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The sprint gives teams a shortcut to learning without building and launching.

The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it's a "greatest hits" of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more-packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.

Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you'll get clear data from a realistic prototype. The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.

This page is a DIY guide for running your own sprint. On Monday, you'll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you'll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you'll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you'll hammer out a high-fidelity prototype. And on Friday, you'll test it with real live humans.

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The sprint is a 5-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing with customers. Learn to run your own sprints, and read about our book on sprints.

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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven't expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders' fear of change.

At every phase-customer discovery, idea generation, and testing-a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology -one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

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With time and practice, the methods and mindsets of design thinking will lead you to something even more important—creative confidence.

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"Design thinking is not a linear path. It's a big mass of looping back to different places in the process. "

-David Kelley, Founder of IDEO

As founder of IDEO, for over 30 years David Kelley has been tackling complex problems using design. We sat down with David and IDEO U Managing Director, Coe Leta Stafford, to discuss why design thinking is more relevant now than ever.

At times it looks a lot like common sense, but thinking like a designer is more difficult than it seems. In many ways, design thinking is about having a methodology that helps you feel comfortable wading into the messy complexity of creating something new to the world. The better you get at it, the more you'll build creative confidence to take on bigger challenges.

So, why is design thinking relevant to the challenges we're facing today?
Design Thinking Builds Creative Confidence
With time and practice, the methods and mindsets of design thinking will lead you to something even more important-creative confidence. The subtle techniques of design thinking can unlock mindset shifts that lead people (many for the first time in their lives) to see themselves as creative. You come to a place where you understand what's going on and you believe you can set out to do what you want to do-and that's creative confidence. It's the opposite of insecurity.

Creative confidence gives people the ability to navigate ambiguity. By building on the foundations of design thinking, it makes people capable of solving these complex problems in the world.
Design Thinking is Here to Stay
The impact of design thinking will continue to become more evident and accepted in the same way the scientific method is a widely adopted approach. Design has moved from the kid's table to the board room with C-level executives recognizing creativity's role in strategy. For example, a global IBM survey of over 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries found that executives believe that beyond rigor, management discipline, integrity, or even vision, successfully navigating an increasingly complex world requires creativity. From Fortune 500 companies to universities, we envision a future where design thinking is a common part of company and school curriculums.
Design Thinking is Not a Cookbook
There's a notion about design thinking that it's a cookbook where the answer falls out the end. But the truth is it's messier than that. As you go along, even if you're not getting anywhere, if you haven't unlocked new insight or if the prototype hasn't unlocked a clear path that everyone agrees on, you have to stay there. Design thinking is not a linear path. It's a big mass of looping back to different places in the process.

There's also confusion around knowing how to navigate divergent and convergent thinking. There's skill in knowing when a team is stuck and that's a moment to diverge-let's go out and get inspired, let's think a little different. When are moments in the process you need to think differently? It takes practice knowing when in this messy process to give yourself permission to diverge and when and how to creatively converge. The bad news is you do actually need to have the insight to make creative leaps to a new place.

Every day there are new ways to think about and apply design thinking. If you're new to design thinking and looking for an introduction, check out our latest class,
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David on Design Thinking Webinar Chapters
(2:40) David's Story(18:26) An Interactive Lesson (27:18) Q&A (27:29) Prototyping at IDEO (34:16) Misunderstandings of Design Thinking (38:23) Design Thinking Related to Innovation (41:58) Future of Design Thinking (5:00) Introducing Hello Design Thinking

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As founder of IDEO, for over 30 years David Kelley has been tackling complex problems using design. We sat down with David to talk about what he's learned over the decades and why design thinking is more relevant now than ever. But as David says, don't trust us, design thinking is our religion.

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Life in the 21st century demands mindfulness—getting to know ourselves better and seeing how we contribute to suffering in our own lives.

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Bill Gates reviews "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" by author Yuval Noah Harari.

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- Affinity map
- Empathy map
- Cover story
- Low-tech social network

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The Actors map represents the relationship between stakeholders. It's a view of the service/ system and its cont ...

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FOMO: trchnologie leidend ipv 'enabler' voor optimale dienstverlening

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FOMO: trchnologie leidend ipv 'enabler' voor optimale dienstverlening

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1. Neem de organisatie visie als startpunt: “Om écht te innoveren moet je verder denken dan alleen vanuit de huidige context.”
2. Stel de klant centraal
3. Breng de kansen in kaart
4. Neem met meer vertrouwen een beslissing

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In de vorige artikelen uit deze reeks kwamen de typische kenmerken van service design al naar voren: de obsessieve focus op de customer experience, de onderzoekende manier van werken, de holistische blik en het vergaren van input bij verschillende stakeholders. Het zijn allemaal aspecten die ook van belang zijn bij het bepalen van de meerwaarde van een technologie voor organisaties. Met die aanpak hebben wij het laatste jaar onder meer gekeken op welke manier artificial intelligence de gezondheidszorg kan optimaliseren en hoe blockchain de samenwerking van een luchtvaartmaatschappij met zijn leveranciers kan verbeteren.

Neem de organisatie visie als startpunt

Het helpt om je bij dit soort vraagstukken als eerste af te vragen: ervaar ik op dit moment uitdagingen in relatie tot onze dienstverlening waarbij deze technologie verbeteringen kan bieden? Dat kan organisatie-breed zijn, maar ook voor specifieke klantgerichte diensten of interne bedrijfsprocessen. Zo behoud je de focus, omdat je anders elke week zonder resultaat achter de nieuwste hype aanrent. Tegelijkertijd moet je om écht te innoveren verder denken dan alleen vanuit je huidige context. Het is hierbij belangrijk om je organisatievisie als uitgangspunt te nemen: waarom ben je als bedrijf op de wereld, nu en over 5, 10, 20 jaar? Welke problemen los je op? Wat is hiervoor nodig? Als deze visie er nog niet is, is dát eigenlijk de eerste stap die je moet zetten. Pas met de juiste kaders kun je namelijk gaan kijken of en hoe AI, voice UI, blockchain en andere nieuwe technologieën jouw organisatie vooruit gaan helpen.

"Om écht te innoveren moet je verder denken dan alleen vanuit de huidige context."

Stel de klant centraal

Een duidelijke organisatievisie gaat idealiter gepaard met een heldere 'customer promise.' Die customer promise dient als een toetssteen in je technologie-ontdekkingstocht. Wat heeft onze klant hieraan? Wordt onze dienstverlening hier beter van? Maakt het onze operatie efficiënter? Zo'n vraag kan aan het begin van het proces cruciaal zijn en ervoor zorgen dat je geen tijd stopt in een technologie die jou op dit moment (of in de toekomst) niet verder helpt. Maar ook later in het proces moet je kritisch blijven kijken naar de meerwaarde voor je klant. Dit betekent overigens niet dat een klant direct moet merken dat je met een nieuwe technologie bezig bent. Wellicht helpt blockchain je bijvoorbeeld alleen om een specifiek bedrijfsonderdeel efficiënter te maken, zoals de samenwerking met leveranciers. Maar ook dan draagt het uiteindelijk bij aan het grotere doel van je organisatie.

"Die customer promise dient als een toetssteen in je technologie-ontdekkingstocht"

Breng de kansen in kaart

De uitdaging is om de mogelijke implicaties van een bepaalde technologie voor jouw dienstverlening inzichtelijk te maken. Aan vage voorspellingen heeft niemand iets. Het is daarom slim om mensen met domeinkennis, liefst vanuit van verschillende lagen en functies binnen de organisatie, en mensen met technologische kennis bij elkaar te brengen, bijvoorbeeld in co-creatiesessies. De ene groep mensen is expert in hun specifieke vakgebied en kent de uitdagingen waar ze dagelijks mee te maken hebben, de andere groep mensen kan hun kennis gebruiken om de nieuwe technologie op de juiste manier toe te passen.

Wij als service designers brengen de klant scenario's in kaart en plotten waar de technologie potentie heeft. Door alles overzichtelijk samen te brengen en direct tastbaar te maken, wordt het mogelijk om een gedeeld begrip van de materie te vormen en op efficiënte wijze discussies te voeren over deze scenario's. Per vakgebied kun je zo concreet uitwerken hoe de toekomst er uit zou kunnen zien als de technologie ingezet wordt.

"Zo kan je concreet uitwerken hoe een technologie kan bijdragen aan de toekomstige dienstverlening".

Het is daarbij wel van belang om deze tastbare veranderingen te blijven toetsen aan de organisatie visie en de customer promise. Bijkomend voordeel van het bij elkaar brengen van disciplines is dat zij uitgedaagd worden om innovatief na te denken over hun eigen rol én direct betrokken worden bij mogelijke organisatieveranderingen. Als we met een klant een visie uitwerken en de route uitstippelen om daar te komen, merken we dat dit intern leidt tot enthousiasme en overtuiging om ermee aan de slag te gaan.

Neem met meer vertrouwen een beslissing

Het vermogen van service designers om kennis overzichtelijk in kaart te brengen en veranderingen inzichtelijk te maken, helpt organisaties betere, onderbouwde beslissingen te nemen over de toegevoegde waarde van een technologie. Met de organisatievisie en de customer promise als uitgangspunt neem je een dergelijke beslissing met veel meer vertrouwen en verdwijnt die FOMO vanzelf. Alleen als een technologie jouw dienstverlening richting de klant echt verbeterd, is het interessant.

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Service design trend 5/5: technologie potentie - Essense

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In de vorige artikelen uit deze reeks kwamen de typische kenmerken van service design al naar voren: de obsessieve focus op de customer experience, de onderzoekende manier van werken, de holistische blik en het vergaren van input bij verschillende stakeholders. Het zijn allemaal aspecten die ook van belang zijn bij het bepalen van de meerwaarde van een technologie voor organisaties.

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Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile: What is the difference?

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Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile: What is the difference?

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Empathize, Define and Ideate through Design Thinking

Turn ideas into Business models following the lean startup

Build and deliver the product incrementally and faster through Agile processes

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What is the difference between Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile?

I often get asked what the difference is between those terms. "Is lean startup opposite of design thinking? oh no, maybe it is the same?" and "Ah ok, so you mean agile?" or "I think Agile is a better word for it". Those are some of the comments I get whenever I talk about one of terms above.

I will hereby try to clarify what these terms relate to, and how they can be integrated with each other.

Design thinking

Design thinking is an iterative process in which we thrive to understand the user's pain, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, in order to create new strategies and solutions.

Opposed to "Brainstorming", Design thinking promotes "Painstorming", in order to fully understand the user's pain.

The usual Design thinking phases are the following:

Empathize with your users

Define your users' needs, their problem, and your insights

Ideate by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions

Prototype to start creating solutions

Test solutions

According to Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO: "Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success."

Lean Startup

"Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products, which aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning." - Wikipedia

Globally, 90% of startups fail (Forbes) and the number one reason is market failure: "They make products no one wants." (Fortune).

The lean startup methodology was born in Silicon Valley in the 90s, but the use of the word "lean" has its roots to Toyota's lean production system. Toyota's lean manufacturing system was used to build things efficiently, yet it doesn't tell what should be built.

Using Eric Ries words: "The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and get a desired product to customers' hands faster. The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup-how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere-and grow a business with maximum acceleration. It is a principled approach to new product development."

Agile
Agile is a way of working, based on an iterative development, incremental delivery and ongoing reassessment of a product.
As mostly used in software development, it is based on a clear idea of the product's concept and its market.

Contrary to the idea of focusing on a set of features to be developed, agile focuses on the high value features first.

Agile is all about producing tangible, working results after each iteration. According to the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto, "Working software is the primary measure of progress." Deliver a rough draft, then revise based on your editor's suggestions. Never deliver the entire piece all at once!

Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile can be combined as shown in the picture below.

Empathize, Define and Ideate through Design Thinking

Turn ideas into Business models following the lean startup

Build and deliver the product incrementally and faster through Agile processes.

Why combining?

If 90% of startups fail because they produce products nobody wants, combining those methodology drastically reduce this risk of failing.

As you probably noticed, all the three methodologies take the final user into account, through direct feedback. This feedback loop makes sure that no product is created without a purpose to the final user. This is clearly against the old way of planning on paper and then starting building a real product based on a list of pre-decided features.

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Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile: What is the difference?

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What is the difference between Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile? I often get asked what the difference is between those terms. "Is lean startup opposite of design thinking? oh no, maybe it is the same?" and "Ah ok, so you mean agile?" or "I think Agile is a better word for it".

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1. Vision & principles: The guiding light illuminating why this is important and what our unique approach is

2. Shared practices: The practical applications from our process, including the tools and methods we use

3. Communication & training: Sharing the knowledge and supporting your first followers

4. Program management: The structure and activities that give us momentum and keep us on the right track

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A four-pillar framework to support evangelists and forerunners making this movement happen

If you are reading this, it is likely you are already familiar with the concept of design thinking. You've likely read about it, applied the principles in your own work, and maybe even tried speaking up for practicing the mindset at scale within your company.

You're convinced. You've seen the benefits. But now what?

How do you spread the human-centered, experimental, and co-creative way of working within large organizations?

Throughout history, all influential movements have spread through the hard work, vision, and motivation of courageous individuals. For a movement to start gaining followers, you always need those bold pioneers who are willing to lead by example, craft the shared vision, and put themselves on the line to gain momentum - to drive change. The classic Dancing Guy video is all the proof one needs.

Still, no matter how amazing your moves, it takes more than movements to cross the chasm between a few bold individuals' visions and mainstream acceptance. Based on our experience in helping numerous large companies - including giants such as IBM and Cisco - ramp up their design thinking practices, we at Idean crafted a framework to support the evangelists and forerunners in making the movement happen. In addition to helping our clients, we use this framework as a starting point for planning workshops around the topic, most recently at the Design Systems Conference in Helsinki.

The four pillars of spreading the movement

The framework is based on four foundational pillars, which any successful design thinking transformation initiative should be built upon:

1. Vision & principles: The guiding light illuminating why this is important and what our unique approach is

2. Shared practices: The practical applications from our process, including the tools and methods we use

3. Communication & training: Sharing the knowledge and supporting your first followers

4. Program management: The structure and activities that give us momentum and keep us on the right track

Vision & principles

Establishing a common vision and principles will help you lead with a shared understanding instead of pushing for ready-made solutions.

When people are empowered to craft their own solutions based on commonly established principles, they are far more motivated to succeed than when merely executing someone else's orders. To enable this, we emphasize the need to understand your audience, to co-create, and to document in way that inspires.

Understand who you are trying to influence and how

By definition, a shared understanding is not something you can dictate from an ivory tower. Instead, alignment is a collaborative effort. To achieve this alignment, one of the first things to do is to understand who the stakeholders are that you'd like to impact-and what kind of a change in behavior or attitudes are you seeking from them?

Once you have an understanding of who these people are, you are in a better position to involve the ones who matter the most. And, together, you can craft principles that will help guide you forward.

To craft a set of principles that people can stand behind, it helps to host workshops that invite everyone to contribute and think by doing. This is far more productive than having long discussions where, unfortunately, it's often the loudest, the highest paid, or the most extroverted whose voices are heard.

Your goal for these workshops is to involve your key stakeholders-and, together, create a vision that you can all sign off on and are excited to start working toward. Some common tasks for such workshops include creating mock magazine covers or tweets from the future, illustrating what success would look like and what you are striving to achieve.

Document your unique language

After arriving at a shared understanding of what it is you want to achieve, the principles should be documented as a part of your organization's unique design language. This language is your shared vocabulary, your documentation of lessons learned, and your collection of signposts that guide you forward. Essentially, it is the formal - yet inspiring - documentation of what you are setting out to achieve through design, and how you will get there.

Depending on your company's culture and goals, your design language might be built to emphasize different types of principles:

What is the end-user experience we seek: outcome-oriented principles that consider what the benefit is to the end user. One example is Google's material design guidelines.

How they should be created: process-oriented principles that guide how you work with a design thinking mindset. One example is IBM's design thinking principles.

Some companies combine both process- and outcome-oriented principles in their design language - it really depends on what your context is and what change you set out to achieve.

Introducing shared practices allows you to drive change through everyday actions.

While it is difficult to approach a task so abstract and large as changing an entire organization, influencing seemingly small, everyday practices is a much more concrete starting point. These practices include your design process and your preferred methods and tools. They ensure that you have a common starting point and a frame of reference so you don't have to reinvent the wheel with every new initiative.

The design process

The design process is the 10,000-foot view of how human-centered design is practiced in your organization. The most famous examples are the d.School and Double Diamond models. Overall, all design process visualizations describe much of the same thing: empathizing with your end users, defining the problem worth solving, ideating for solutions, rapid prototyping, and testing your ideas out in the real world in an iterative manner.

To make the model easier to communicate-and to make it your own-it pays off to build a custom description of the process for your specific context. For example, IBM's process is described as an infinity loop, emphasizing that design is a continuous process; whereas SAP's process description outlines clear checkpoints along three major phases. Each organization's custom design process is based on the same ideas, but reflects their unique culture, terminology, and struggles.

Methods and tools

Methods and tools are the more detailed activities that help people apply design thinking in their everyday work. They consist of research methods such as contextual interviews, synthesis methods like journey mapping, ideation methods including crazy 8s, prototyping methods such as wizard of oz, and countless others. In fact, there are so many methods out there that someone new to the world of design is likely to find the sheer amount of methods confusing. Building a curated, approachable toolkit customized for your organization's needs will help alleviate the information overload, and will help you approach complex problem-solving tasks in a structured and more consistent manner.

When defining the process, tools, and methods that best fit your organization's needs, one aspect to still consider is how these manifest themselves as tangible artifacts: Will you print a book? Build a website? Revamp your working space? Create cat memes? Once again, a question of context. And budget. And cojones.

Communication & training

Engaging communication and hands-on training are essential for bringing the design transformation to reality.

Through communication and training, your goal is to increase people's understanding of design thinking, and move them from utter ignorance toward awareness, and eventually toward practicing design thinking in their daily work. Some will even become fellow evangelists, and will support you in spreading the movement.

In communication and training, there are five core aspects we emphasize:

Make it unexpected

Grab people's attention with distinctive communications. For example, Visa, inspired by the concept of hackathons, hosted internal Design-a-thons to give people the opportunity to personally experience the design thinking approach in a single-day event. Whatever it is in your context, make your idea stand out.

Present it in a simple package

Focus on the core and package it in a way that is simple enough to grasp. For example, Google Venture's sprint model is packaged so well that even without understanding the details, the value and process is easy for anyone to grasp: By following the process, you'll get results in one week.

Make it concrete

Aim to make your actions so apparent and visible that it is hard for anyone to miss. From printing large-scale journey maps to running live user tests with low-fidelity prototypes, you can increase awareness by making yourself visible in locations that people walk by on a daily basis. For example, project rooms with walls covered in Post-it notes always raise interest, and anything near the coffee machine is likely to provoke spontaneous discussions.

Learn by doing

Once people become aware of the approach you are promoting and are drawn to the idea, they will need mentoring in applying the approach in their daily work. For example, Cargotec built an accelerator program where teams can explore and validate new business opportunities in a guided manner during a 10-week period.

Identify and support your torchbearers

For your idea to gain traction, you will need to ensure that the early adopters - the ones that are willing to follow your approach even with no guarantee of mainstream success - are empowered to share the message. The spreading of this new idea is likely to somewhat follow the diffusion of innovation curve, and especially when you first get started, you should focus your energy on convincing the people who will help you take the message forward.

Eventually, the only way to really understand what design thinking is about is by experiencing it yourself, which is why workshops and guided programs are often the best way to gain initial traction. While online trainings can be cost effective, live workshops are the most intensive way of experiencing the design thinking way, and getting practice to later applying it in your own work.

Program management

Endless planning is easy to get stuck in. Plans will change, and you should have a bias toward action. Figure out the first step, and get started. Then keep realigning your approach as you go along.

For managing the internal dynamics within large organizations, there are five activities we have recognized that will make your journey easier:

Start a spearhead project

There are many ways to get started on your journey, but the recommended approach is to start a spearhead project, in which you will apply the design thinking process and methods in practice. This will allow you to build the first case study that can act as the success story in your communications. And you will gain a ton of valuable learnings along the way.

Secure executive support

You need the support of the top management to make an influence on the company level. As soon as possible, focus energy on finding an executive who shares your mindset, or is curious enough about your experiment to support your efforts.

Co-create your vision

Get your core stakeholders in the same room to work on your vision together. Using collaborative workshop methods, you can try and spark a reaction to your initial ideas, or help people envision the change.

Set up a governance model

A governance model is about guidance and accountability. It is about inspiring the change, managing the process of constant learning, securing a budget, and proving the results to your organization.

Gather quantifiable outcomes

Design thinking, like anything, can be quantified. The ROI of design thinking is often measured on market positioning, customer loyalty, relevance of your offering, internal capability development, or speed to market.

Final remarks

In the words of Indira Gandhi:

Have a bias toward action - let's see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away.

As final remarks to light your way, there are five suggestions we recommend you keep in mind when getting started:

1) Don't waste time with non-believers, you will never reach everyone. 2) Focus investments into projects that are staffed to succeed. 3) Start small, but be bold. 4) Finding your own path takes time and experimentation. 5) Embrace and support your first followers; they will make the movement with you.

Get started, gain empathy, experiment, and iterate as you go.

Contributors

Written by: Anna Kalme

Content by: Matias Vaara, Sampo Jalasto, Petri Heiskanen, Anna Kalme

About Idean: We help businesses - from startups to Fortune 500 companies - create the most innovative and valuable services, products, and experiences in their industries. We specialize in customer experience, user experience, user interface, and service design. In addition to designing and shipping cutting-edge digital products and services, we also help businesses establish world-class design programs that ignite growth and improve customer experience at an organizational level.

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Spreading design thinking in large organizations

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If you are reading this, it is likely you are already familiar with the concept of design thinking. You've likely read about it, applied the principles in your own work, and maybe even tried speaking up for practicing the mindset at scale within your company. You're convinced. You've seen the benefits.

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Four ways to make design thinking stick:

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Four ways to make design thinking stick:

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1. Help people identify the right places to apply design thinking
2. Encourage trainees to find a kindred spirit
3. Ask people to teach another team about design thinking
4. Start with small, focused design thinking tasks

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One of the biggest challenges companies struggle with in adopting design thinking, is getting employees to use it outside of the training space. We've seen many teams flourish in design thinking workshops. They brainstorm hundreds of ideas, learn to ask brilliant questions and build prototypes that could become the next big solution for their industries.

But then they go back to work, and after a few days of buzz about how these new tools are going to change the way they do their jobs, work gets busy and they fall back into old patterns. Within a month or two, it's business as usual and all that valuable training gets forgotten.

So how do you avoid this pattern?

The first step is figuring out what in the workplace is preventing design thinking from being adopted. The likely cause is reverting to a habit of rushing through the process, or skipping steps, to get to the end deliverable.

Other times people just don't know where to start, says Luke Brodie, a master facilitator with ExperiencePoint. "They aren't sure what types of challenges lend themselves to being tackled using design thinking, which can result in these tools being over- or underused."

The existing corporate culture also frequently gets in the way, says ExperiencePoint master facilitator Keith LaPlante. "If they return to a setting that is not prepared to embrace a new way of tackling challenges then the odds of them applying what they've learned are dramatically reduced."

Fortunately all of these obstacles can be overcome - or avoided altogether - if companies take a holistic approach to design thinking. "Most participants are very enthusiastic about the learning when they leave a workshop and just need a little nudge from the boss to say, "Hey, we think this is important and we really want to leverage what you've learned," LaPlante says.

Here a four ways that leaders can provide that nudge so design thinking processes can take root.

1. Help people identify the right places to apply design thinking. Not every problem is appropriate for a full design thinking approach and employees can be wary of where to apply these new skills. To find that perfect fit, Brodie suggests that managers meet with teams after the workshop to identify challenges that are complex, meaningful, and human-centered, then provide space for them to try any of the appropriate design thinking habits to solve them. "People can start earning quick wins that translate into stories that get shared around the organization," he says. "These stories serve to encourage others to also start applying what they've learned and the enthusiasm will grow."

2. Encourage trainees to find a kindred spirit. "Often the 'tyranny of the urgent' takes over when people leave that special moment of learning," says facilitator Kimberly Douglas. To avoid losing what they learned to the daily grind of getting work done, she urges all of her trainees to find one or two other people they bonded with in the workshop, to be each other's "accountability partners." "They can push each other to put what they learned into practice to keep the momentum going."

3. Ask people to teach another team about design thinking. Managers should let employees know that they will be invited to lead a discussion or mini training session about design thinking after the workshop. "There is no better way to embed your learning than to teach it to someone else," LaPlante says. "And there is no better way to encourage its use than to make it a priority for everyone to understand and apply."

4. Start with small, focused design thinking tasks. "A lot of people can feel overwhelmed by the pace of the learning when design thinking is brand new," Douglas says. By encouraging trainees to use design thinking on small tasks within the core team, like facilitating a brainstorming session, or participating in a "how might we?" conversation, it can help them get comfortable with the processes, and prove to themselves and others that it can work. A good first brainstorming topic is "how might we engage our remote teams in a more meaningful way?" Douglas says. "Working on remote teams is one of the barriers that many trainees say gets in the way of implementing what they learned." Tackling that challenge in a brainstorming session allows them to practice their new skills while overcoming an obstacle to using design thinking more often.

Remember, a design thinking workshop is just the first step to embracing a new way of problem-solving and design iteration, but it can't drive transformation on its own. Business leaders need to create an environment where people aspire to be creative, and are given the resources, language and encouragement to use design thinking appropriately. When managers adopt these small solutions, they are more likely to see that training investment pay off.

Learn how to enable innovation skill-building at scale here or download our free ebook Kickstart Innovation: A Guide for Organizations.

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Four Ways to Make Design Thinking Stick in Your Organization

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One of the biggest challenges companies struggle with in adopting design thinking, is getting employees to use it outside of the training space. We've seen many teams flourish in design thinking workshops. But then they go back to work and fall into old routines. So how do you avoid this pattern?

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"There is risk in taking a new, creative approach - not everything pays off, and some prototypes will fail along the way, but that's the way the process is supposed to work. To get good results you have to veer from the known path. If you want to get to new places, you have to dive into the unknown. "
-Coe Leta Stafford, Co-Managing Director of IDEO U
In a special episode of our Creative Confidence Series podcast, IDEO U co-managing directors Suzanne Gibbs Howard and Coe Leta Stafford answered questions from our community of learners on how to overcome barriers to creativity at work with tactical examples, stories, and tips. How do I get my teammates to think outside of the box?
Christel in France says: "My team is very creative in warm-up exercises and when working with case studies, but it's difficult to get clients and colleagues to think outside of the box when reflecting on their own business."

Analogous experiences are a great way for clients to feel what the customer experience is like for their end users and open up their minds to seeing their business in a new way. Often feeling these experiences yourself can be more transformative and motivating than observing someone else. In a project IDEO did with a hospital to improve their patient experience, an analogous experience opened up new insights for leadership when they saw how hectic and stressful a dining experience would be if customers ate in the kitchen, wore uncomfortable bibs, had no explanation of the food they were served, and endured long periods of unexplained waiting - an analogy for the way patients often see more of the backend operations at a hospital.

Coe's Tip: To create a truly helpful analogous experience, choose something that's both close enough to the core business that your team can see the connections, yet far enough away that it offers a new lens on familiar problems. Use these steps to pick the right setting:

1. Identify the human need you are trying to solve without specifying the industry. In the hospital example, they need people coordinating tasks and activities that are high stakes with lots of handoffs.

2. Brainstorm analogous scenarios that have a similar challenge. What other industries face this problem? How do they solve for it?

Another tool you can use to spark creativity in a team is divergent and convergent thinking - identifying which moments are for coming up with new ideas ( divergent thinking) and when the team should be refining ideas (convergent thinking). Too often, teams have one divergent moment at the beginning of a project, then only converge going forward. Instead, embrace cycles of divergence and convergence over a project lifecycle. Divergent thinking is helpful when the work feels stuck, when everyone is disagreeing on what the path should be, or when teams are reverting back to safe ideas.

Coe's Tip: When it's time to converge and refine ideas, use a voting system with your team to ensure you don't scrap all the most creative work in favor of safe ideas. Ask people to vote on the few plausible (yet ambitious!) options, but also the 1-2 wild ideas that feel risky, yet valuable to consider.
How can I help my team overcome inertia and stay creative?
Birgit in Germany asks: "I encounter pushback when trying to bring creative ways of thinking to people who are proud to have a solution for every problem. Once I do get them on board with exploring new ideas, the excitement often rubs off in a few days and they revert back to their old ways of doing things."

Think about the experience your team has - often people go to a conference room or an offsite workshop, then they come back to their office where everything is the same. It's easy to fall back into old patterns when you're in the same environment.

To keep the insights you discovered and the customer you're designing for alive all around you in your workspace, create artifacts that represent your customer and build out detailed archetypes to make it easier to relate to them and think of their needs. On an IDEO project about women and contraception, the team made displays to help explain the mindsets of the target audience. A few of the young women they met were represented at each booth where you could read about them and see examples of things that they valued or carried each day. Intel got creative to capture people's attention with customer persona posters where they were most likely to see them - on bathroom stall doors.

Suz's Tip: Make tangible and fun artifacts instead of digital-only slide decks and white paper reports. They often stay on people's desks because they're fun to see and touch. Think a deck of cards that shows customer behaviors, your key audiences, or methods of thinking you want to prioritize.

Another way to keep momentum going after a really great workshop is to build rituals into your daily or weekly routine. Start with micro-commitments - small actions that build over time to have a larger impact - like turning fear moments into curiosity by reframing problems as questions. Instead of "The customers aren't engaging with our new product line," try "How might we understand the barriers customers face in trying our new product line?" It's a simple way to encourage collaboration and conversation among your team.

Coe's Tip: Find an accountabilibuddy - someone you'll be accountable to for achieving goals or making progress on a project. Support each other and cheer each other on!
How can I make room for creativity in spite of budget and time constraints?
Armand in France asks: "Most of my stakeholders demand I works on a fixed price and scope basis, so my team is pushed to eliminate uncertainty so they can meet those constraints. But during a project, I ask my teams to be creative, which introduces uncertainty into the mix. How might we better estimate creative work in a way that customers agree to spend for it?"

Creative leaders have to start by building up the way that we speak to the value of creativity nad how the process works. When it's time to budget and scope a project, make sure you build space for creativity and make your creative practices official by giving them a name. This helps clients understand the value of creativity and see how it plays a part in the bigger process. Suz used this approach for a retail design project she worked on at IDEO years ago. Instead of scheduling formal interviews back to back all day, they built in time to get inspired and talk to people in the actual retail environment and called those moments "inspiration tours." By planning a scavenger hunt that directed what each person was looking for, the team came back with insights on a specific challenge they were trying to solve.

Suz's Tip: Scope out time for iterative loops of prototyping by identifying their purpose. For example, if we knew we needed about three rounds, we would call the first round "early stage explorations" or "sacrificial prototypes." The second round is for getting the right idea, followed by a third round of prototyping that was about getting the idea RIGHT.

When there isn't support for creative work upfront, sometimes you have to go out on a limb and do the work you know will be a game changer in addition to delivering on the core ask - an approach known as double delivery. In an IDEO project with an online retail company to surface customer insights for the product and marketing teams, they wanted to focus mainly on quantitative data. But the IDEO team knew that stats alone - divorced from stories about the real people and they 'why' behind their behaviors - would be limiting. So they focused on quantitative data, but also gathered qualitative customer stories and created videos and visuals to humanize the data. By tracking which assets were used the most, the IDEO team saw that the customer stories and videos were used about twice as often - a proof point they could use when suggesting qualitative research to new clients later on.

Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of IDEO.org, uses a framework to get alignment on priorities - the theory of change - at the start of a project. By getting agreement on the outcomes they're shooting for and the highest priority stakeholders to involve along the way, they earn more leeway and trust with the methods they use to get to the best solution.

Suz's Tip: When kicking off a project, get your team and leadership aligned on priorities by asking what outcomes they value the most and determining how you will measure the success of the project. There's often a tradeoff between budget, time, and quality.

Tune into the podcast for more from Suz and Coe, and keep an eye out for more office hours opportunities in the future. We love answering your questions!

For more tips on activating creativity within yourself and others, check out our on-demand class, Unlocking Creativity.

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Office Hours: IDEO U Co-Founders Share Tips for Getting Creative at Work

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In a special episode of our Creative Confidence Series podcast, IDEO U co-managing directors Suzanne Gibbs Howard and Coe Leta Stafford answered questions from our community of learners on how to overcome barriers to creativity at work with tactical examples, stories, and tips.