Enterprise design thinking
A tailor-made approach of design thinking for large and distributed teams to help them quickly deliver human-centred outcomes to the market. Has three principles in particular to guide teams:
- focus on user outcomes — driving business by helping users achieve their goals;
- restless reinvention — staying essential by treating everything as a prototype; and
- diverse empowered teams — moving faster by working together and embracing diversity.
- Diverse teams are ones focused on having varied perspectives, skills, and backgrounds. They build upon each other’s ideas, enrich each other’s knowledge, and challenge each other’s assumptions in ways that accelerate work.
- Empowered teams are ones that have the agency to make everyday operational decisions on their own, being equipped with the expertise and authority to deliver outcomes.
Enterprise design thinking can be thought of as an infinite loop, with three primary stages:
- observing — the team immerses itself with the real world with research, interviewing users, watching them work, and testing ideas with people who matter the most;
- reflecting — the team comes together to synchronise movements, synthesise what was learnt, and share “aha” moments with each other to decide together and move forward with confidence; and
- making — giving a concrete form to abstract ideas.
Keys are scalable practices for enterprise team alignment, with there being three primary keys:
- hills — aligining the team around meaningful user outfcomes you want to achieve, where statements of intent are written as user enablements (follows a format of who, what, and wow);
- playbacks — aligning the team around regularly exchanging feedback, of which playbacks are story-based presentations sharing insights, ideas, and updates to a user experience; and
- Particularly useful in a few specific moments when everyone needs to be aligned, like:
- starting a new project or initiative;
- deciding on a future user experience; and
- reviewing progress as the team delivers.
- Particularly useful in a few specific moments when everyone needs to be aligned, like:
- sponsoring users — inviting users (external clients, future clients, or end users representing the target user) into the work and staying true to real-world needs, usually formalised with an agreement that covers confidentiality and the team’s right to use on their feedback.