Design Thinking - Stories of Business Value & ROI - SPJain School of Global Management
Dr. C.J. Meadows, director of the innovation centre at S.P. Jain School of Global Management, delivers a concise, story‑driven introduction to design thinking. He defines it as a human‑centred, interdisciplinary approach that balances desirability, feasibility and viability, then illustrates its power with a series of cross‑industry case studies that show measurable business impact. Highlights include Bank of America’s “Keep‑the‑Change” savings product (12 million users, $3.1 bn saved), Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower queue redesign (90 % of 900 daily visitors served in 10 minutes), Peru’s low‑cost modular Innova Schools (triple national math scores for $130/month per student), Unilever’s “Uber‑style” sanitation service in Ghana, food‑waste to bioplastic incubators, InterContinental Hotels’ coworking‑friendly spaces, and many other examples. Meadows then cites research that design‑led firms outperform peers (Design Council, DMI Design‑Centric Index, IBM 301 % ROI, Strategy& Innovation 1000). He explains why design thinking now extends to employee experience and HR, noting the huge economic cost of low employee engagement. Practical guidance follows: building whole‑brain, diverse teams (HBDI profiling), when design thinking is appropriate, the IDEOS process (Define → Discover → Ideate → Prototype → Test), the importance of field observation, learning from extremes, analogies (F1 pit crew), rapid low‑fidelity prototyping, and the “How might we?” framing. He warns against over‑reliance on focus groups, shares failure stories (striped‑soap, boombox colour), and ends with a motivational call to action for the audience to identify their own challenge and start applying the methods.
Chapters
¡Hola! I'm Dr. CJ Meadows. I run an innovation center at a Forbes Top 20 global business school, S.P. Jain School of Global Management. One of the things I do is to help executives and MBAs learn about design thinking, practice the tools, apply it to their situation. In the course of doing executive education, MBA immersions, and corporate consulting, I share with people the amazing value that's been created with Design Thinking. So, in order to reach a broader audience and save a little workshop time so you can practice the tools more and apply Design Thinking to your own situation, I've decided to share some stories with you here. So here it goes. Basically what I'd like to share with you today is what is design thinking, why does it matter, and perhaps a little about how it's done, but again, just focusing on the amazing stories. First of all, it's an appetizer only. You— there are many books out there and lots of people to talk to about design thinking, so this is It's just a taster. Now, I'll be sharing with you classic stories, and they're probably gonna be outside your industry, but the stories are spread across a number of industries, so there is something here for you. First of all, what is it? I think Tim Brown put it best in Harvard Business Review when he basically said that design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws on the designer's toolkit— art, architecture, industrial design— to integrate what people need and want with what's technologically feasible and what makes a good business strategy. So basically, you want to innovate at the intersection of desirability, feasibility, and viability. One of my favorite stories is from Bank of America and IDEO. Bank of America went to IDEO and asked them to create something. And they thought the IDEO people would stay in their lab. So they said, hey, can we go and see how you do this in your lab? And the IDEO folks said, yeah, come on over, but we won't be there. And Bank of America said, well, wait, wait, wait. We're paying you to create this thing. Where are you going to be? And they said, well, look, to design something that's really useful to people that they actually want, we need to be in the homes and offices of your customers, seeing how they manage money, what they do with it, sensing their needs, seeing opportunities in the real world. So OK, OK. They went out and they did that. And they noticed something. When business people came home, especially men because they don't have handbags, they would— first thing they want to do is get out of the suit. It's hot, it's uncomfortable. Before doing that, they have to dig into their pockets and pull out all their keys and change. So they would dig out the change and stick it in a jar. And one of the designers thought, wait a minute, how much money is in that jar? Even more, how much money is in the jars in homes all over this nation? A lot. They also noticed that when people were writing checks— yes, this is a classic story, people used to write checks— some people would round them up. And I said, "Wait a minute, you're overpaying your bills. Why would you do that?" And most of the respondents had good reasons. It's easier to write the check. Instead of $29.86, I just write $30. It's quick and easy. If I am traveling and I can't pay, I call back and say, "No, no, no, I always overpay you. Take away the fees from being late." Also, people who did their own bookkeeping found it easier to use round numbers. And so the designers thought once again, "How much money is that?" So they went back to the client and said, "We don't want to make the thing you hired us to make. We have a better idea. We want you to make the keep-the-change accounts. Now here's how it's gonna work." New customers will sign up for the Keep the Change account, put bill-paying information online, will pay the exact amount, round it up, and put the round up in people's savings account. They gave it a try. So usually I ask people, is this just a marketing ploy to show that you're high-tech? Or is there any real value in doing this? Are you actually serving any real needs? As luck would have it, 12 million customers later, they had helped people save $3.1 billion. Little things add up. And the thing they were hired to make was a promotional money clip. I think they had a better idea. This is a picture that some people find familiar. It's a very innovative way to wait in the queue, but how about we don't wait in the queue? One of my favorite design thinking examples was actually Ministry of Manpower in Singapore. I went to Singapore first to work about 22 years ago, and back then to get my little piece piece of plastic, my employment pass. I would have to take my laptop. I knew I would be there and I couldn't miss that much work because it would— to get a little piece of plastic would take 4, 5, 6 hours. Now, 900 people go through that office in a day. So 900 people are missing half a day minimum, probably more, from work. And a lot of them are high-level executives. Now, how much productivity is lost every year by making people sit around if they don't take their laptop and they didn't know in advance? And what about people who come back and they have children? I took 4 kids through that process, and they had to wait, and they had to wait, and they had to wait. Not a lot of fun. So in order to save productivity, make life a lot easier, and give a great impression of the nation to international business people who go around the region saying, "You gotta do business here, it's wonderful here, they're amazing," Ministry of Manpower hired a design team, IDEO in fact, to redesign the whole thing. So they went there and experienced it. They talked to the kids, they talked to the people waiting, they talked to the people who work there, they ran the numbers. How much real estate does it cost, and lighting, and air conditioning to have people sitting around for 4, 5, 6 hours, etc. And here's what they came up with. Now 90% of those 900 people per day are served in 10 minutes. You make an e-appointment, you go on time, someone greets you at the door, the kids go straight over to their toys, and the grown-ups are at the computer doing what needs to be done in just a few minutes. Design Thinking is also responsible for the largest private network of schools in Peru. 29 schools, almost 20,000 students, 1,200 teachers, and growing. Now, anyone who has sent one of their kids to private school knows it's terribly expensive. Yes, they get great results, but it's more than a lot of families can afford. So the design team took a look at and talked to students, parents, teachers, community members. They saw how the school works today, they saw new technologies, they saw new physical setups, and they set up a modular school with blended learning, group learning, students help each other, teachers also help each other, resources are online, the physical facility is modular and changeable. It's a great school, Innova Schools, and they earn 3 times the national average in math scores, twice the national average in communication, and it's only $130 a month. There's also a wonderful example of Uberizing toilets, basically, with new product design and a new business model for Unilever. To help 1 billion to 2.9 billion people worldwide who don't have adequate sanitation. When they went to a test center in Ghana, they found that there was high unemployment, a great deal of poverty, very little infrastructure. So if you haven't got water, you haven't got people to pay for existing toilets, what are you gonna do? They came up with a small sanitation unit which would partially biodegrade the material, but did need servicing. Instead of having people buy the unit, because no one could afford it, they helped entrepreneurs set up sanitation businesses. Now, instead of buying a toilet and relying on the government to put in a water infrastructure someday, you simply hire a sanitation service. Now small businesses are popping up everywhere everywhere, helping with what's a very real need, and the entrepreneurs themselves buy the units on a lease-to-own basis. There are some wonderful examples as well on food waste. I was absolutely stunned to find out that about a third of the food we produce every year just goes to waste. Now, they've designed a number of interventions in schools, restaurants, and hotels, and even better, an incubator so that more people can come up with good ideas. One of the ideas that got funded was turning bio-waste into bio-plastic. Another example is the Intercontinental Hotels Crown Plaza. They found that this generation of business people is doing business differently, having informal meetings and wanting shared spaces and services and easier ways of printing and working in a, in a less structured and more collaborative manner. So for business travelers, they've set up facilities that are more attractive both to the travelers who want to have meetings and use temporary coworking spaces, but they have also found that people in the community who are not traveling also want to use their coworking spaces. Coworking and crowdsourcing are also very powerful ways of design thinking, getting ideas from everyone. IDEO.org, for example, has launched a number of social initiatives and had people volunteer working on virtual teams. It's a great way to get experience, and we get the best ideas from everyone. Now, other than the anecdotal examples, Why would design thinking matter? Well, there's been actual research done on design thinking to figure out, is it worth all the trouble to go where people live and work, learn their needs, and design something new? As it turns out, it is very, very much worth it. The Design Council, for example, found that design-led companies over a 10-year period outperformed their peers in the FTSE 100 by 231%. There's something called the DMI's Design Centric Index, which identifies companies that are design-led. The D-Index companies outperformed S&P by 228%. IBM, which actually runs the largest design thinking practice in the world, commissioned a study to evaluate the payback. What did they find? Return on investment of 301%. Strategy& which used to be Booz Allen Company is now part of PwC. They've been doing the Innovation 1000 studies for about 10 years now, where they look at the 1000 most innovative companies in the world. Now they separated the companies that they've examined into those that directly capture customer insights versus those that use indirect methods and they look at data and they may run surveys or look at market trends. Research shows that the companies that directly engage their customers and learned insights directly from them had 3 times the growth in operating income, twice the return on assets, and 60% more shareholder returns. So directly engaging your customers is a value. Further, they separated those companies into those that drive new growth by investing in new technology Those that drive new growth by tracking the market, looking at trends, they may want to be a fast second. And those who drive new growth by looking for new needs. Again, research showed that the need seekers financially outperformed their competitors. So yes, it is a good idea to focus on needs and start with those, directly engage the people you wanna design for and serve. Now, interestingly, design thinking has moved from product development to service development to employee experience, not just customer experience. The Deloitte Human Capital Report shows that the more importance an organization places on design thinking, the faster the organization grows. In addition, survey respondents at companies where HR delivers the highest levels of value are almost 5 times more likely to be using design thinking in their programs than their peers. Is employee engagement something worth addressing? Well, actually it is. According to Gallup, Worldwide, only about 15% of employees are engaged in what they're doing at work. The economic impact? In the United States alone, the impact is $450 to $550 billion. Imagine rolling that up worldwide. So there's also a lot of value to create by engaging your employees and design thinking is a powerful and effective way to do that. So I'd like to share with you a little bit of how it's done. At IDEO itself, the teams that work together on an issue are wonderfully diverse. It might include an MBA, an engineer, an anthropologist, a scientist, an artist. They realize the power of diverse teams taking multiple perspectives on a problem and coming together integrating new solutions. In fact, beyond the field in which your team members have studied and worked, a very effective tool for achieving team diversity is HBDI, Herman Brain Dominance Indicator. Not only are we left-brained and right-brained, we're also top-brained and bottom-brained. So if you want to get a whole-brain team together, it may be worth mapping your executive team or your startup leadership team and making sure that you are actually a whole-brain team and bring all the perspectives and skills and styles to your work. Speaking of startups, I I worked for a consultancy in the first round of dot-coms, which worked with the big corporates— Chase, Morrow Benny, Boots, Sephora, all these guys— to set up the first round of e-businesses. And we also ensured that we had a diverse team. For absolutely every project we worked on, we had to have 3 people plus other team members. These 3 key people were the design and customer experience person, the business strategist who would deal with the business model, operating model, all of that, and the technology architect. So basically, back then, we were also covering the 3 design thinking bubbles of needs and wants, design, customer experience, technology, and the business strategy. You have to have them. And the most powerful place to innovate is at the intersection of all three. Design Thinking isn't for every problem, however. It's not the scientific method. You're not gonna come up with truth for a well-defined problem. However, most of us aren't doing that. Most of us are out in the world solving problems whereby we don't know the solution and actually, to be honest, we don't understand the problems either. So design thinking methodologies are a way to discover the solution and discover the problem at the same time. And the only way to come up with a truly effective solution is if you take the time to really understand the problem. Now, we're gonna go through some stories that relate to the different phases of my favorite methodology, IDEOS. It starts with defining the challenge that you're gonna work on. That's not the same as understanding the problem completely, but at least you need to take the time to decide what you're gonna work on and why it's important. You may come back and change it later, but you have to start with that. Now, there are examples of companies that have chosen the wrong problem to work on, or that didn't go about it in quite the right way. Case in point, I was at a big international development bank a little while ago, and they shared with me this story. They felt it was a problem in one nation where they were working that there was so much time and effort spent getting water. It ate up the days of the women in the community, so they decided to do something about it. They set aside money and put in a water infrastructure so these women would no longer have to carry water on their head long distances They met with the community afterwards, and what did the women say? "How could you do this to us?" is actually what they said, which the bankers didn't expect. They said, "What do you mean, do to you?" We live in a conservative society. We serve our husbands and children and communities well. We are working all the time to do that. The only chance we get to get out of the house is to go get water. And when we do that, we can talk to our friends and borrow things and ask advice and arrange marriages and get medical recommendations. Now we're stuck at home. Thanks a lot. So having realized that the water system would impact more than just the economy or people's productive time, it would actually impact the society in unintended ways. Sadly, money was not set aside to maintain the infrastructure, and it fell into disrepair. And the bankers went back to the community and spoke to the women and said, "Okay, we're back where we started, and you still have a problem." What actually do you need and want? What would actually help you? And they said, "Actually, water filters. A very big problem for us is that we bring back water not knowing that there are bad bugs in it that make our families sick. Then my husband can't go to the fields, my children can't learn." and I'm spending time taking care of health problems. We need safe water, but we need our social and informational infrastructures to remain intact. That the bankers could do. They set aside budget to give water filters and to teach the women how to make more. And that worked. So the challenge that they thought they were addressing was not actually the challenge that really needed solving. That brings to mind soap. It's a classic case from Procter Gamble. Colgate-Palmolive came up with a green striped bar of soap, and it took the market by storm. Everybody wanted this green striped bar of A soap soap. called Irish Spring. It made Procter Gamble pretty upset. So management put together a design team and said, "Go into the conference room, brainstorm, and come up with a better striped bar of soap." So the team did that. They came up with a striped bar of soap Maybe not better. Actually, definitely not better, because they took it out to a test market and people already had a striped bar of soap. The product failed. They went back to the drawing board. Okay, learn from your mistakes. Failure is okay. Go ahead. Made another striped bar of soap and took it out to a test market and It failed again. Then the third time they came back in, there was a new engineer who'd just been hired and assigned to the team. And he said to them, "Why are we making striped bars of soap?" And the team said to him, "I don't know, we were told to." So he said, "Well, look, look, look, um, I hear that this has failed twice already, let's not do it again. Can I ask another why question? Why do people buy any particular bar of soap? What is it they want out of the shower experience? They thought about it, they said, ooh, well, wait a minute, Okay, so we want to be refreshed. When it's hot out, we want to cool off. We want to have a wonderful smell that reminds us of happy times. So he said, well, okay, let's brainstorm on that. So they brainstormed about why people would buy a particular bar of soap, what experience they want, what are all the things that would make them feel they chose refreshed. Well, what makes you feel refreshed? A dip in the pool, cannonball, a dip in the ocean, a day at the beach, blue skies, picnic. So they put all the ideas together and came up with a smell and a look and an experience and that made people feel like they were at the ocean being refreshed. Yes, they put blue striped stripes in the bar and they test marketed it. It did really, really well. It never beat out Irish Spring, but it sold millions of bars. You may have heard of it. That's the backstory behind coast. I also had an MBA, a group of MBAs who were taking an immersive experience in design thinking. Now we chose to do social enterprise type projects. So these MBAs said, you know, there's so many people out here in Mumbai who have no education, no job, and they have such a hard time We'd like to help them. So we want to put together an infrastructure, a platform, an electronic platform, so they can get jobs. Because after all, what does every MBA want? A job to pay back student loans, to advance the career, all this stuff. Now that was the challenge they chose from their own perspective. Once they actually got went out and learned from the people they wanted to serve, the people said to them, "Jobs. Job." "Why would I want a job?" And they were stunned. People wanted to be paid for their work, but they didn't necessarily want to be tied down to a full-time job if they had other responsibilities with family or with a farm, or et cetera. They didn't necessarily want to be under some boss's thumb for a whole variety of reasons. They didn't want jobs, but they did want work. So the challenge got reoriented from how might we help people get jobs to how might we help people get work and be paid for it. This reminds me of the story, another TED Talk, called "The Amazing Story of the Man Who Gave Us Modern Pain Relief." It was also the beginning of palliative care. Before this man's work, the mission of doctors was to make patients well. However, in so many cases, They can't. But even when you can't make a patient well, you can make a patient feel better. You can relieve the pain, you can relieve the symptoms. So a whole field opened up by changing the challenge to, how might we make patients well, to how might we make patients feel well. It's a whole different challenge. So choose your challenges and be open to redefining them. So part of what I have talked about is the challenge, but part of it is the experience with the person you're designing for. That brings to mind one of my favorite, favorite stories from the pharmaceutical industry. One company decided that it was a a problem that when grandparents couldn't open a bottle of arthritis medicine, they hand it to the grandchild to open. In some homes, the only person who can open childproof bottles is a child. So that sort of defeats the purpose of this safety feature. So the company wanted to come up with a better bottle. So they put together focus groups. And created new designs. They would give a design to a group of older people in the focus group and say, "Go home and use it for a week, come back, tell us how you like it." This one woman in particular, they'd give her a bottle, she'd come back and say, "Oh, it's fine." They'd give her a design the next week, go home, come back, "Oh yeah, it's fine." They did this week after week and they got nowhere with anyone. So they hired a design team to get out of the office and go to people's homes. They went to her home, knocked on the door, offered her a bottle. She invited them in. They said, "Ooh, can we see you open the bottle?" And she said, "Oh yeah, sure." So she left. They said, "Ma'am, where are you?" "I'm in the kitchen." "Can we come too?" "Oh, sure, sure." They watched her walk over to the wall, switch the electricity on, run, run, run, run, run, run, eee! And look in the bottle. She had no trouble opening the bottles because she opened them with her ham slicer and sliced off the top of the bottle. They had no idea to ask her in a focus group, "Oh, ma'am, do you have no trouble because you open all bottles with a ham slicer?" So again, you have to go where people live and work and see what they do and listen and experience the world as they do, because you're never going to think to ask all the questions because you've never been there before. Now, a lot of people with a marketing background think, OK, I'm designing a product or service, so I need to design it for that mass market middle group of millions of people, and that's what I'm gonna go study. That's not how a designer thinks. It's gonna take too, too long to go and investigate the lives of all those people in the middle. What you want to do is to observe a few people on either extreme, the lows and the highs. For example, there was a It was a cooking utensil company that was going bankrupt. They outsourced everything. They got the cheapest materials, the most standard designs. They made everything as cheap as they could. And they were going to go bankrupt. They hired a design team and said, can you help? The team said, well, we can try. So where do you think they went? What do you think they did? Well, they had to go out where people work and live, but who are these extremes? Where would they go? Okay, well, who would have trouble using standard kitchen tools? Well, you have a hint from the previous story. Older people with arthritis or shaky nerves might have trouble. If it's not older people having trouble using a kitchen tool, it might be a child, a younger person. Whenever I give this talk and I describe the situation, I always hear, "Husbands." Um, I will leave that for you to consider. So the design team went to a kitchen with a grandmother and a granddaughter and watched them try to use the tools. One of the things they noticed with the grandmother and the granddaughter was that they were making pizza. And the typical round pizza cutter with a handle, well, they observed the little girl trying to cut the pizza. She couldn't get enough strength through her arms and elbow and wrist, so she moved the handle on top, but that's dangerous. You can cut yourself. You can slip. So they made a pizza cutter with a round handle on top of the blade. It's super easy and lovely to use. Now, on the other extreme, who uses kitchen tools 14, 15, 16 hours a day, even more? How about a chef? How about a bartender? How about a food kitchen? They went to those places as well and observed what— how people interact with the tools and what kind of workarounds they would use to make it easier. They came back designed incredibly easy to use, and also beautiful kitchen tools, launched those as a new product line, and the company blossomed. So learn from your extremes. Learn what is hard and learn the workarounds that you can extend to everybody else, or the new uses of the product. Now, Other than the lows and highs, you also want to study the analogies. There was a hospital emergency room that wanted to get better, so they thought, "Well, wait a minute, what is better for an emergency room, and can we look outside of healthcare to find a great example and borrow some ideas?" They decided that better is fast and it's accurate. You've gotta get the job right because someone's life is at stake. So fast and right. Where could we go to get ideas from someone who's doing a job fast and right? Well, the place they decided to go was actually Formula One racing pit crew. The design team went to Formula One racing for a day, not just to have fun, but to watch the pit crew and see how they operate fast and right, because someone's life is at stake. They watched the patient, the cars, roll in, and one of the pit crew members would take a basket of tools out to the car, and 80% of the time, those were all the all the tools that were needed. And the team looked at each other and said, "Why don't we do that? We don't do that. Let's adopt that practice." And they saw a lot of other practices that they adopted as well. They didn't stop there. They invited the pit crew to the hospital to walk around, and they asked them, "Hey, here's what we do. How would you do it?" And of course, they also got the patients involved and anyone else who had the possibility of having some great ideas. So once you've decided who to observe, you'll need to observe them effectively, and this is surprisingly the hardest part of design thinking because it's very natural for us to look at something and bring our own assumptions and make up that story and move on instead of discovering something in the real world. Case in point, one of the exercises that I do with people is to show them a box of clothing, and I ask, "What do you observe?" Invariably, someone in the room says, "I can see this person is giving a donation," and then I've got 'em. Because when you see a box of clothing, clothing with donation written on the box, how do you know the person didn't just buy those things and bring them back from a donation center? Or how do you know it's not just a box that they happen to have from the donation center and this is their laundry basket? You see the clothing, you see the box, you see the word donation, but you don't know that it is being now given instead of received. So you have to ask. So be very, very careful when you're going out because the observation is the what, the facts. The insight you're trying to get to is the why, the motivations, thoughts, and feelings behind why is that the way it is, and why are people doing what they do? What do they really want? Now the next story I'd like to share is actually from Clay Christensen, from his disruptive strategy work. Now, this is the intersection between disruptive strategy and design thinking. At this intersection, it's called the job to be done. So Clay's example was one where he had taken his son to a fast food place after a sporting event, and they were going to have some special father-son time. And he ordered a milkshake for his son, and it was a wonderful treat. And so they were sitting there, the son is slurping up this very thick shake through a very thin straw. And Clay's thinking, "Okay, we had a certain amount of time for this treat, but I'm gonna have to go. I've got a meeting at church. Are you done yet?" Son's not done yet. "Okay, we can wait a few more minutes. Are you done yet?" "Nope, not done yet." "Aye aye." Now a little while later, there was an opportunity to do a project at a fast food restaurant. And one of the things, of course, that they sold were shakes. So they had someone in the restaurant observing 18 hours one day. It was huge. And most of the shakes were sold, yes, in the afternoon after sporting events, but also first thing in the morning. The observer went up to the customer and asked, "Why are you buying a shake first thing in the morning? It's only 7 o'clock." So the person said, "Well, I have to be at work at thus-and-so time, and I have a 1-hour commute." And some people had longer commutes. "Look, I don't want to wake up early. I really do need some sleep. I'm hungry, and I'd like something that fills me up." And during this 1-hour or longer commute, I'd like to have something that keeps me awake and keeps me alert. And so the observer said, well, what else did you try? Well, I tried a cup of coffee, and it was gone pretty quick, and then I was hungry. I tried a bagel, but, you know, stirring and putting something on the bagel, that didn't quite work. I tried a banana, again, kind of peeling, and then I was also hungry later, and it just took me 5 minutes to get rid of the banana. So if you're designing the after-school or after-sporting event shake, and it's mainly for children, how would you design it? Well, perhaps it should be thin. And have a thick straw so the kids can get it up quickly. Probably should have chocolate or other kinds of sugary something, 'cause it's a treat, it's not a grown-up meal. But how would you design the morning milkshake? Okay, it should be thick so it lasts a while, with a thin straw, maybe with little bits of granola or nuts or something to give you some, you know, help keep you awake for that long commute. Should it be sugary and unhealthy? No. Maybe it should be based on soy or yogurt, certainly fruit, because grown-ups are going to want something more healthy. So these are two completely different shakes, even though they're both shakes. Because the job to be done is different. These are the insights that you're trying to come to by observing keenly and by experiencing what the user is experiencing, finding their needs, learning more about them. So I'm going to finish up with some stories that I usually don't have time for, but they're great stories stories that give you some good insights, and they're good examples. I'm sorry to slam focus groups, they are very good for a variety of situations. However, I gotta agree with Steve Jobs, he said it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times people don't know what they want until you show it to them, and that's a key thing for design. Design thinking. You're not having people design the products and service for you, you're trying to really understand their needs and wants. You may design it with them, you may design it for them and interact when you're prototyping and experimenting, but go where they live and work and where you see the real needs in real life. One Classic case that I love was when the boombox first came out. I believe it was Sony that didn't know what color to make a boombox, so they did a focus group. They had a discussion and everybody said, look, we want to take the boombox out to picnics, into the park, into the beach, and it's all about lemonade and picnics and sunshine and Eventually, they, 100% of the focus group said yellow. The boombox should be yellow. It's happy. So the facilitator said to everybody, "Ah, super. Thank you, everybody. On your way out, please feel free to take a boombox. There's a whole stack of them outside, and thank you again for your time." One participant Spence stayed back and he had some questions for the facilitator. And then, questions answered, he left and he came right back in and said, "Um, are there any more black boomboxes? Because they're all gone." Everyone passed up all the colors of boombox. Including yellow, and took the black ones. So boomboxes were introduced in black. Another wonderful thing, and it's an example of people saying and doing different things, so you need to observe what they do, not just what they tell you, Mrs. Fields cookies. When they were expanding globally, Mrs. Fields thought that Japan would be a wonderful place to introduce her cookies. So she took a box of cookies and went to a meeting of some wonderful executives and business leaders in Tokyo. And so, they had green tea at the meeting, they exchanged cards, they all sat down down together, and the executive said to her, "We're very, very sorry, Mrs. Fields, but we're not the right market for your cookies. They're made from wheat products. Our diet is rice-based. We don't eat a lot of wheat. They're much sweeter than anything that we eat, so they really don't fit." what people are used to. Also, they contain a great deal of butter. We don't eat food that's that oily. So you're wonderful, and thank you for showing interest in our nation, but your cookies really won't sell here. And so she said to them, "Thank you. Can I have my empty plate back?" All the while that they had been telling her why these cookies will not sell in Japan and are inappropriate for the Japanese people, they ate all her cookies. So she went and she did just fine. Another example of observing people is actually, it's on the prototyping and experimentation end of the methodology. So there was a company that wanted to go green, and they wanted to stop harming the environment so much. So somebody decided that an easy and quick way to start improving what they do is to change from Styrofoam cups for coffee. Alright, so they decided on a prototype. Okay, took almost no money, could be done within an hour, quick and easy, let's just try it out. Okay, so they put up a sign on the wall, "Please help yourself to an eco-friendly mug." They took down the ceramic mugs and put them by the coffee maker, they put the Styrofoam up and away. The sign also said, "When you're finished, 'Put your mug in the dishwasher.' Okay, so mugs are down, sign is up. Let's go away for a few minutes and see what happens. They came back 10 minutes later. They saw some guy going out. How was it? The sign was crumpled up and in the waste bin. The Styrofoam was down, the ceramic cups were up. So they chased down the guy and said, "Hey, did you see what happened in there?" And he said, "Yeah, it was so stupid. These people put up some stupid sign and they put down all the ceramic mugs. I'm the custodian and I'm not gonna clean up any stinking mugs and take them out of the dishwasher." So, "No, no, no, some stupid person. I just put it all back. It's okay. Go have your coffee." What did they learn from that experiment? They learned something about a key phrase in innovation called "How might we?" Who's we? When you're designing something for people, you really have to include include everyone. And "how might we" is a really key phrase as well. How? You're assuming it can be done, and frankly these days with technology, it probably can. Or if it's not today, it's real soon. How might? You keep the problem open and explore for a while. Don't just jump into what we should or shouldn't do because you will kill off good ideas. If you kill them off too early. How might we? Who are all the we's that we need to learn about when we're designing a solution? And prototype and experiment early and often. In any design thinking project, usually about half of your time is prototyping and experimentation. Now you need to do the discovery is the discovery part first. That's incredibly important, and that will take about a third of your time. The other little slice is what most people think of innovation as— brainstorming and ideation. Okay, that's actually the smallest piece. Most of what you do is discovering what the problems really are and what the needs and wants really are. And messing around with the prototypes. And they should be very unfinished prototypes, very cheaply done, just to communicate. So, to wrap up a little bit for ya, and thank you for your patience, this is a lot like tying your shoe. Your mom and dad can tell you again and again how to tie your shoe and how to make a bow, but there really is only one way to do it. You just have to get out there and do it. And you will make a lot of mistakes, and you will fall down, just like when you were learning to walk in those shoes that you couldn't tie. But just get up and do it again and again and again and again. It takes years to become a really good design thinker and solution maker. But in so doing, your life can be really meaningful because you really are making the world better. Final notes, design thinking, on average a project takes about 3 to 6 months. If you'd like to learn more about design thinking, there are those TED videos that I mentioned, and there's a whole issue of Harvard Business Review on design thinking. You can check out IDEO.com, IDEO.org, IBM Design Thinking Practice, and a whole bunch of others. One thing that I found very useful is a 4-hour simulation by Experience Point so that people experientially learn the tools and techniques and concepts. Usually I find the 4-hour simulation gets people going, but they need to be— have an immersive experience. I offer a 1-week sprint in which people do a project and they're coached and mentored all the way through. Companies also find this a great way to start, especially if they're going to do a 90-day innovation cycle. Some coaching and mentoring all the way through is a useful thing. If you're doing design thinking yourself, then you're creating a culture of innovation and a culture of empowerment and developing language, which can spill over into so many areas that will help so much. So in closing, thank you for listening to these classic stories, and I would challenge you to start tying your shoes. And the big question for you now is, what's your challenge? Thank you.
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