The superpower of using design thinking in leading projects
As we are living in the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) world, the disruption is constant and the pace of change is relentless. We can’t actually manage what is known, and we all have to manage and lead the unknown-unknowns while tailoring ourselves according to the competitive strategies, business trends, and the new normal era.
The faster the world changes, the less likely the assumptions made at the start of a project will survive to the end. Design thinking is an ideal tool for cultivating the flexibility and awareness to keep projects on track to engender something truly beneficial.
Project Leaders and Scrum Masters can no longer be quiet servant leaders waiting to manage the next system implementation. They must attempt to make user experience and system adoption part of the project’s guiding principles and metrics for project success. Embracing Design Thinking, into the Project Management practice, can be valuable regardless of the project management methodologies being used.
“The promise of design thinking extends the project manager into project leadership, where the science of management and art of leadership come together for breakthrough results. Design is a change. Design thinkers are leaders who love to challenge the status quo, embrace complexity, and synthesize solutions rather than “decompose them.” They use art, metaphor, and analogies to provoke inspiration around form, function, feel, and experience. Through this process, they break down a solution, while at the same time generating new options” (Raney, 2010, p 36).
Approaching projects inclusive of design thinking, a project leader could be appealing for a number of reasons, including greater clarity, improved creativity, and a potential for a reduced level of risk, while creating a platform for open dialogue and transparency.
How does design thinking work?
Beginning with developing a deeper understanding of the given problem, solutions are then identified and vetted against one or multiple subjects, generally referred to as personas. These personas are fictional archetypal users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of the end-user or client.
Looking into the diagram which describes the design thinking process in five phases. Each phase takes teams through a series of creative and analytical exercises which then can become part of the project’s deliverables.
Since Design Thinking is inherently an iterative process, each phase could and should be repeated until the team is satisfied with the results and is ready to move forward with developing and implementing a full-scale solution. This benefits by facilitating truly creative solutions to problems, allowing for more radical ideas to be voiced, or for solutions that break from the traditional way of doing things. Project teams can also tailor the framework based on the challenges they are trying to solve, and leveraging individual phases as they see it fit.
That said, properly executing on innovation takes an open mind to accept disruptive ideas and the patience to hear them out.
Design-thinking concepts allow us to better understand the customer and the world outside the project walls, expand our peripheral vision on threats and opportunities that will define project success, and envision more complete and adaptive solutions to issues and risks we deal with on a daily basis.
Conclusion:
The Design Thinking framework can be applied to virtually any industry, and the basic principles can be leveraged by any organization to explore new initiatives and take a user-centered approach when it comes to designing or implementing new systems.
Resilient leadership, coupled with design, has the potential to transform the world we live in. Although no panacea, design thinking provides project leaders with a new capacity to understand the changing conditions that surround their project and envisioning better solutions to some of the most troublesome challenges facing our projects.
References:
- Raney, C., & Jacoby, R. (2010). Decisions by design: Stop deciding, start designing.
- Gustavo Moreno, and Taylor Huston, (2019) Design Thinking: A Framework for integrating into the Project’s Guiding Principles, Mi-GSO-pcubed, https://www.migso-pcubed.com/services/innovation-frameworks/design-thinking-framework-into-projects/ (April 08, 2021)
- Nadine Rochester, (2019), “Design Thinking Finds Its Place In Project Management”, Blog.Adobe,https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2019/11/18/design-thinking-finds-its-place-in-project-management.html#gs.y8xdkh (April 08, 2021)
