Design Thinking – Organizing Your Strategy for Success

Carolyn Coates

Mar 25 2014

I recently heard Beverly Ingle speak about Design Thinking that left me with some insanely valuable tips. You don’t have to be an artist because design thinking is a method of evolving an idea through a specific thought process. While some of it may seem like common sense, following a specific process to organize your thoughts and ideas can lead to more efficient, thought-out solutions.

Why Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a formal method used to find a practical, creative solution that will resolve the issue at hand and improve future result. Organizations use design thinking to not only solve a problem but give them valuable insights they can use along the way. It’s important to keep a few things in mind through design thinking…

• Be Purposeful – stay on track of your goals
• Stay Customer Focused – keep your primary customer/client always in mind throughout
• Be Iterative – repeat the process so you can get as close as possible to the desired result
• Be Innovative – think of new possibilities to improve upon
• Resilient – recover quickly when something doesn’t work the way you intended
• Collaborative – bringing more people into the process allows more possibilities and a stronger conclusion

Problem Solving Methodology

When you’re looking at a problem, before jumping in and coming up with a resolution that hasn’t been thought out, it’s important to step back and identify gaps, uncover opportunities, and activate innovation.

• Identify Gaps – what’s missing and causing the issue?
• Uncover Opportunities – where are opportunities for growth and refinement?
• Activate Innovation – is your situation ready for change?

After considering these key things, it’s time to start the design thinking process…

5 Key Steps to the Design Thinking Process

1. Understand – Gather information about all aspects of the situation and factors that affect the outcome
2. Define – Summarize the underlying problem and determine the specific challenge
3. Ideate – Brainstorm. Get a team together (because 2 heads are better than one) and concentrate on idea generation in order to transition from defining the problem to creating solutions
4. Prototype – Developing a prototype can help you answer questions and use in the test phase to receive feedback from others that get closer to finding the best solution.
5. Test – Receive feedback to refine your ideas and solutions.

Design thinking is a beneficial process that can refine your way of thinking as well as your overall resolution. Follow the 5 steps for your next decision whether it be personal or for your organization and see how this process can help you!

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