile to quickly review them one more time.

You may not wish to use all of these tools and frameworks in your own innovation processes, and you should not worry about memorizing them—now that you know how to use them and where they fit in the process, you can build your own innovation toolkit to consult whenever you are starting to innovate (or you feel stuck in certain ways of thinking).

Let’s move through each stage from beginning to end, starting with clarify. The goal at the beginning is to adopt a human-centered approach to innovation, acquiring research and prioritizing novel approaches to the (explicit and latent) problems you identify.

• Use the “what, structure, how” tools to make and categorize observations.

• Search for innovative ways to frame the problem using “how might we” questions.
• The characteristics of innovative problem framings are:
  • Deep rather than shallow
  • Emotional rather than only functional
  • Broad rather than narrow
  • Dynamic rather than static
• These steps can lead to insights and design principles for a solution.

Having obtained observations, pain points, insights, and design principles from the clarify stage, you can proceed to ideation. The Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) tools for innovative problem-solving help you break cognitive fixedness and quickly explore different ideas.

• SIT tools include:
  • Task unification: Assigning a new task to an existing resource
  • Division: Dividing a product or process so that components can be used in different ways
  • Subtraction: Removing an essential component to create new value
  • Multiplication: Multiplying a component and changing it in a way that provides value
  • Attribute dependency: Creating or removing dependencies between external factors and internal attributes
• Problem stories: Breaking a chain of undesired phenomena (UDPs) by applying neutralization (eliminating the relationship between two variables), inversion (reversing the relationship between two variables), or a tool like task unification

You can also approach ideation with approaches that are still structured, but that remove some of the boundaries of the heavily structured SIT tools. Divergent thinking tools include:

• Alternate Worlds: Referencing other worlds for fresh perspectives; pondering how someone in a different industry or role would accomplish the same task
• 2 by 2 frameworks:
  • Mapping the tensions in a situation on a graph
  • Identifying opportunities for strategic growth
• Brainstorming: Generating ideas freely in reference to design principles and pain points

User-focused ideation and behavior-change frameworks provide an opportunity to refine ideas:

• Design heuristics: Applying rules of thumb for user-centered design:
  • Anticipate needs
  • Recognize constraints
  • Provide responsive feedback
  • Match mental models
  • Minimize perceived complexity
  • Prevent user errors
• Personas: Creating composite users based on research to quickly evaluate and iterate on ideas
• Point of View (POV) Statements: Stating the problem you are trying to solve, for whom, and why.
  • Start with the POV template created by the Interaction Design Foundation: “[User] needs a way to [verb] because [insight].”
• The Fogg Behavior Model: Plotting users’ motivation and ability to help develop triggers that will prompt users to change behavior

Many of these tools and frameworks were developed by analyzing successful innovations. Patterns in successful concepts revealed that the products, services, business models, and strategies that attract dedicated users from the competition often share certain characteristics.

Generating ideas is the first big leap that teams take on their own. Research is rewarding, and it’s also safe from a risk standpoint. You should use the tools and frameworks from the ideate phase to slowly introduce teams to creative risk.

After ideation, we discussed the develop phase, which focuses on combining ideas into concepts, critiquing and evaluating them, and then prototyping strategically through critical questions.

In the develop phase, you can use the following tools to accomplish these goals:

• Combining the ideas the team has generated into several potential concepts
• Impact-difficulty matrix: Evaluating concepts based on how much impact they would have on the business context, as well as how difficult they might be to implement with existing resources
• Near-far-sweet model: Evaluating how near or far your concepts are from the present context
• Attribute-value mapping: Evaluating whether an innovation concept’s features support the values that users expect
• Concept poster: Outlining all the relevant details of your innovation concept and identifying the key assumptions to test around desirability, feasibility, and viability
• Rose, Thorn, Bud: Identifying the elements of the concept that are positive, negative, or might have potential if developed further
• Six Thinking Hats: Using color-coded perspectives to structure critique and elicit targeted feedback

Finally, you just learned the following tools and frameworks for the implement phase, all of which can help you overcome the curse of knowledge and the status-quo bias:

• Tensions in innovation adoption: Graphing the innovation concept in a 2 by 2 framework that compares the value captured by the user with the behavior change required
• Everett Rogers’s five factors of innovations:
  • Relative advantage
  • Trialability
  • Observability
  • Simplicity
  • Compatibility
• The principles of communication:
  • Curiosity before content
  • Options before solutions
  • Demonstrate to communicate
  • Make it personal
  • Psychologically comfortable and easy to adopt
• Elephant and Rider framework: Considering whether your communications appeal to both the emotional and rational sides of the user
• Stakeholder analysis: Creating a table that measures and compares where important stakeholders currently are and where you need them to be

The biggest challenge to becoming a successful innovator is developing the empathy, trust, and long-term perspective needed to inspire a team and bring out the best work in others. Some have these qualities naturally, but anyone can develop them with practice.

Use the tools you have learned for support as you move through the innovation process, and develop the hopeful and humble attitude that leads to productive insights and teamwork.

These are the seven qualities of innovative leaders:

• Build a sense of purpose.
• Inspire others to make a difference.
• Cultivate wisdom and humility.
• Create empathy and trust.
• Practice open-mindedness and a constant desire to learn.
• Show courage and the discipline to do what is right.
• Cope with failure.

These are qualities that any leader should have, but I think they are particularly important when leading innovation. Innovation is costly and will sometimes fail. In the realities of business, in which public companies must demonstrate consistent short-term growth, the leader may need to stand up for the team and its ideas and strategic plans.

That is why these leadership qualities are so important. Inspiring, open-minded, courageous, and humble leaders can keep both their teams and their organizations focused on a long-term view of success.

You may one day review all the tools and frameworks covered in Design Thinking and Innovation articles, and feel the weight of all that knowledge. Do not feel restricted or restrained by it.

Design thinking and innovative problem-solving tools are guideposts for innovation. They are light, flexible, and designed to help you focus when the open-endedness of innovation makes focusing difficult.

Innovation is one of the biggest challenges, but also one of the biggest opportunities of this century!