Giving by Alexandre Mars

Author:Alexandre Mars
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

10

Design Thinking

“I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.”

—LARRY KING

“Design thinking” is the most efficient way of looking at a problem and finding a new angle. It goes against the classic vision we have of the brilliant inventor tinkering in his office or his garage and, without ever leaving his desk, discovering the keys to the success of a start-up which will, of course, soon become a “unicorn” company—valued at over $1 billion.

Design thinking is an entirely different way of operating. It works on the principle that no matter the qualities of the people sitting in a room and seeking a solution there, they will not find it for the simple reason that the solution exists beyond the room. In other words, you must go out into the world to find it, examine it, and build it in conjunction with the people for whom it is intended—i.e., the consumers—and look at it from their point of view.

Steve Jobs did this, and he brought people the solutions they needed even if, to start with, they weren’t aware that they needed them. At the start of his entrepreneurial career, he even used IDEO, a consulting firm and one of the biggest purveyors of design thinking. Jobs faced a problem: how could users of his first computer—the Lisa, forerunner of the Mac—interact with the screen through their keyboard without too many complications?

The design thinkers of IDEO did not retreat into the countryside to think about this. On the contrary, they went into the streets, visited universities and businesses, and met dozens, hundreds of potential users and asked them: “What do you plan to do with this object?” Back in their laboratories, they created a product, tested it, and kept working on it until they had found a solution. And thus was born the mouse, the little tool that revolutionized the world of computing.

Talk to your audience. It may sound obvious, but I’ve known countless very smart leaders who failed to do so. A friend of mine once had a generous and theoretically brilliant idea: send thousands of tablets to children and adolescents in African villages to connect them to the world and perhaps, later, facilitate educational programs for them. But my friend did not speak with his consumers, the intended recipients of the gift. The result: disappointment on the part of these African villagers when they opened the boxes and found tablets, because their villages did not have access to electricity.

In theory, design thinking constitutes a multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving. Or, put more simply, it means looking at and resolving a problem from the point of view of the consumer. Most of the start-ups that succeeded, like Facebook or Google, operated in this fashion. Their creators had an idea, a desire, a problem; as the first users, each sought to resolve the problem in what seemed the most efficient way possible for other users.

Epic was born partly from design thinking.

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