Design Thinking and collaboration Culture

This article is from my translation on infoq Chinese siteArticle, Original address is: http://www.infoq.com/cn/news/2012/05/burnett-design-thinking

Design Thinking refers to creating the future, not just managing the present. It also refers to spending more time creating value rather than obtaining value. Bill Burnett, executive director of design planning at Stanford University, recently talked about design thinking and the questions we need to answer in the process of switching from design to design thinking. Design thinking is a means to discover problems in a strategic manner, which is achieved by thinking about new strategies, new systems, and new patterns.

Bill says that in almost all cases, the problem is incorrectly defined. These incorrect definitions appear in the context of the symptom, not the root cause. He said that the design thinking method helps to define problems from the context of the root cause.

Design Thinking aims to create a culture that encourages innovation and radical collaboration (bringing people with different backgrounds and expertise together to solve problems ).

Ideology and culture:Bill introduced techniques such as morphological analysis and mind map, and used them to create solutions for problems people want to solve. He said how to choose from a large number of ideas, then we will choose a better one.

Prototype culture:Prototype culture is also very important in the field of design thinking. You should create a prototype using a low-resolution, simple solution (not perfect), and ask the customer if this is what they want.

We also need a culture that attaches importance to ideas and collaboration. He quoted Ford CEO Alan Mulally as saying: "Culture eats processes as lunch", so culture is very important. We should never mistakenly consider the processComposition. He introduced the methods used by D School, including ideas, prototypes, iterative processes, and new perspectives.

In his speech, he also talked about the cultural barriers faced by design thinking, including the obstacles between people in the organization, such as the semantic gap, the same words but different meanings, or different words, but the same things, will lead to confusion. A small difference is very important, and the team is easy to misunderstand. There are also social barriers such as network problems. He said that these constraints have a solution.

Bill explores value acquisition through technologies such as TQM, Six Sigma, lean entrepreneurship, and agile systems. These different frameworks come from different perspectives and are of great value. However, we should focus more on value creation rather than simply value acquisition. This is the foundation of design thinking. Companies such as Apple and BMW are winning through design. He asked us how much time we spent on value acquisition and value creation respectively? Value Creation refers to problems such as what we are important, what the purpose of the business is, and how we can make full use of our advantages and achieve sustainable development.

He also talked about the relationship between doing the right thing and doing the right thing. If we do things correctly, do we have a good process, do we violate the process, and do everyone know their roles in the process. Doing the right thing is about execution, and doing the right thing is about redefining the problem from different perspectives. From this point of view, redefining the problem is not a superficial symptom, but a root cause.

He suggested that we should look at which models in the industry require us to take a step back and make overall thinking and pattern matching. When you complete the task list, name a category as "Do the right thing", that is, to create this culture. Otherwise, the emergency will take up all your time. This kind of leadership is very important. Collaboration is not only important, but also necessary.

View Original English text:Design Thinking and culture of collaboration