I visited an acupuncturist today. She asked me a slew of questions and after each answer she followed with a why. She wasn’t looking for surface level answers to prescribe a generic treatment. She was digging deeper. Forty-five minutes into our conversation, I asked her why she spent so much time asking why. She noted that acupuncture is a modality based on designing meaningful solutions that serve each person’s unique needs, all of which begins with deep, careful, open-minded observation to understand the underlying reasons for those needs. While she stuck needles in my forehead, feet, belly, and hands I thought to myself, “she’s using the tools of a designer to design a change in my system. Cool!”
Then, she shared that she was going through a process of synthesis based on her observations and would design a treatment. We would observe and gather feedback from that treatment and refine as necessary in the coming weeks to make it even more useful. Essentially she gathered information by understanding deeply. She used that information to form a hypothesis about my treatment. And, she created a prototype solution that she acknowledged we would iterate on based on feedback. Seriously, did this lady go to design school?
A key component of design thinking is taking the time to understand the community, their environment, what motivates them, and so on. Any change—be it a new product, service, process, or cultural change—will have a terrible time when the change is poorly designed. That’s why the tools of a designer are so important when leading change.
Being smart about designing successful change is not so much about having good answers. It’s about having good questions. You don’t need to have answers to everything. But you need to work hard at making your questions useful, for both you and your audience.
Photo credit Don Moyer.
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The information presented is top notch. I’ve been doing some research on the topic and this post answered several questions.