Thinking about Design Thinking for Organisational Change

IDEO talks about 4 different contexts for design:

• Product
• Space
• Service
• System

An organisational change / improvement is essentially the last context: designing a system.

So how might we apply a Design Thinking approach to something like an "Agile / Lean organisational transformation"?

How would a Design Thinker approach the problem?

The Stanford d.school identifies 5 major activities in a Design Thinking approach:

• Empathise
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

Empathise

Observe and engage the target consumers of the change in the context of their work.

Relevant tactics might be:

• Contextual inquiry
• Micro in-context narratives
• Walking the customer journey / value stream

Define

Consolidation and establishing a point of view.

Relevant tactics might be:

• Personas
• Empathy mapping
• Current state customer journey / value stream mapping
• Affinity mapping

Ideate

Widen and explore the solution space.

Relevant tactics might be:

• Idealised Design
• Brain writing
• Future state customer journey / value stream mapping
• Design sketch boards
• Positive Deviance
• Explore external examples (e.g., SAFe, scaling Agile at Spotify, etc.)

Prototype

Create a prototype to explore, test, inspire, and increase understanding of the design space

Relevant tactics might be:

• Role-play
• Storyboarding
• Process simulation / miniature

Test

Test and refine the change in context.

Relevant tactics might be:

• Pilot projects with testable hypotheses