If you haven't heard about or used Design Thinking, you should know it is the problem solving methodology most responsible for the explosion of innovation in the start-up economy which in turn is driving dramatic levels of business transformation. It focuses on user experience, creating sketches and models to understand problems, using prototypes to explore possibilities, and tolerating failure.
It is incredibly useful for solving what Stanford University Professor Dave Evans describes as "Wicked Problems" which involve so much complexity, varying factors, and human elements that it is not even clear where to start. A "Tame Problem" by comparison can be difficult and complex but the input and objectives are much more clearly defined. So "how do we make a great-tasting inexpensive cup of coffee?" is a tame problem because it is bounded by price of ingredients, labour and taste preferences. Where "How do we get customers to return to the coffee shop and try a different beverage?" is a wicked problem because it involves a near infinite number of factors. In the digital world, design thinking has enabled businesses to quickly test multiple assumptions and quickly optimise their solutions to drive customer behaviour.
Design Thinking's Expanding Significance
The explosion of interest in Design Thinking is an indication that the increasing complexity of modern business is necessitating new approaches and solutions. Jon Kolko in his 2015 Harvard Business Review Article, describes Design Thinking efforts taken by the corporate giants GM and IBM, and helps us understand the ubiquity of the practice: "Every established company that has moved from products to services, from hardware to software, or from physical to digital products needs to focus anew on user experience. Every established company that intends to globalize its business must invent processes that can adjust to different cultural contexts." Deloitte even claims that 79% of senior professionals see Design Thinking as a high priority tool for addressing talent challenges and yet its adoption in the HR realm is far from prevalent.
Why Design Thinking Matters For Human Resources
The lack of adoption of Design Thinking in the corporate HR function is strange given that Human Resources challenges are the poster child of “Wicked Problems”. The goal of our function at its core is to hire, enable, retain, and develop talented employees who in turn will sustain and grow the organisation. This problem is unbelievably wicked. Consider that performance goals can change daily, employee wants and needs may vary dramatically over time. Who knows what kind of leaders you'll need in the future, and any intervention designed to optimise one positive outcome (e.g. retention, measured performance, innovation, etc.) can have dramatic unforeseen impacts that cost in other areas. HR is a unique function in that it touches and influences every employee and department. Yet its measures and objectives are only tangentially related to business success outcomes (such as growth, revenue, productivity, etc.). These points make a strong case for the utility of Design Thinking in solving HR problems. Considering how, as emphasised last year by Thailand's Prime Minister, the development of human resources is critical to Thailand's economic transformation, now would be a great time to apply these powerful new tools to your people practices.
An Illustration of Design Thinking in HR
A traditional HR approach to a problem like increasing employee engagement and productivity might involve designing a training, rolling it out company-wide and measuring its impact after six months. As anyone in the function knows this involves a massive amount of leadership alignment, planning and manpower to execute, not to mention the time lost pulling people out of their jobs for the training. There is even a risk that more work will be required to reach the intended goal because, to put it simply, human behaviour and emotions do not march to the beat of your spreadsheet.
A Design Thinker, presented with the same problem, would take a very different approach and avoid placing all hopes on a single grand plan. Instead they might start by gathering as much system data as they can on performance, engagement, retention etc. and use it to identify a few teams with high engagement. They can then focus on the experiences of those teams by simply taking a few members out for coffee, interviewing them, maybe observing one of their team meetings. They would do the same with a disengaged less productive team. The insights from this data collection would lead to a hypothesis. Maybe they notice that the engaged teams have simpler operating procedures and promote a customer centric attitude and they spend an afternoon designing a low-key one-hour team intervention, find a manager willing to test it out and learn from the outcome. This process continues to iterate. Over time it could grow into a company-wide training. Or maybe the design thinker discovers that a few tweaks to job responsibilities and meeting guidelines make the biggest impact.
The benefit of this approach is that, at every step, new insights are generated and quickly tested, the full honest experiences of employees are captured, and the solution evolves over time, ensuring company resources are not committed to a grand plan designed by committee which may or may not succeed.
Making Design Thinking Part of HR
If the above example sounds like a good idea, you can literally start tomorrow. There are countless tools and certifications available and the prototyping process will allow you to generate insights and results before anyone knows what you're up to. We have been surprised by just how useful it can be to incorporate these tools into our work. As the complexity and pace of change in our working environments continues to increase, so does the wickedness factor of HR problems. We are fast approaching the point where ‘designing a grand plan by committee' is no longer a viable solution for HR. So, why not get a head start learning to think like a designer?
Author: Justin Paul, Fortune 500 HR leader & consultant has helped executives in over 20 countries build their leadership capability. Currently CEO, Latchmere Performance Solutions Ltd, Justin@Latchmereconsulting.com
Series Editor: Christopher F. Bruton is Executive Director of Dataconsult Ltd, chris@dataconsult.co.th. Dataconsult’s Thailand Regional Forum provides seminars and extensive documentation to update business on future trends in Thailand and in the Mekong Region.
