Rapid Prototyping Learning Launch
Visualization Journey Mapping Value Chain Analysis
Assumption TestingConcept DevelopmentBrainstormingMind Mapping
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Rotman Magazine Fall 2011 / 17
WHEN DESIGNER HUGH DUBBERLY asked Tim Brennan of Apple’s Creative Services group to define design for his book,How DoYou Design?, Brennan drew the following picture:
While many business people appreciate the power of design, a formal process for its practice has been elusive; until now.
by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie
Designing for Growth: A Tool Kit For Managers
? $
Design, this drawing asserts, is simply magic – a mysterious no-man’s land where only the brave dare tread. Such a definition mocks the idea that a formal process could possibly exist for navi- gating its many hairpin turns. Our advice: don’t be put off by Brennan’s view of design.
Design has many different meanings, and the approach we will describe here is more akin to Dorothy’s ruby slippers than to a magic wand: you’ve already got the power; you just need to figure out how to use it. Can the average manager be transformed into the next Jonathan Ive? No more than your local golf pro can turn you into Tiger Woods. But can you improve your game? Without a doubt.
If Managers Thought Like Designers Whatwould be different ifmanagers thoughtmore like designers? We have three words for you: empathy, invention and iteration.
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Design always beginswith empathy – establishing a deep under- standing of those for whom you are designing. Managers who thought like designers would consistently put themselves in their customers’ shoes. We all know we’re supposed to be ‘customer- centered’, but what we’re talking about is deeper and more personal than that: true empathy entails knowing your customers as real people with real problems, rather than as targets for sales or as a set of demographic statistics around age or income level. It involves developing an understanding of both their emotional and their ‘rational’ needs and wants. In addition, managers who thought like designers would view
themselves as creators. For all our talk about the ‘art and science’ of management, we have mostly paid attention to the science part. Taking design seriously means acknowledging the difference between what scientists do and what designers do: whereas scien- tists investigate today to discover explanations for what already is, designers invent tomorrow to create something that isn’t. Powerful futures are rarely discovered primarily through analytics. They are, asWaltDisney once said, “Created first in themind and next in the activity.” Finally, design insists that we prepare ourselves to iterate our
way to a solution, so managers who thought like designers would view themselves as learners. Most managers are taught a linear problem-solving methodology: define the problem, identify vari- ous solutions, analyze each, and choose the best one. Designers aren’t nearly so impatient – or optimistic; they understand that successful invention takes experimentation and that empathy is hard won.The task, first and foremost, is always one of learning.
18 / Rotman Magazine Fall 2011
When groupswant to generate new ideas, brainstorming is often their first course of action. When this technique is effective, participants draw on each others’ pre-existing knowledge to create new combina- tions of ideas not previously considered. But brainstorming can fail in at least as many ways as it can succeed. Over the past eight years I have worked closely with designers who take brainstorming very seri- ously and together, we have added a new technique to the brain- storming mix: improvisation.
Like brainstorming, improvisation is a creative collaboration between people with a common goal of developing engaging ideas within a prescribed amount of time. To date, I have taught improvisa- tion techniques to approximately 60 practitioners, 170 undergradu- ate and graduate students and 80 faculty members at Stanford and Northwestern Universities.
Early on, participants are exposed to the rules of effective brain- storming developed by BBDO founding partner Alex Osborn. While ‘Osborn’s Rules’ for effective brainstorming remain pertinent, my experience indicates that they can be optimized by importing tech- niques from the world of improvisation. Let’s look at each rule in turn, and how improvisation can enhance it.
1. Identify a Leader. Rarely do groups explicitly commit to a struc- ture and set of processes to enhance the session’s effectiveness. One strategy that can help is to identify a leader to oversee group dynamics. In improvisational theatre, participants select a coach who takes a step back and offers advice. For example, if one indi- vidual is not being heard by his fellow ‘players’, the coach may pub- licly advise him to speak up. Active coaching can also benefit brain- storming sessions. During one session, a leader noticed that a col- league was drawing interesting ideas on his notepad; she asked him to share his ideas and upon doing so, he received praise from the rest of the team. From that point on, he positively informed the out- put of the brainstorm.
2.WithholdJudgment.Avariety of improvisation activities can help a group transition to the non-judgmental frame of mind required for brainstorming. One such activity, called Malapropism, involves individ- uals walking around a room, pointing to familiar objects and calling them by another name out loud. For example, a one might point to a lamp and call it a ‘garage’. The goal of the activity is to misname as many objects in the room as possible. As participants move through
Using Improvisation to Enhance Brainstorming Sessions By Elizabeth Gerber
A Toolkit for Designing for Growth Remember that initial drawing of the design process? Our version looks quite different:
We start and end in the same place as Brennan did, but we’ve untangled the hairball into a manageable process. Despite fancy vocabulary like ‘ideation’ and ‘co-creation’, the design process actually deals with four very basic questions, which correspond to the four stages of design:
1. What is? 2. What if? 3. What wows? 4. What works?
What is explores current reality;What if envisions a new future; What wowsmakes some choices; andWhat works takes us into the marketplace. The widening and narrowing of the bands around each question represent ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ thinking: in the early parts of the process, we are progressively expanding our field of vision, looking as broadly around us as possible in order to
? $What is? What if? What wows? What works?
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Rotman Magazine Fall 2011 / 19
not be trapped by our usual problem framing. That’s divergent thinking.After we have generated a new set of concepts, we begin to reverse the process by converging – progressively narrowing down our options to the most promising ones. There are ten essential tools that a design thinker uses to
address these four questions. Beforewe begin, wewant to call your attention to one very special design tool: visualization (Tool#1). This ‘meta tool’ is so fundamental to the way designers work that it shows up in virtually every stage of the process. Visualization is an approach for identifying, organizing and communicating in ways that access ‘right brain’ thinking while decreasing our dependency on ‘left brain’ media such as numbers. It consciously inserts visual imagery into our processes and focuses on bringing an idea to life, eventually creating stories that go to the heart of how designers cultivate empathy in every phase of their work. Now let’s take a look at how the process unfolds across the
four questions, and how each tool fits within them.
Question 1:What Is? All successful innovation begins with an accurate assessment of the current reality. When we think of something new, we usually think about the future – so why start with the present? For lots of reasons. First, we need to pay close attention to what is going on today to identify the real problem or opportunity that we want to tackle. People often throw away all kinds of opportunities for growth before they even get started by framing the problem too narrowly. For years, product developers at Procter & Gamble focused on improving the detergents that were used to clean floors. One day they realized (with the help of design thinking) that what their customers really wanted was cleaner floors, and that this could be achieved through means other than better detergents – such as a better mop. This insight produced a runaway
best-seller, the Swiffer, a growth initiative that revolved around a product invented in the middle ages. Fruitful searches always go back to the basics: what is the job to be done? A funny thing happens when we pay close attention to what
customers are up to: we often find that the clues to a new future lie in dissatisfaction with the present. Ultimately, growth is always about solving peoples’ problems – even if they don’t yet knowwhat they are. If you pay close enough attention to their life and its frus- trations, you might see what they don’t, and that’s why the most promising place to start any growth initiative is to find out what customers don’t like about today. Design offers a number of tools to help with this stage, such as
journey mapping (Tool #2), to help assess an idea’s potential for value creation. This tool teaches us how to ‘follow customers home’ and develop a deep understanding of their lives and the problems they struggle with, so that we can bring our capabilities to bear on the ones in our sweet spot. It is also important to assess the potential for value capture, so we need to do a deep dive on the value chain inwhich this new idea is likely to be implemented:Who are the powerful players? What are their incentives? Will they be able to help us? Accurate information on your organization’s own capabilities and resources (and those of key competitors) is essen- tial. You’ll also want to recognize early on the capabilities you are missing and locate the right partner to provide them. All of this involves a value chain analysis (Tool #3). When will you know that you’ve explored enough? This is
always a judgment call. Gathering high-quality information usual- ly requires field research, which is expensive and time consuming. Keep in mind that the primary objective in this exploration stage is not to build a ‘business case’ for any particular idea; that comes later.The purpose here is to prepare to generate ideas – not evalu- ate them. Designers have come up with a number of tools for
the room, they hear others misnaming objects, thereby normalizing ‘failure’ and breaking free from the mindsets that constrain us to see the world as we are accustomed to seeing it.
3. Build on the Ideas ofOthers.Brainstormers can practice this skill by playing a popular improvisation activity called Yes, Let’s. This involves picking an imaginary activity in which the group will partici- pate, such as planning a party or going on a trip. Participants gener- ate ideas and offer them to each other, beginning each offer with the phrase, “Let’s…”, and the group responds with, “Yes, let’s.” The first player makes a suggestion such as, “Let’s travel to Paris” and then gestures in a way that supports her suggestion. Withholding any crit- icism that might spontaneously arise in a group member’s mind, the group responds, “Yes, let’s!” A second player adds a suggestion: “…And let’s climb the Eiffel Tower,” and gestures accordingly. The group responds, “Yes, let’s.” A third person adds, “…And let’s return home and teach our friends how to speak French,” and so on, until the energy of the group begins to falter.
In my class, designers often modified this activity to be product- focused. One group decided to design a product and a company to
support their product. The first designer began by saying “Let’s design enterprise software that is easy to use.” Withholding criticism, the group members smiled and said, “Yes, let’s.” A second designer made a second suggestion building on the first, offering, “And let’s make software that people look forward to using every day at work.” The group responded in agreement saying, “Yes, let’s.” The exercise contin- ued until a company and product had been defined. These designers reported generating an idea that – while it seemed crazy at first – actually led to a discussion of a viable idea.
4. Generate a Large Quantity of Ideas. Brainstormers can prac- tice being prolific idea generators using a modified improvisation activity called New Choice. For this activity, two people stand side by side, and a third player stands to the side. The two players begin to have a conversation about building a new product. When the player to the side doesn’t like what has been said, she asks the play- er who last spoke to offer a new choice. If she is still not pleased with that response, she asks the player to offer another new choice. The goal is not to critique, but to have the players generate ideas as quickly as possible. For example, one player might say >>
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20 / Rotman Magazine Fall 2011
looking for patterns in and making sense of the wealth of data amassed in this exploratory stage. One approach is mind map- ping (Tool #4), which helps organize the information you’ve collected and enables you to draw insights from it about the qual- ities of the innovation needed. You will then use these criteria to generate ideas in the next stage.
Question 2:What If? Having synthesized the data and identified emerging patterns, ideas begin to pop into our heads andwe start to consider new pos- sibilities, trends and uncertainties. Even without trying, we are beginning to develop hypotheses about what a desirable future might look like. It’s time to move from the data-based exploratory questionwhat is? to the more creativity-focused question,what if? Designers call this stage ideation. To generate truly creative
ideas, it is crucial to start with possibilities. Often, in our attempts to be practical, we start with constraints, which can be deadly to breakthrough thinking. If we start by accepting all the things that don’t allow us to do something better, our designs for tomorrowwill inevitably look a lot like today’s. The only hope is to ignore some key constraints in order to identify a new set of possibilities. Then the real creativity kicks in – figuring out how to get those con- straints out of our way. It takes a lot of momentum to do this, and that can be created in a good possibilities discussion that energizes the hard work of overcoming constraints. In many of the innova- tions we’ve been involved with, the creativity that really matters lives in how the new futurewas accomplished, notwhat it looked like. During this stage, we look at how customers currently frame
their problems and the mental models and constraints that we imposeon them.Wewill use this information to formulatehypothe- ses about new possibilities using a familiar tool, brainstorming (Tool #5) – although we will apply it with more structure than the free-form approach that is often used. A disciplined approach to brainstorming is crucial to overcome its inherent pitfalls. A key
“Let’s create a product for the elderly.” The other might say, “Yes, let’s build a safer walking cane.” The third player coaches the second player to come up with a new choice by saying “New choice.” The second player responds, “Yes, let’s build a wheelchair for snowy weather.” The third player coaches the second player for a new choice again by saying “New choice.” The second player says, “Yes, let’s build a new limb for the elderly.” The coach requests new choic- es until s/he is satisfied with the new direction.
5. Free-wheel.This simplymeans generating ideas free of constraints, and can be practiced by playing a modified version of an improv activi- ty called Presents. During this activity, participants pair up and pass a familiar object back and forth. When the object is received in hand, the player names the object and then describes an alternative use for it. The goal is to pass the object back and forth as quickly as possible while generating asmany alternative uses as possible, until the original use of the object becomes just one of many ‘possible uses’.For exam-
ple, one pair of players passed a small trash can back and forth, devel- oping multiple uses for it including “a stool” and “a door stop.” The stu- dents realized that to generate more alternate uses, they had to relin- quish their preconceptions of what a trash can could be. As they con- tinued the activity, the trash can became more imaginative things, including a cup for giants and a boat for a mouse.
In the end, brainstorming will always be an unreliable process, but it remains one that shows great promise for idea generation. As indi- cated, theatrical improvisation offers a new set of tools to support the group dynamic that enhances brainstorming effectiveness.
Using Improvisation to Enhance Brainstorming (cont’d)
1.Visualization:Using imagery toenvisionpossible futureconditions.
2. Journey Mapping: Assessing the existing experience through the customer’s eyes.
3.Value Chain Analysis: Assessing the current value chain that supports the customer’s journey.
4. Mind Mapping: Generating insights from exploration activities and using those to create design criteria.
5. Brainstorming: Generating new alternatives to the existing business model.
6. Concept Development: Assembling innovative elements into a coherent alternative solution that can be explored and evaluated.
7. AssumptionTesting: Isolating and testing the key assumptions that will drive success or failure of a concept.
8. Rapid Prototyping: Expressing a new concept in a tangible form for exploration, testing and refinement.
9. Customer Co-Creation: Engaging customers to participate in creating the solution that best meets their needs.
10. Learning Launch:Creating an affordable experiment that lets customers experience the new solution over an extended period of time, so you can test key assumptions with market data.
The Ten Tools Figure One
Elizabeth Gerber is a professor at the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University. With student designer Molly Lafferty, Elizabeth’s lab created Betterbrainstorms.com, a collection of improv inspired games for brainstormers. She previously spent five years developing programs and teaching at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (‘the d.School’). She is also the fac- ulty founder of Design for America, an award-winning educational initiative build- ing creative confidence in students through design for local and social impact.
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reason that brainstorming is often unfulfilling is the lack of a formal process to convert the output into something valuable. The design thinking tool we introduce here, concept development (Tool #6), will take the output of the brainstorming process, organize it into coherent clusters, and architect the most compelling clusters into a robust concept.We moved from data to insights in the first phase; in this phase, we’ll move from insights to ideas to concepts. Having developed some hypotheses (in the form of con-
cepts) about new possibilities, we’ll begin to think systematically about prioritizing the concepts we have come up with and figur- ing out what ‘wows’.
Question 3: WhatWows? If all has gone well in the preceding stages, you probably have far too many concepts to move forward with all at once. One firm we worked with recently generated more than 300, which they nar- rowed down to 23. Of these, only five eventually made it to marketplace testing. Clearly, you will need to make some choices. What you are looking for is ideas that hit the ‘sweet spot’ – where the chance of a significant upside in customer value meets attrac- tive profit potential. This is what we call the ‘wow zone’. This necessitates starting with some kind of evaluation of the
only data you’ve got – data about today. Again, keep in mind that you are not ‘proving’ the value of an idea; you’re just ready to do some thought experiments to begin to assess what the business casemight look like. Because it is often difficult to assess the long- termpotential of a new concept, youwill want to tread carefully so that you don’t unintentionally favour the incremental concepts and dismiss the more radical ones. The good news is that you have an approach at your disposal
that has been little used in business, but is far more useful in assessing early-stage innovations than much-maligned but still commonly usedmetrics like return on investment (ROI): the good old scientific method. The scientific method uses both creative and analytic thinking – that’s what makes it such a useful tool when we want to be imaginative in the search for possibilities and rigorous in figuring out which ones to pursue. Unlike brainstorm- ing, it doesn’t ask us to leave our analytical minds at the door. It invites both the left and the right brain into the process, and it is custom-made to deal with situations involving a lot of unknowns. It accomplishes all of the above by treating our new concept as a hypothesis and then testing it: it starts with the hypotheses gener- ated by thewhat if? question; then it takes these new possibilities (which are really educated guesses about something we think is likely to be a good idea) and tests them by asking, “What would need to be true for this concept to be a good one?” In other words, you surface and test the assumptions underly-
ing your hypothesis. The hypotheses that ‘pass’ this first set of tests are good candidates for turning into real experiments to be conducted in the marketplace. As a result, assumption testing (Tool #7) is one of themost potent tools in the designer’s – and the manager’s – toolbox. Remember, the goal here is not uncovering ‘truth’. All design is essentially hypothesis driven, which, in the design world, is shorthand for saying that the solutions generated are the outcome of an iterative rather than a linear process.
Having tested your assumptions as carefully as you can, it is time to move to the real thing: experimentation in the market- place. In order to do this, you take the concepts that have successfully passed through the screening process and translate them into something actionable: a prototype.Rapid prototyping (Tool #8) seems like a challenging task, but all we are talking about here is taking the concepts generated in the what if? stage and turning them into something concrete enough to spur conversa- tions with important stakeholders. The intent is to create visual (and sometimes experiential) manifestations of concepts in order to facilitate meaningful conversation and feedback.
Question 4:WhatWorks? Finally, you are ready to launch and learn. First, we suggest that you try out a low-fidelity prototype on some customers and see how it goes. If it succeeds, build a higher-reliability 3D prototype of the idea and see if any customers arewilling to partwith theirmoney for it. A particularly powerful approach to determining what works involves inviting the customer into the conversation in an active, hands-on way. The tool you can use here is customer co-creation (Tool #9).There is no more effective way to reduce the risks of any growth initiative than to engage customers in designing it. Prototype in hand, you are ready to move into piloting. To
accomplish this, we offer a tool called a learning launch (Tool #10), which moves your developing concept into the field. As you design the pilot, you will want to be explicit about the search for disconfirming data – information that disproves your hypotheses. This is the most valuable information you can uncover – and it is also the easiest to miss. To enhance your ability to detect it, you must lay out in advance what disconfirming data might look like. As you proceed, keep in mind some of the principles of this
learning-in-action stage:work in fast feedback cycles;minimize the cost of conducting your experiments; fail early to succeed sooner; and test for key trade-offs and assumptions early. Most important, play with the prototypes in the field instead of defending them in endless meetings.
In closing An unavoidable but healthy tension will always exist between cre- ating the new and preserving the best of the present, between innovating new models and maintaining healthy existing ones. As a manager, you need to learn how to manage this tension, not adopt a wholly new set of techniques and abandon all of the old. The process we have described can get you started on the path.
Rotman Magazine Fall 2011 / 21
Jeanne Liedtka is the UnitedTechnologies Corporation Professor of BusinessAdministration at the University ofVirginia’s Darden School of Business and the former chief learning officer at UnitedTechnologies Corporation. Tim Ogilvie is
CEO of Peer Insight, an innovation strategy consultancy and a visiting lecturer at the Darden School.They are the co-authors ofDesigning for Growth:AToolkit for Managers (Columbia University Press, 2011), from which this is excerpted.
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