How many times as a marketing professional or strategy consultant have you left a formal (or even an informal) meeting and doubted that anything was actually going to change or that made an impact? So many times, we gather key stakeholders and team members together to solve a critical issue that continues to arise nothing gets accomplished—it’s frustrating. Sadly, many approaches to solving business challenges are misaligned for various reasons—pick your poison. Innovative, business changing ideas can be challenging at times – that’s where a design thinking approach can quickly help address your most challenging business issues.
Design thinking is a proven and repeatable problem solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve big results. Design thinking combines creative and critical thinking that allows information and ideas to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained. It’s a mindset focused on solutions and not the problem.
A primary element of design thinking is simply thinking and ideating on a solution to address a problem or better meet a customer need. Establishing the proper amount of time for truly thinking through the work being done and measuring its merit as a viable solution to solve the challenge at hand is shockingly and overwhelmingly missed a lot of times. I’ve seen this at many organizations. Surprisingly, it’s that “little thing” that is missed—something so obvious. It reminds me of the immense amount of sales professionals that surprisingly do not ask for a sale.
As humans become more assimilated into the processes that govern their company, the insurmountable inertia against positive change can be overwhelming. Collaboration drops; good work born from proper thinking decreases. The machine, more often than not, has every waking minute of the day consumed due to task overflow and improper organizational structures. This produces one thing—chaos of inefficiency void of new pathways. The proper time to move the needle through dedicated thinking is silently not allowed by the proverbial “machine” and this paves a direct path to failure. You’ll never hear this admitted by corporate leadership at most companies, but when it comes to true change it’s more talk than real practice. Did you know that Google formally allows 20% of their employees’ time to think? That says a lot about the value of thinking. How much are you allowing your team to perform real thinking on good solutions to solve the challenges?
Original Source: Lawton Ursrey
