IN THIS CHAPTER

Focusing on people

Visualizing and demonstrating ideas

Understanding mistakes as opportunities to learn

Integrating different perspectives on the team

Designing workspaces and establishing processes for success

In this chapter, you get to find out more about the principles of design thinking and come to understand the significant role these principles play in your project’s success. In design thinking, everything revolves around people. You learn that you must focus on people’s needs early on and that, above all, you have to work with your lead users. By using this strategy, you can establish proximity to your target users so that you can better analyze their emotions, goals, and activities. Design thinking follows the principle that you make the results of your analysis and proposed solutions visible and comprehensible. As a result, you enable another tenet — namely, that you learn from mistakes as you develop the solution. Keep in mind that design thinking is based at the bottom on teamwork and that effective teamwork requires appropriate workspaces. As a team endeavor, design thinking also forces you to learn about and appreciate the potential benefits of various perspectives. After all, you have to make the process both flexible and goal-oriented.

Focusing on People Early On

Consistent customer orientation in the generation and development of new products and services has long been acknowledged as a significant factor in a company’s success. With design thinking, you actually go one step further. Design thinking is more than just customer orientation — it is centered on people. People are the beginning, middle, and end for every consideration. You begin with people by taking up a problem faced by your target users or a wish expressed by them. Your task in design thinking is not to pursue a technology or business goal — it’s to satisfy the expressed needs of customers.

With design thinking, you don’t ask the question “How can we apply XY technology?” Neither do you ask the question “How can we impress the customer with our new product?” Instead, you ask, “How can we solve the problem of our target users in such a way that it’s less of an effort for them to use our solution?”

Your target users should have a substantial influence on the go/stop decisions in the process. If a potential customer group responds that the identified problem is relevant, you can start your activities. However, if you get feedback that the problem is an insignificant one in the eyes of the customer, you stop further activities and identify another problem. If the target users don’t consider the solution that you found attractive, change your approach at an early stage.

The principle of creating an early focus on people offers you numerous advantages and opportunities:

• You focus, right from the start, on the most important wishes and problems of your target users.
• You gain detailed impressions of the user market.
• You prevent your development from bypassing the market.

• You prevent overengineering — another word for “excessive perfectionism.” You avoid overreaching in a technical sense when regarded from the customer’s perspective. One example is a product that has too many features and thus becomes complicated to use.

  The US-based company Juicero originally wanted to sell, for $700, a juice press that took prepackaged bags of fruits and vegetables and squeezed out the juice with greater or less strength, depending on the contents of the plastic bags. The appliance was connected to the Internet so that the juice ingredients could be shown and the plastic bags could be reordered. Ultimately, users figured out that it was quicker to just crush the prepackaged fruit and veggies by hand rather than with the help of the juice press — and it was a lot cheaper.

• You save time in terms of product development and subsequent marketing.
• You cut development and marketing costs.
• You lower the marketing risk.
• You accelerate the market launch.

More than Traditional Market Research

In traditional market research, you ask the customers about their wishes and needs and what they think about a specific product. With these kinds of direct questions, traditional market research methods such as customer surveys often yield, for numerous reasons, disappointing results when it comes to the search for innovation.

The methods of traditional market research are focused on the average customer — the one who is supposed to represent target users. Average customers are often too focused on current needs, on product selections, and on product features — a state of affairs often referred to as functional fixedness. The customer’s own (product) experiences act like a mental restraint. This often prevents thinking in unconventional, innovative directions. Likewise, companies that turn today’s customers’ wishes into a benchmark for innovations of tomorrow are just focusing on small improvements. Over time, these companies lose their capacity for creating the groundbreaking innovations referred to as radical or disruptive. The average customer has no urgent need for new products for now.

Imagine that the co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had conducted a customer survey shortly before Facebook's launch in 2003. He would have asked many potential users in writing or online whether they would need a social network. With such a question at that time, you can expect that the results would have been disappointing. Customers must be able to develop an idea of what is behind a product or service and what kind of benefit they could get from it. The idea here is to analyze the needs of people without immediately asking about their preferences for certain product features.

Furthermore, the average customer can barely articulate new needs. In this context, one often hears a quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether Ford actually said this is doubtful. Aside from that, this sentence is also misleading. Never expect customers to immediately provide you with solutions. When starting with design thinking, the focus is intentionally not on solutions but on an understanding of the person and their problems, desires, motives, goals and opinions.

Don’t just analyze the average customers, which is what traditional market research often concentrates on exclusively. Be sure as well to research the behavior of people who aren’t among your target users. Ask yourself the following questions:

• In what ways are my potential customers and those who are not my target users the same? In what ways are they different?
• Why do these differences and commonalities exist?

Keep in mind that customer surveys at companies are still usually driven by departments. Marketing determines needs and comes up with ideas for product improvements. Research and development works out technical and product specifications. Often, there's no coordination with internal and external partners. Generally speaking, customers are included only selectively at the start of the innovation process and at its end, when the final prototype gets tested. There’s no consistent, partnership-based cooperation with the customers throughout the innovation process.

The customer’s needs are too important to leave them to marketing alone, so make sure that employees from research, development, and production are brought in contact with the customer. This can happen in joint workshops or even by visiting the customer.

Finding the Lead User

Because average customers can offer only a limited number of new ideas when it comes to product development, you should look instead for lead users — the ones whose need precedes that of all other customers in the market and who have a strong incentive to resolve this need. These people are the first to recognize and track a market trend before all other possible users have identified this trend. Their interest in satisfying their need is so strong that they often develop their own prototypes and sometimes launch them in the market on their own. Some of these people even start their own businesses based on this motivation (user entrepreneurs). In other words, lead users aren’t your average customers or pilot customers, and they don't necessarily represent customer needs in the current market. They aren't even necessarily previous customers; they can also come from entirely different market segments and even from outside industries.

The Internet is a lead-user product. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, was a lead user. As an employee of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), he saw that using different network infrastructures was causing communication problems between the various laboratory sites. He initially established the basis for the World Wide Web just so that he could communicate more easily with colleagues.

Mountain bikes are also a lead-user product. Back in the 1970s, Gary Fisher and a bunch of other old-school hippies recognized the deficits of the current sports bikes for their own demanding needs. They used bicycles in the open country and felt compelled to modify the wheels to fit those needs. This perspective resulted in the first mountain bikes.

The systematic integration of lead users promises a high potential for innovations when generating ideas for new products and services. Identifying these users and integrating their creative potential into the innovation process is the function of the lead-user method, which was already developed by Professor Eric von Hippel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) back in 1986.

You can find lead users for your design thinking process by first looking at dominant market and technology trends. Search online or offline for new trends in technologies and market developments (new developments of needs, new competitors). You can find tons of resources to turn to for help:

• Publication and patent databases
• Newspapers and trade magazines
• Technology, market, and industry studies by trade associations, service providers, consulting companies, scientific establishments (colleges, research institutes), or national and international institutions
• Statistics (government sites like the US Bureau of Economic Analysis [www.bea.gov] as well as private sites)
• Trend or market research reports
• The annual reports, sustainability reports, presentations, press releases, and websites of other companies (competitors, suppliers, startups)
• General Internet research, forums, blogs, and social networks
• Conferences and trade shows
• Customer surveys, supplier surveys, workshops with customers or suppliers
• Personal networks of your own employees
• Expert talks
• Cooperative work with scientific institutes or other companies
• Employee surveys

After collecting the necessary information about technology and market trends, you should come up with possible selection criteria for lead users. Here’s a list I came up with:

• They are trendsetters.
• They have specific knowledge about relevant technologies or about the problem you're trying to address.
• They often face the same problem or are forced to deal with it intensively.
• They have to deal with special (extreme) conditions.
• They expect a great benefit from finding a solution to the problem you've identified.
• They already have initial ideas or even prototypes for the solution or have developed their own modifications of existing solutions.

You shouldn’t define these criteria too narrowly; otherwise, you might exclude lead users from other areas. Furthermore, not all of the listed selection criteria must be met, nor do they have to be satisfied 100 percent.

Be sure to analyze analogous areas. It can be helpful to take a look at other industries that either use similar technologies or face similar challenges. Ask yourself which application areas have the same problems on an abstract level and which areas use other technologies.

Based on these selection criteria, you have a number of different approaches for identifying lead users: You can send a questionnaire to a large pool of preselected individuals derived from the criteria and ask them to voluntarily disclose some of their personal information so that you can determine their suitability as lead users. You can then use these individuals as resources when identifying market and technology trends. (Note: You can also integrate as starting points existing customers, suppliers, and company contacts into the survey. With the help of the selection criteria mentioned above, you can distinguish between average customers and lead users among your existing customers.)

You can also just contact a limited amount of people at the outset and ask them if they in turn know potential lead users. You could start by asking them the following kinds of questions:

• Do you know anyone who has special expertise in the areas of XY?
• Do you know anyone who has already started developing their own solution to this particular problem?
• Do you know anyone in analogous areas who has experienced similar problems or uses similar technologies?
• Do you know anyone who is facing this problem in special circumstances or is highly motivated to find a solution to the problem?

If you’re lucky, you can use the social networks of the individuals you contacted to forward your questions and concerns from person to person with the snowball effect so that you ultimately end up with a potential lead user.

To conclude the search, you have to decide whether

• The identified persons are suitable as lead users
• These persons are motivated and willing to participate in a workshop
• The desired mix of people for this workshop is appropriate

Of course, there is no “perfect” lead user who can satisfy all criteria for the selection.

Actively Involving the Lead User

You should actively involve lead users in the search for potential solutions and invite them to a creative workshop. To prepare the workshop, you have to clarify a few basic conditions, such as the available times, confidentiality aspects, remuneration, and expense reimbursements.

Clarifying the inventor rights of lead users continues to be a challenging issue for companies. This calls for creative solutions that also take the legitimate interests of the lead users into account. You should avoid a wholesale transfer of inventor rights without fair compensation. You can grant exclusive usage rights to the lead user in certain areas. You could arrange remuneration in the form of a one-time, lump-sum payment, milestone payments, and/or a revenue share. In-kind benefits are also possible. You could then provide the resulting product to the lead user without charge or on reduced terms. Or, you could ensure that the lead user is one of the first customers to receive the product.

Lead users, with the help of the latest presentation and creative techniques, should work on concrete solutions together with in-house representatives from various departments, such as research and development, production, marketing, and sales. You should plan for a maximum of 12 to 16 people (half internal experts and half external lead users) and a moderator (preferably, external) for the workshop. Such a workshop can last from one to three days, depending on the topic and focus. (You can find out more about the planning and execution of workshops in Chapter 5.)

Developing Empathy

A key principle of design thinking is empathy — putting yourself in the position of the customer or user so that you can explore that person’s feelings, emotions, thoughts, intentions, and actions. With empathy, you not only establish distance to yourself but also build up proximity to the potential customers. You can then better orient new products and services toward the customers to the degree to which such products and services can meet their needs. In this automated, digitized, and partially dehumanized world, where decisions are often made solely on the basis of hard facts, figures, and data and where efficiency increases are a priority, this approach is promising.

A lack of empathy was one reason for the failure of Google Glass, which was introduced in 2012 and then dropped from the market a mere three years later. The Google Glass pitch was that it could show the user emails, calls, text messages, instructions, or videos directly in the user’s field-of-view. One mark against it right out of the box was that it was voice-controlled, a feature many users ended up disliking intensely, especially when the data glasses were used in public. An even bigger factor in the flop was the sense others had, when they interacted with data glass wearers, that their privacy was being invaded — a perception that Google had not reckoned with. Numerous people felt they were being permanently filmed by the wearer of the data glasses and even threatened the users with violence. Google didn’t adequately address the needs of the users and, getting back to empathy, had not placed itself in the position of users faced with actually using its product.

Analyzing the feelings and emotions of your target users makes it possible for you to not only identify the still unspoken and undiscovered needs of your customers but also understand the motivations behind such needs. Products and services influence feelings and create emotions. Feelings and emotions can also show you the motivations behind the use of applications. You check your email more often when you happen to feel depressed. You use social networks more often when you feel alone. You resort to Internet search engines when you feel uncertain. You watch videos when you get bored. People frequently use products or services for more than just one reason. There’s actually a network of emotions that explains the actions of people. Only when you correctly identify and understand the feelings and emotions of users can you use this as a basis for solving the problems of your target users or for making their wishes come true. (For more on the importance of feelings and emotions, see Chapter 7.)

Feelings and emotions can be divided into basic forms that can be found among all people across all cultures. These basic forms (and, in parentheses, their variations) include anxiety (fear, panic), anger (annoyance), sadness, joy (happiness), curiosity (surprise), disgust (boredom, revulsion), and contempt.

Pay attention to people’s feelings when they do or don’t do something. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Which feelings do you recognize when you look at their gestures and facial expressions?
• Which feelings do you identify when you hear a person's statements and their tone of voice?

Take the time to analyze the underlying emotions. Name them and assign them to the basic forms. For practice, you can start with yourself: Pay attention to your feelings for a week and explore them. Before going to sleep at night, name and describe them in a journal of emotions. Divide these feelings into positive, neutral, and negative. Ask yourself why the situations you encountered during the course of the day led to these emotions.

Illustrating Ideas

In design thinking, your goal is to make your ideas comprehensible and attainable at an early stage. You visualize your ideas and preferably demonstrate them with a prototype for potential users to experiment with. Prototypes don’t necessarily have to be pieces of hardware; they can also be drawings, images, role-playing games, model constructions, or videos. (For more on prototypes, see Chapter 13.) It’s not about giving your target users a finished and perfect product. Quite the contrary. Initially, your target user should only review individual functions, features, characteristics, or activities of a product or service offer. A prototype helps you make something that is difficult to describe more tangible. When creating and selecting a prototype, the guiding principle is this: As simple as possible, as meaningful as possible.

On its website, Dropbox showed a short video that explained the benefits of its product idea in a simple and original way. The interesting part: This software solution didn’t exist yet at that time. The video was a huge success, and more than 100,000 people registered to find out more about the software. The founders thus received positive feedback about their idea and began with the implementation.

Failing in Order to Learn

Another important principle in design thinking involves learning from mistakes. Make sure that mistakes are understood as a fixed component in the design thinking process and are considered to be opportunities for learning. The tasks you deal with in design thinking are always accompanied by uncertainties. You have to acknowledge that a Zero Defects approach is impossible in the scope of innovation and that this shouldn’t be the goal. Even just the attempt to reach something perfect with the first draft, concept, prototype, or product is often doomed to fail when it comes to innovation and it works to stifle groundbreaking new concepts.

Quickly learn from mistakes and establish a culture of experimentation at the company. Just like successes, mistakes offer learning opportunities. To learn successfully, you should answer the following questions in the design team:

• What caused the mistake?
• What do we now have to do together to remedy or reduce the damaging effect of the mistake?
• How did the mistake show up first?
• What do we have to do in the future to prevent the mistake from happening?
• What can we learn from the mistake as a company?

Address the issue that mistakes (must) always occur and are to be expected. For that reason, allow — better yet, encourage — errors. The development of innovation consists of two-legged learning — learning from successes as well as from mistakes. The best way to get this point across is to use examples from your own company, showing how mistakes led to specific improvements or even innovations. (For more on learning from mistakes, see Chapter 3.)

Teflon was discovered because a chemist experimented with refrigerants and stored them for too long. Penicillin was discovered by the bacteriologist Alexander Fleming when, over the summer holiday, he accidentally left out a Petri dish, leading to the formation of a mold that prevented the growth of bacterial cultures. Popsicles were invented when the 11-year-old Frank Epperson left homemade lemonade with a stick inside on the patio during a freeze. The teabag was invented after the tea merchant filled tea into silk pouches for cost reasons and customers accidentally immersed those in boiling water.

Ensuring Diversity on the Team

An important success factor in design thinking is the right composition of the team. There are good reasons why you should rely on diversity in the team structure. Design thinking puts people in the spotlight. Look at the people for whom you want to find a solution or whose wishes you want to fulfill. More likely than not, these people come from various age groups, consist of both women and men, or have different cultural backgrounds. It helps when your team reflects this diversity. This makes it easier for your team to put itself in the position and situation of the target users.

Another reason for the positive effect of diversity lies in how you approach the tasks facing you. In design thinking, you deal with tasks that aren’t easy to solve. You need the knowledge, creativity, experience, and perspectives from different disciplines. Design thinking combines interdisciplinary broadness and technical depth. The process relies on the knowledge, experience, and perspectives of a team of engineers and scientists in the fields of the natural sciences, engineering, the humanities, and the social and economic sciences who are capable of multidisciplinary collaboration. (For more on the importance of prioritizing diversity when it comes to team building, see Chapter 5.)

Don’t just rely on diversity when it comes to the age, gender, education, or cultural background of your team members. Affiliation with the company (for a long time or a recent hire), experience with the topic (in-depth, low, none) or the personality type (introverted or extroverted) are additional factors that you can take into account.

Offering Team-Oriented and Creative Workspaces

The room design and its furnishings have an often underestimated impact on an organization’s innovation capacity. For innovative work, you have to create a balance between concentration, communication, and creativity when it comes to workspaces. At the same time, the architecture and workplace design must leave room for flexibility. That’s why the “innovation factory” has to look different from the usual “production factory,” which is designed purely in accordance with efficiency concerns.

The workspaces for individual and group work as well as assemblies of the whole group must have a flexible and inspiring design. I highly recommend choosing different locations, rooms, or furniture arrangements for the different design thinking phases. This lets you create a new work atmosphere on the fly — one that is appropriate for the work being carried out.

Design thinking is a communal process that not only takes place in-house but also integrates external partners. The room design should simplify and encourage the communal work with short distances. Buildings and rooms connected with walkways and covered bridges link different disciplines together in an optimal spatial design. (You can learn more about this topic in Chapter 5.)

Airbnb designed some of its corporate rooms the way its own customers originally offered them as vacation homes all over the world on its website. Google equips its workplaces with couches, gaming areas, fitness equipment, hammocks, pool tables, table tennis, massage chairs, or yoga rooms. The Lego office in Denmark also has many playfully designed work areas, such as miniature golf courses. Rather than take the stairs, the employees can use a slide. The Kickstarter office in New York City is inside an old pencil factory and includes spaces such as a theater, library, gallery, and roof garden. Trees grow in the garden, and fruits and vegetables are planted for the employees.

Making the Process Flexible Yet Focused

In design thinking, the path to your goal is filled with uncertainties. In situations with high uncertainty, there is often little information on which to base the best approach. Forecasts for developments in the future tend to be vague in these situations when it comes to their explanatory power — or lack thereof. You can reduce uncertainty and complexity if you proceed step-by-step and respond flexibly to changes.

The design thinking process encourages this gradual approach. First, you thoroughly analyze the problem, use the results of your analysis to formulate a task, develop the first possible solutions, test them, and learn from the feedback. You don’t strictly complete the phases one after another. Whenever you get information that you first have to analyze in detail, jump back to a previous step. Changes in the process are expected and desired. Each step can pose a new challenge for you. This is why part of the principle is that you make the course flexible and change it when needed. (For more on flexibility when it comes to workflows, see Chapter 4.)

Accept the fact that you won’t have all the information you need right at the start and that you aren’t immediately doing everything correctly. Understand that knowledge and information are the greatest enemy of uncertainty. The design thinking process will give you the relevant knowledge and required information. Uncertainty is based on a fear of failure. Think realistically about what it is you might actually lose if your project failed. From that perspective, it's usually the case that the benefits outweigh the risks.

You should be focused during the design thinking process. The principle that you should make the process focus-oriented initially seems to contradict the need for flexibility. My experience with creative processes has shown that the definition of clear boundaries or limitations is helpful for the design thinking process. Within these boundaries, you can, in turn, act flexibly. These boundaries can consist of a rough orientation based on the company strategy, a special regional focus, a certain amount of new features, the compliance with regulatory restrictions, or resources with limited availability.

Your continued focus also relates to the design thinking process. Boundaries can mean that you set yourself clear time budgets for the individual phases or specify for whom, how, and where the solution should be used. When these limitations are applied and communicated properly, they can boost creativity and have a motivating and inspiring effect on the design thinking team. Stay true to the principle “Necessity is the mother of invention.”