Why Do Design Thinkers Need To Add 'Design Doing' To Their Toolkit

"To personalize an experience in the context of the moment--to understand what makes a customer human--Reinventors don't just plumb lots of data, though they do that well. They're design thinkers. They approach problems with a sense of empathy for their customers, which helps them explore and consider the right questions." IBM 2017 Global C-suite Study

The Reinventors, above, are CEOs who lead in innovation and outperform their peers in both revenue growth and profitability over the past 3 years by 27%. To understand how these Reinventors use design thinking, I reached out to Don Norman, the best selling author of the seminal book, Design of Everyday Things. 

Here are the basic building blocks of design that every CEO needs to know, drawn from Norman:

Design is a way of thinking.

Norman's 1st sentence was, "Design is a way of thinking." So many people still think that design is making pretty things when in fact you can design everything--from your life or any particular aspect of it to companies, governments, countries... 

"Here's the issue. Design Thinking is the rage. Executives love it. But how does it change things? Design Thinking is worthless on its own, what you need is "Design Doing" (developing, fast prototyping, demonstrating and testing the ideas generated by design thinking)."

According to Norman, business people don't understand what modern design is and see designers as an adjunct or a tool, not a driver or decision maker. "Modern design" in this context is design of human-centered experiences that uncover needs (often unsaid or unarticulated) and answer them in intuitive and delightful ways (think of Nike, Apple, Tesla products as successful examples of modern design).

The right thing to do is to have designers in the C-suite and at the table. Designers are taught to solve real issues, going in novel and unexplored directions that can help businesses create new and unique value.

Design needs to be taught by doing.

Design is about solving problems. Instead of lecturing, give your team an actual problem to solve. If successful, demonstrate to others to show what can be done. 

Innovation can help companies grow 10 times bigger or go bankrupt. And, yes, that is risky. Norman is keenly aware that companies need to survive and continuously make profit. His recommendation is to first start with a small project, demonstrate and learn what it takes for design to work, then you can move on to the bigger, riskier projects.

"CEO's want innovation but then they say, 'hold on, no one is doing that.' We need to educate CEO's about design."

Everyone needs to be in.

Design Driven Transformation requires buy in by everyone in the company. Everyone needs to be on board. You want entry level staff, managers, managers of managers, all the way up to the CEO in agreement.

Important point is tradition gets in the way of innovation.

Norman finds that it is easy for the CEO to say we need more innovation and for juniors to say they have great ideas. It is in the middle management that it gets stuck. The reward structure is not there. If you gamble and you fail you're dead. "It should be, you fail and we reward you", says Norman.

It needs to be transferable.

Have a repeatable process that can survive changes.

Design Driven Transformation takes a long time to build. Norman says the biggest danger is when people change--they move on, change roles, retire.

Important processes are the ones that survive these changes. Toyota's Just-In-Time, Manufacturing flow and methods of marketing are such processes. They're engrained. Design is not, not yet.

"Innovation needs to be thought of as a system and not as individual projects."

You need to develop methods for the average person, have it work for everyone, not just the 1%.

Couple Design Thinking with Design Doing to get to Design Driven Transformation--that's how real change will happen and value will be created. 

This article first appeared on Inc.com on June 30, 2018

What Moments Can Make A Difference In Your Leadership Style

Does being a leader feel overwhelming to you at times? 

When you look at great leaders like Indra Nooyi, Alan Mulally, Sheryl Sandberg, and Frances Hesselbein, it's easy to forget that leadership is something you get better at with practice. In the magnitude of their greatness, leadership can feel overwhelming, big, and often unattainable. 

At those moments, think about this simple but powerful trick from Laine Joelson Cohen, NA Director at Citi Leadership and an Executive Coach: use the small moments.Leadership is how we show up in the small, mundane moments.

Cohen's approach resonated with me. I am keen on breaking big, complex issues into small, manageable parts and then putting them back together in new, often unexpected ways. That is how I solve complex problems, simply using my DE:RE process (short for Deconstruction:Reconstruction). Cohen is doing something similar with leadership--deconstructing leadership into its smaller parts to make it manageable and then reconstructing them into a greater whole.

First, you have to take a moment to recognize what these small moments are. They are everyday conversations and interactions you have at work, and even at your home, that you might pass by if you're not paying attention. Pause and take a moment to recognize them. According to Cohen, how we show up in the small moments has a huge impact on our leadership and how we're perceived.

I asked Cohen to give me an example. She told me that recently she had her team run a meeting, but she came out of it feeling like they could've done better. In that small moment, her gut instinct was to tell them what they did wrong. Instead, she asked them to identify what went well and what they could've done better. Their answers covered all her points and more. She seized the moment to ask and listen, changing that small moment into a learning opportunity. Instead of criticism, she leads with positivity, empowering and motivating her team. 

Here are four small leadership moments, most everyone encounters at work (or at home):

1. Listen when someone comes to you for help.

Often we make the mistake of giving people suggestions when they ask for help (I do this all the time since as a designer my reflex is to solve problems). Cohen told me that the best way to help someone is to actually ask them what they think would be a good solution and then create a space in which they can try it out. This way they develop ownership of the solution, as they learn how to cease the moment and make a change.

2. Create a safe environment, when someone comes to you with a mistake.

Imagine someone comes to you and says, "Boss, I screwed up." What do you do? A. yell at them; B. jump in to take over; or C. help them work through it. Choose the latter says Cohen, and create an environment for growth and show them you trust them even when they make a mistake. This is especially important in innovation where failure is part and parcel of the exploration process and yet so many leaders have a hard time with this critical step.

3. In moments of conflict, take emotion out of feedback.

When there's conflict and you need to give feedback, give positive feedback instead of negative, and do it quickly. This kind of situation doesn't age well and gets bigger and bigger. Negative feedback is fraught with emotion--people get upset, they cry, or even scream. Cohen says, simplify the situation with SBI, Situation Behavior Impact, that executive coaches use. 

Let's say someone on your team came late to a meeting and interrupted the flow of an important keynote speaker. You're upset with them and think they were disrespectful. Instead of telling them they messed up, state the situation (you came late); the behavior (this interrupted the presentation); and the impact (it disrupted the flow, took the presenter off their game and it took us a while to get back into it). This takes the emotion--me and you--out of it, makes it more objective and gives the other person room to explain what happened. It's a skill, the more you do it, the more comfortable you get. 

4. And yet, recognize emotion when you see it.

When a colleague is upset you can avoid it or match it. Or you can recognize it, which is what is needed here. Something as simple as, "You seem upset, what's going on?" can open up a dialogue. You might find that the person is not upset but frustrated. This then gives you a chance to understand why they're frustrated and how you can be of support. Cohen says, this way, you've both identified that something is going on and created grounds for communication at that moment or later, if they prefer waiting. 

Cohen suggests that the small moments can also happen at home and that you can transfer these skills to your life. For example, when her younger daughter approached her about who she should vote for at a school election--her best friend or her older sister--Cohen kept her calm. She didn't say, "You should always vote for your sister, blood is thicker than water." She took a deep breath and said, "I can't make that decision for you. What would you hope your sister would do if she was in your situation?" The answer was, vote for my sister. Crisis averted, one more vote won, a small moment for learning and growth seized.

Small moments equal big gains in kindness, thoughtfulness and genuine leadership.

This article first appeared on Inc.com on June 8, 2018

How to Design Highly Effective Products

If you're asking how to design a better chair, you're asking a product-focused question. If instead you ask, How can I help someone who is tired of standing up? you're asking a human-centered question.

Often, we find clients asking us product-focused questions. Design a better knife, car, bathroom, table, office system. Those are the wrong questions.

Better questions are those that are human-centered, that focus on the wants and needs of the person engaging with this product:

• How can someone with arthritis peel potatoes without hurting? (Hint: Use the now iconic OXO Good Grips line of kitchen tools.)
• How can a guest using a shared hotel bathroom with two doors makes sure both doors are locked? (Hint: Without locking the locks at all--read about it in Ralph Caplan's best-selling book By Design.)
• How can a person concentrate on heads-down work in open offices? (Hint: We've been working on this last one for four years with Herman Miller: Stay tuned for the reveal in June).

Re-framing the question around the user, instead of the product, is a simple but effective tool for leaders who aim to do human-centered innovation to grow their business and improve the lives of their users.

Here are two examples to help you understand how to be human-centered and why it matters.

How can I get my teenage son to do laundry? 

This is a question a participant asked us during a co-design session for GE appliances. By putting the teenage son in the center, the question shifts from the appliance to the person and their experience.

When you ask a human-centered question, you open yourself to empathy. You can imagine the dynamic between the mother and the teenager around a household chore; the disinterest of the kid versus the mom's need to get her kid involved; and a woman wanting to raise a young man who knows to do his chores as part of everyday life in a family.

A more commonly asked question would've been, "How can we design a washing machine for Millennials?" Note that having the product at the center of your question makes the product the star. The problem with that is that you can't empathize with the washing machine. And if you did, it would be misleading--designing a cool-looking handle, fashionable colors, a form that looks like a sneaker. It sounds absurd, but a lot of companies do it and add features to products that enhance products for product's sake, not for the user's sake.

Remember, make your user the star.

A simple exercise to get the product-focused questions out on the table, and out of your head.

Next time you or your team find yourselves asking a product-centric question, ask yourselves to solve it from the perspective of the product.

That is what I did with the Herman Miller team when we were designing the Resolve Office System, designed like a theater set for the performance of work, our first project together. I asked the team to switch places with me and answer the question they were asking me--"How can we create an office system that is technology-centered?"

It is a perfectly valid question. In fact, most companies ask us to answer questions like this. But it is not the right question. A tech-centered office system excludes people who have soft bodies, who hate having their backs exposed to passers-by, who love putting their kids' drawings on the walls, who bring in homemade sandwiches for lunch and stick them in their drawers.

It took me five minutes to make the point that the center of our system is the user. That lesson learned early on kept us on the right track for three years, all through the development of the product. The Resolve System honors the user and has resulted in a 50 percent increase in user performance in a case study done with British Airways.

Product-centered questions will not lead us to human-centered innovation. Re-frame the question around a soft-bodied person. You might change our lives.

This article first appeared on Inc.com on June 2, 2018