When Design Thinking goes wrong
What happens in the workshop often stays in the workshop
Imagine that you’re in a Design Thinking workshop. The energy is great, there are hundreds of post-it notes, and the smell of Sharpies fills the air. You feel like you’re solving real problems. People are collaborating and you leave feeling energized, excited, and inspired—only for that to completely wear off immediately following the workshop. What happened to all the great ideas from the workshop? The momentum and excitement fizzle out, and everyone goes back to their day-to-day work. Sound familiar? This has resulted in a lot of backlash on Design thinking. Many people associate Design Thinking solely with workshops and innovation theater.
Design Thinking can be a valuable tool when used properly, but running a workshop doesn’t always lead to actionable outcomes or value creation. You can run the most exciting workshop, but if nothing actionable comes out of it, it feels like a waste of time. Maybe the thinking was too blue sky and not actually feasible or viable. Or maybe you only included internal perspectives and the ideas aren’t actually desirable for customers. Maybe the problem wasn’t well framed, so you spent time focusing on the wrong problem, or the problem was too big and broad. If you aren’t achieving your objective or actionable outcomes from a workshop, you’re not creating value.
Another tool in the tool box
Design thinking is a framework—a tool in our tool box full of tools. There’s no silver bullet solution to solving problems. It’s essential to use a variety of tools and methods. Design Thinking can be a very effective tool when used properly—the very core of design thinking is about understanding and balancing what’s desirable, viable, and feasible. Unfortunately there has been a lot of backlash on Design Thinking, because it’s been poorly implemented or overhyped as the answer to all of our problems.
Don’t get me wrong, I love workshops, but as good stewards of Design Thinking and customer centricity, these activities need to be part of an overall plan. The objectives need to align with the broader organization’s goals and we need to adopt ways of working that can consistently and repeatedly create value. Many teams get excited when it comes to generating new ideas, but those ideas fizzle out and aren’t leveraged into anything after the workshop. When ideating, it’s good to think blue sky without limitations, but sometimes constraints can lead to better problem solving and more feasible solutions considering existing capabilities and systems. It’s essential to make sure something actionable comes out of the workshop to keep momentum going afterwards, and to incorporate these principles into our daily work.
Diverge and Converge
Instead of just running workshops, we need to introduce ways to incorporate customer centricity into our day-to-day work, zooming out to share and align as a group and zooming in to do independent, focused work. Sometimes our best ideas come to us when our minds are totally free to wander—in the shower, in the car, in nature. They might not always come to us in a workshop. The beauty of a workshop is getting alignment, collaboration, and diverse perspectives—but how can we incorporate that into our day-to-day work? If you work in a large business or enterprise, problems are complex, so it requires diverse perspectives. We can accomplish a lot by first talking to our customers or users to understand their problems and challenges before we jump into a solution. One idea that can help with this is running a cross-functional research kick off to brainstorm the questions and assumptions the team has about the problem or opportunity. You can run this short, actionable workshop in about an hour. This will help your team put together an action plan to research and test your riskiest assumptions and unknowns to better understand the problem you’re trying to solve. This can be a collaborative effort, assigning individuals to lead and execute different parts of the action plan. Then you can come back together to share insights and findings.
Once everyone is aligned and has a shared understanding of the problem (and if it’s a problem worth solving), together you can collaborate on solution ideas. You might diverge to generate a wide range of ideas and converge to evaluate ideas based on feasibility, viability, and desirability using some kind of decision matrix or prioritization/evaluation method. After you’ve made a decision about what solutions you have gained confidence in, diverge again, working independently to further develop solutions or prototype. You might diverge and converge several times, coming together as a group to align and make decisions, and diverging to further expand or refine ideas.
Actionable workshops
If you are going to run a Design Thinking workshop, first define what your objective is. Then determine the right group of people to include and the right combination of exercises that will help you achieve your goal. Make sure you come out of the workshop with an action plan and assign individuals to the actions. Schedule regular check-ins to keep the momentum going. For example, if you run a research kick off, share out the insights generated from the research, then ideate solutions together—this can be done using a variety of methods.
Tips to get the most from a workshop:
Define your objective
Identify the right stakeholders who need to be involved (ideally a small, cross-functional group)
Design the exercises that will help achieve the objective
Create an action plan and milestone dates
Use workshops to create a shared understanding, create alignment, and generate ideas
Make continuous learning and customer centricity part of your day-to-day work
Schedule time to measure and track progress toward your goals after the workshop
The power of Design Thinking for product teams lies in bringing together diverse perspectives and building an understanding of customer needs. When your team and your work is focused around your customers and their needs, you’re able to align on what’s important. This will help your team build better experiences that create an impact for your customers and business.