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Collaborate, create, experiment

Design thinking is a vital tool for the fourth industrial revolution.

Philip Barrett
By Philip Barrett, leader of Deloitte Digital's Experience Design team.
Johannesburg, 02 Nov 2016

Quick! You need to roll-out a smartphone app, and a chatbot, by next Thursday!

There's a huge temptation for companies to look for technological quick wins like these. It's a knee-jerk response, but when surrounded by unparalleled technological change, something has to be done, right? The change curve is so steep that leading thinkers - such as World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab - say it heralds the start of a fourth industrial revolution.

Schwab says this extraordinary moment in history is "characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres". This fusion is disrupting companies, forcing them to transform or face the risk of being taken apart by more agile, innovative competitors.

However, rolling out a 'me too' solution or taking a punt on the latest technological fad rarely earns organisations a major competitive advantage. At best it lets them keep up, hanging onto relevance for a while longer. More often it's just a waste of money, because these solutions don't really address customers' needs, abilities and motivations - and customers don't choose to use them.

Back to front

If companies want to gain advantage from this revolution, they need a different approach: one that starts with human needs and works backwards to products, services, business models and technology. And an approach has emerged that can do just that: it's called design thinking.

Design thinking has gained increasing publicity and popularity over the last few years, but its roots stretch back over the last few decades. It draws the best from practices in product design, interaction design, architecture, social sciences and many other fields. It involves a loosely structured series of steps, and an ever-growing toolbox of techniques. It creates a new team mind-set of collaboration, creativity, experimentation and customer-centricity, which lead to remarkable success.

To understand a bit about the design thinking process, look at an example:

Recently, a Deloitte Digital Africa client was interested in using technology to simplify its account-opening experience for customers. A smartphone app was the obvious choice, driven by enthusiasm for technology.

Instead, Deloitte Digital Africa started with design thinking's first step: empathising with the people who will use the innovation. Deloitte's face-to-face and immersive research showed the client its existing customer base had differing skills, attitudes and levels of access to technology, which meant a smartphone app would simplify the process for only some of its customers. Design thinking helps to avoid the limiting bias people have of choosing the options that come to mind first.

[Design thinking] creates a new team mind-set of collaboration, creativity, experimentation and customer-centricity.

To devise a solution that simplified the process for all customers, Deloitte had to define who the innovation was for, and what need it would address for each type of customer situation. This was the problem definition phase: the second step of design thinking. Deloitte defined four problems to solve, for different customer segments with different needs and constraints. It then documented the problems with journey maps that set out each distinct customer group's account-opening journey in an easy-to-understand visual format.

The clearly framed problems made it much easier to ideate - the third stage of design thinking. In this stage, Deloitte came up with ideas for how to improve the various problem points of the customer journey, and how to take opportunities to exceed customer expectations. It systematically generated a large number of ideas inspired by customer needs and emotions, service themes and new technologies, then selected the best ones.

Elegant solutions

Some of the solutions improved the client's internal processes, some improved the experience of the employees involved in those processes, and other solutions applied the innovations to the customer touchpoints themselves. The result was a set of new, customer-focused innovations that improved the account-opening experience for every human involved in the process.

Deloitte developed prototypes of the solutions. This involved making mock-ups of environments, objects, and digital user interfaces, to recreate the total experience of opening an account. It tested these ideas on real target customers by asking them to go through the process, and watching how they reacted and where they got stuck. Then the company refined and tested the experience further.

This prototyping and testing is the final stage of design thinking. Final, that is, until it is time to innovate again, which, in this age of relentless change, is all the time! New technologies and changing customer expectations mean launching a new digital product or service is the start, not the end, of a company's digital journey.

Tackling innovation customer-first lets companies respond to overwhelmingly complex opportunities in a methodical, grounded way. It makes an incredible difference to the kinds of ideas companies come up with, and the levels of success they achieve with them. That's why design thinking is indispensable for delivering the innovation needed at the heart of a 21st century business.

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