Independent Schools can use Design Thinking

Although Design Thinking has been around since the 60s, its seeing a resurgence in popularity as a way to develop enhanced customer experiences. The reason is customers and clients have greater expectations, more access to information and more connections to alternatives than ever before. To remain relevant, companies need to become truly customer-centric which requires them to think totally different, often re-engineering the business.

But what is it and how can it help you? Design Thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be, and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end-user. Whether your focus is to accelerate organic growth, redesigning internal processes or engaging your work force, the basic methodology is simple and consistent. 

It's often assumed that design thinking is relevant only to companies like Apple or Amazon but it can be applied by anyone to anything. The notion behind design thinking is to apply a method to the intended solution by assessing the current situation, defining what the solution should do, then designing the solution, and finally testing the solution. Too often our end products are what we want to create rather than what is actually needed.

In practical terms, design thinking requires managers and employees to re-imagine their business models - changing it from supply-led to demand-led. To start with a blank page and design their company with the customer's needs in mind by asking 'how do I want my organisation, products and services to be perceived in 3 years time?' and what changes do I make today to get there? 

The 4 stages to Design Thinking are:

1. What Is? - explores the current reality

2. What If? - envisions multiple options for a new and better future

3. What Wows? - makes some choices about where to focus first

4. What Works? - moves into the real world to interact with actual users through experiments

The above approach to problem solving is distinguished by a few key attributes: It emphasises the importance of discovery in advance of solution generation using market research methodologies that are empathic and user-driven; it works to expand the boundaries of both problem and solution; it is enthusiastic about engaging partners in co-creation; and –it is committed to conducting  real-world experiments rather than running analyses using historical data.

Design Thinking is a very useful strategy for innovation because when these principles are applied to strategy and innovation the success rate dramatically improves. Design thinking is at the core of effective strategy development and organisational change because it can be applied to products, services, and processes… in fact anything that needs to be optimised for human interaction. You can ‘design’ the way you lead, manage, create and innovate. So it can be very useful for schools, both from the dual points of view of administration and education.

Unlike analytical thinking, design thinking includes "building up" ideas, with few, or no, limits on breadth during a "brainstorming" phase. This helps reduce fear of failure in the participant(s) and encourages curiosity, creativity, input and participation from a wide variety of sources in the ideation phase, since this can aid in the discovery of hidden elements and ambiguities in the situation and discover potentially flawed assumptions. It's an iterative process. Problems need to be framed, the right questions need to be asked, then more ideas can be created, and the best answers can be chosen. The steps aren't linear but not strictly circular. They can occur simultaneously and be repeated.

The above 4 steps can be deconstructed into 6 main themes: 

Understand: explore the topic through research and develop familiarity with the subject matter
Observe: take note of the environment, including physical surroundings and human interactions; gather more information about peoples' actions and possible motivation through discussion
Point of view: consider alternate points of views to better understand the problem and to inform your ideas for the next phase
Ideate: this phase consists of brainstorming ideas without criticism or inhibition. In this phase, the focus is on generating lots of ideas with an emphasis on creativity and enjoying the process.
Prototype: create quick prototypes to investigate ideas generated during the ideation phase
Test: test your ideas in a repetitive fashion and determine which aspects of the design are effective and which could be improved.

Design thinking in education
Design thinking has been suggested for use in schools in a variety of curricular ways, including for redesigning student spaces and entire school systems, and it usually takes 3 forms: helping the school executive solve institution-based problems, assisting educators develop more creative lesson plans, and instilling design thinking skills in students.

If you would like to find out more on the research bodies exploring the intersection of design and education, look up Stanford University which runs at least 3 different programs: the REDLab group, from Stanford University's Graduate School of Education; the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program (a collaborative program between Stanford University and the Hasso Plattner Institute from Potsdam, Germany); and the Taking Design Thinking to Schools Initiative.

Design thinking as a viable curricular and systemic reform program is increasingly being recognised by educators, especially as a method to stimulate more interest in STEM subjects. As the workplace of tomorrow may not completely fit in with the current curriculum, it will be critical that students learn both the skills and the tools to participate in a society where problems are increasingly complex and nuanced understandings are vital. There are of course obstacles, such as the accountability to succeed on high-stakes exams in the K-12 environments where teachers feel that following the classic curriculum will better prepare students for those exams. However that hasn't impeded the creation of a number of student-centric K-12 design thinking programs (at least in the USA) employed to promote creative thinking, teamwork, and student responsibility for learning. For more information see Tools at Schools, NoTosh, the Design Thinking for Educators toolkit (IDEO), and DesignEd K12 (AIGA).

Even for a school that sees the value of design thinking, the issue of implementing these new approaches to education successfully is a wicked problem.

The evolution of Design Thinking as a way to solve problems has provided significant benefits to business:

a) The Power of Re-Framing - by asking better, deeper questions that expand the boundaries of the search. Taking time to understand instead of rushing to solve pays big dividends.

b) Collaboration - Design thinking doesn't get caught up in debates and either/or thinking. Instead, it insists that we develop shared insights and ambitions before generating ideas, and that we use data from experiments (rather than theoretical debates) to determine the most effective course of action.

c) Curation - Too much information can actually degrade the quality of  decisions so design thinking helps us to drill down to the essence of an issue and see what really matters.

d) Comfort with Emptiness - Design thinking is comfortable with leaving space in the emergence of a solution so that many can contribute to it. 

e) Speed - Design Thinking’s ability to deliver engagement, alignment and curation greatly enhances speed by removing the friction and subsequent drag created by trying to unite people with different views of the world around a new idea.