Whys ideas

Then each attendee was invited to join a small group at one of five tables, where the participants shared individual ideas, grouped them into common themes, and envisioned what an ideal experience would look like for the young patients and their families.

Champions of change usually emerge from these kinds of conversations, which greatly improves the chances of successful implementation. All too often, good ideas die on the vine in the absence of people with a personal commitment to making them happen. Local pediatricians adopted a set of standard asthma protocols, and parents of children with asthma took on a significant role as peer counselors providing intensive education to other families through home visits.

Typically, emergence activities generate a number of competing ideas, more or less attractive and more or less feasible. In the next step, articulation, innovators surface and question their implicit assumptions. Managers are often bad at this, because of many behavioral biases, such as overoptimism, confirmation bias, and fixation on first solutions. In contrast, design thinking frames the discussion as an inquiry into what would have to be true about the world for an idea to be feasible.

An example of this comes from the Ignite Accelerator program of the U. Department of Health and Human Services. As team members began to apply design thinking, however, they were asked to surface their assumptions about why the idea would work.

It was only then that they realized that their patients, many of whom were elderly Apache speakers, were unlikely to be comfortable with computer technology. Approaches that worked in urban Baltimore would not work in Whiteriver, so this idea could be safely set aside.

At the end of the idea generation process, innovators will have a portfolio of well-thought-through, though possibly quite different, ideas. The assumptions underlying them will have been carefully vetted, and the conditions necessary for their success will be achievable. The ideas will also have the support of committed teams, who will be prepared to take on the responsibility of bringing them to market. Companies often regard prototyping as a process of fine-tuning a product or service that has already largely been developed.

But in design thinking, prototyping is carried out on far-from-finished products. This means that quite radical changes—including complete redesigns—can occur along the way. And their incompleteness invites interaction. Such artifacts can take many forms. The layout of a new medical office building at Kaiser Permanente, for example, was tested by hanging bedsheets from the ceiling to mark future walls.

Nurses and physicians were invited to interact with staffers who were playing the role of patients and to suggest how spaces could be adjusted to better facilitate treatment. At Monash Health, a program called Monash Watch—aimed at using telemedicine to keep vulnerable populations healthy at home and reduce their hospitalization rates—used detailed storyboards to help hospital administrators and government policy makers envision this new approach in practice, without building a digital prototype.

Real-world experiments are an essential way to assess new ideas and identify the changes needed to make them workable. Consider an idea proposed by Don Campbell, a professor of medicine, and Keith Stockman, a manager of operations research at Monash Health.

Campbell and Stockman hypothesized that lower-wage laypeople who were carefully selected, trained in health literacy and empathy skills, and backed by a decision support system and professional coaches they could involve as needed could help keep the at-risk patients healthy at home.

Their proposal was met with skepticism. Many of their colleagues held a strong bias against letting anyone besides a health professional perform such a service for patients with complex issues, but using health professionals in the role would have been unaffordable. Rather than debating this point, however, the innovation team members acknowledged the concerns and engaged their colleagues in the codesign of an experiment testing that assumption.

Three hundred patients later, the results were in: Overwhelmingly positive patient feedback and a demonstrated reduction in bed use and emergency room visits, corroborated by independent consultants, quelled the fears of the skeptics.

As we have seen, the structure of design thinking creates a natural flow from research to rollout. Immersion in the customer experience produces data, which is transformed into insights, which help teams agree on design criteria they use to brainstorm solutions. Along the way, design-thinking processes counteract human biases that thwart creativity while addressing the challenges typically faced in reaching superior solutions, lowered costs and risks, and employee buy-in.

Recognizing organizations as collections of human beings who are motivated by varying perspectives and emotions, design thinking emphasizes engagement, dialogue, and learning. By involving customers and other stakeholders in the definition of the problem and the development of solutions, design thinking garners a broad commitment to change.

And by supplying a structure to the innovation process, design thinking helps innovators collaborate and agree on what is essential to the outcome at every phase. It does this not only by overcoming workplace politics but by shaping the experiences of the innovators, and of their key stakeholders and implementers, at every step.

That is social technology at work. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. Design thinking. Why Design Thinking Works. It addresses the biases and behaviors that hamper innovation. Marcos Chin. Idea in Brief The Problem While we know a lot about what practices stimulate new ideas and creative solutions, most innovation teams struggle to realize their benefits.

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Nov View Calendar. This can be an especially severe limitation for entrepreneurs and innovators striving to get their projects off the ground.

There are two distinct camps on the best way to frame an idea. In one of the most popular Ted Talks , Simon Sinek argues that if we want to mobilize people and resources around an idea, we should frame our message by emphasizing the why of what we are trying to achieve.

Instead, Grant suggests, skeptics may be more likely to be persuaded by focusing on how you plan to implement your idea. Who is right? Take the case of an entrepreneur chasing seed money to start a new venture: Should she focus on why her idea is useful or should she instead promote a more concrete focus on how the idea works when pitching to an audience of investors? To find out, we conducted a study, which the Strategic Management Journal published in August.

We then examined whether their responses to the idea varied when the innovator framed the solution in terms of concrete actions e. Sample 1 consisted of a group of investment novices recruited via Prolific, an online UK-based platform of high-quality data.

For Sample 2, we recruited a group of 59 professional investors affiliated with three centers for entrepreneurship located in the United States and Canada.

Participants were invited to view and evaluate two pitch decks based on an actual product prototype for a wearable exercise sensor: one that emphasized in factual terms what it did and how to use it, and a second that explained why you might want it. As anticipated by Sinek, novices appreciated the idea more when it was framed in more abstract why terms. However, experts appreciated the idea more when it was framed in more concrete how terms, as Grant suggests.

The difference turned out to be sizable. To double-check the results of our first two experiments, we recruited a different group of novices and a different group of experts innovation managers and asked them to review the pitch for another product, a special sun lamp that mimics natural light.