Ep 199| Is Design thinking really required ? 8 reasons when it can fail

We have been talking about design thinking for a long time. In this particular recent episodes we are going into deep understanding of what is the methodology thinking process and the mindset involved to solve it. But there is always a two sides to the swot. Okay. When the design thinking can really fail, where it should not be applied and we should be more aware while taking decision. In this podcast I am going to go into details and also this will cover majority of the mistakes what designers also do when they follow a design process. Okay, so take a lot of notes. Let's jump in. Welcome to this Design for Change. Thank you for staying tuning in with me guys. I'm on a mission to help over a million designers reach their creative potential to get a job. Even when they have a degree or experience that doesn't matter. I will help them make sure they are getting a creative potential job because there are huge creative potential available. But we are not filling that. So I'm on a mission to help them and also people who are already designers. I want to help them grow 2x or 3x over the time. Okay. And we are working towards it. And this Design for Change show is reaching more than 30 countries and a lot of listeners, thousands of listeners are listening to it. The impact is huge. And if you would like to follow our episodes you can get a notified button and then you can follow us in Apple and Spotify podcasts. Okay, so today we are going to understand the awareness of design thinking when it needs to be taken care with the proper resistance, when it needs to be aware, when it needs to be little more caution when we are going along the process. See, many times if you're learning and doing the design thinking process will be defaultly having the mindset to go and follow it. But there are many circumstances which may even make a backfiring in you. Okay, see, definitely it's a valuable what you call subject. I would say design thinking when it comes to product design, ui, ux, design system design, service design, medical area, aerospace, consumer electronics, whatever. Sometimes it's very essential to understand why it can have a what you call it's not a silver bullet or something like magical thing. Guys, sometimes it effectiveness can vary in a very different different factors. Okay, so here are the eight reasons I'm going to be telling you. You can make it very very what you call crisp note of it so that you will get an understanding and be aware when you do the process. First is misunderstanding on misapplication. See, design thinking is a structured process, okay? It involves empathy, creative problem solving, ideation refinement and doing it again. Sometimes teams may misunderstand this and misapply the process and the principles of the design thinking. What happens when we do it? It'll lead to a very substandard outcome. So people will have a. What you call. They'll lose the trust on the process. I've seen many times it happens like people will randomly come and saying hey, even if you have followed just our thinking process, normally in our brain, we would have got the solution. You brought something like design thinking, refine, ideate, prototype, just that now we are leading nowhere. Our time is wasted. So that thing will happen, guys. So you need to convey the understanding to you and your team very carefully. Okay? Next, Lack of empathy. See, empathy is a very important milestone. Being a design thinker. It involves understanding of what the user needs, preferences, behaviors, pain areas. Sometimes if designers fail to empathize with the users or the stakeholders, that may end up creating a different product, right? So if they not understand, second, if they understand very deeply on empathy level, until they're only solving for those kind of uses. But for the whole general market, the real world problem is still not solved. So empathy needs to be very carefully played, guys. That is why I told you it's a two edged sword. You need to be very careful while you're applying how it can solve a specific problem for a maximum impact of the people. Very important. Third is limited resources and time constraint. I told you in the first point. Also see, design thinking requires some time effort. You need to have a timeline, you need to have a budget. So what happens is many times teams will be very resistant towards it. Because many times what happens is they'll say hey, deadline is there, we don't have to follow process, we'll just skip this. That's a very, very important thing to be taken care of, okay? Because if you are an effective communicator, you can manage that. The fourth is resistant to change. Design thinking often improves. I mean often improves only with iterating, okay? Only when you change, only when you fail. Fast. Many organization and even the design leaders are not ready to do it, guys. You know what? They'll go back to their old traditional method. That is the reason why design thinking is not applied in majority of the industries. More than 80% of the CEOs have agreed they are not applying design thinking in their organization. Though they know it is very vital for their revenue improvement and profit increasement. In spite of that, why? It's because of this reason. Resistance to change. People who had that visionary people who had the thought process. They did it guys. Okay. Fifth is complexity of the problem. See, sometimes design problems are very very wicked nature of the problem. Like let's say there are hundreds of reasons why a problem is happening. Thousands of reason connected with the different different systems and subsystems and micro level systems and macro level systems and grassroots level systems. So maybe a new technologies need a new processes needed even to improve the design thinking. We need to be open. See right now AI is coming and AI is already there. So we have a machine learning algorithms which is running to make us bring the data in just fingertips which is not previously available using the Google search engine method. So how we read to needy collaborate with the schools. In order to make this design thinking more effective that needs to be taken care. Because sometimes interdisciplinary collaboration and methodology are definitely required. Based on so very very complex problem. It's difficult to really approach in this way. I have not encountered in my career not a very very complex problem. I worked on a complex problem like system design problem. I worked on one of the child adoption project. It was one of the complex problem I've ever worked. So there are much more complex problems than this. So keep in mind 6th important thing is poor collaboration communication. See the moment when you're talking with engineers, marketers, researchers testing people software. If there are a lot of breakdowns in the communication and conflict happens, it will directly impact saying hey Jagdish, stop this design thinking process. Hey, no, we are not following this process. So you need to be very careful in that collaboration ways. If you effectively do it, it can have a positive impact. Seventh is sometimes people don't do iteration. People don't learn. The whole point of design thinking is to fail fast and iterate design thinking. Emphasize this as a continuous learning from the feedback is if team fails on this particular step and then they follow all the step properly. I'll tell you what happens. They'll miss the opportunity for improvement and innovation of the project. That's why it is very careful to apply design thinking. Okay, people partially apply it. 8th and the last important thing is inadequate skill set. See, people don't have the skill set to first go and work on it. Some design thinker and a training and a support system is required for an employee or a designer to first go and learn. This design organization don't really take care of this. They think people will learn from online. That's not the way people give five years training, right? In engineering people give six sigma training. People give different problem solving training, workshop training, manual training. So same thing needs to come into the design field. Also people needs to be aware to give this kind of a trainings and methodologies continuously in order to make it more set as a format. Okay? Because lack of the skills can have lot of thinking problem and methodology problem, they may find a lot of struggle to approach it. So it's not always successful. Sometimes it can harm you. Also you need to be very careful around it. Let me repeat you quickly guys. Misunderstanding on misapplication is one of the problem. Lack of empathy, finding out the two extreme sides of the empathy and going into a trouble, limited resources or time constraint, resistant to change. Complexity of the problem may even lead to different things. So you need to be careful. Poor collaboration and communication, lack of iteration and not learning and inadequate skill set. Please be aware guys. Okay? I hope this podcast would have given you the other side of design thinking what not to be done. Thank you so much guys. You find this useful? Give me a best star rating in Apple and Spotify. If you need my mentorship support to join, you can write that email me or my team will help you out guys. Okay Take care. All the best. Bye bye la.