What is this design + business idea really about? And what are the processes and tools that are useful to business students and business leaders as they expand their thinking tool-kits? What is the value-add of design thinking to business?
Last Friday afternoon, the Design Means Business Workshop explored these questions with ~130 full and part-time MBA students at the UBC Sauder School of Business. We knew it would be challenging to design a 3-hour experience that introduced the idea of design thinking to a large and diverse group. It was a great learning experience for my colleague Denise Withers and me.
We structured the workshop as follows:
• Context – setting up the context for the workshop; asked the students to articulate the business thinking processes they had used so far at Sauder
• The Design Means Business Process — outlining one version of the process for students to try, to experiment with, critique and revise to suit them. Hoping for some feedback on the process and the language that we used.
Here is the latest iteration of the process that we introduced at the workshop — very much to be “owned” and changed by each individual. Link to pdf: business by design process final
• Team Work – the wicked problem: trying out the process and adding in some tools – very structured given our time and what we want to accomplish.
• The Wrap: debriefing the problem
The students were asked to take on the following wicked problem:
The head of a chain of Pharmacies has hired them as a management consulting team — their task is to reduce the misuse of pharmaceuticals.
The definition of a wicked problem is one that is very open-ended, hard to define, and without a “right” solution. Wicked problems are messy — often with incomplete information and constantly changing requirements.
We provided a set of tools to support the design thinking process should the team decide to utilize them — for example, role-playing, in from left field-forced connections, extreme user interviews. We also provided the teams with “materials” with which to build a prototype of their idea. All this in 75 minutes!
Each team had a facilitator and an observer — the idea being that someone led the process and someone tracked the process that the team used. When we regrouped at the end of the afternoon, the observers commented on the challenges that the teams faced and the break-throughs that sometimes occurred by using the tools or just through the chemistry of the group.
I am sure it was a challenging, if not frustrating, afternoon for some — few of us are used to thinking in an open-ended way — and we generally don’t like ambiguous, difficult to define and solve problems.
During my sabbatical I am investigating the various ways that other business schools and businesses introduce the concept of design thinking. For sure it isn’t easy to do in a one-shot workshop setting.
In my post-sabbatical world, I will have the opportunity to develop the pedagogy, the content and the processes that will hopefully work effectively for students — and for business leaders.