Design Thinking

So many ‘lightbulb’ moments for me at this thought provoking event Change Management Institute UK event, but key ones I will take away:

Clarifying what design thinking is all about. Design is not what something looks like but how it works. So when we say something has been well designed, what we are really saying is that the experience of using it has been well thought through

I loved how @LeeSankey gave us the business case for design thinking “It makes good business sense to create a great customer experience because when the experience is poor, the cost of answering queries and dealing with complaints from customers increases the total cost of ownership and decreases your profit margin.”

Everything I do now “starts with the end in mind” – understand what great looks like before you start work on anything, otherwise you will waste effort on interesting but not essential work. So the idea of viewing everything from the experience lens really appealed. I aligned what Lee was saying to empathy maps. Asking the following questions enables me to ‘walk int shoes of others’ and imagine how they might experience what I am delivering to them:

• What does a great experience feel like?
  • What are they seeing from me?
  • What are they hearing from me?
  • Is this information given to them in a format that they like?
  • Do they have to look for information from me or have I anticipated their needs and provided it already?
  • What is available to them in this experience and what is not included?
  • How does this make them feel?
  • If this customer has a great experience, what impact does this have upstream and downstream for suppliers and other customers?
• What is to be avoided in a great experience?
  • Ask all the questions above to identify the opposite of good, to give yourself a solid boundary of what to include and what to avoid when creating the experience.

Finally, as Target Operating Models are such a common piece of work currently (everyone sems to be designing their TOMs!) I thought it was timely that Lee reframed the TOM and the TEM – Target Experience Model! Brilliant contribution from @JeffWellstead at this point in the discussion, highlight his work in creating a positive employee experience when requiring staff to undertake business travel. Definitely food for thought on the questions I ask when trying to design the best possible outcome for a transformation.