When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills – Chinese Proverb
While innovation is the key to staying competitive in the industry, this supposed “innovation” is too often only a reorganisation of an existing offer that sometimes fails altogether.
Some would say, well you learn from your failures. But how many organisations today have the stomach for “expensive” failures that may even destroy the business altogether? So, is this then a catch-22?
The world of design offers some lessons for this predicament, but to learn these, businesses need to step away from what they see as the “problems” in their existing offers and take a better look at the surrounding business and consumption environment. They need to consider the lives and journeys of their customers for clues to understand the real reasons underlying these so-called problems.
Sometimes what we see as problems are only symptoms of underlying issues or opportunities in consumer interactions. Perhaps new consumer trends are driving micro changes in consumption, or maybe the product itself is being substituted as part of a broader evolution in the ecosystem.
Think how Uber disrupted the taxi economy or how m-Pesa, a mobile app became a de-facto “bank” or means of money-transfer for the unbanked populations of Kenya.
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” –Albert Einstein
Yes, such imagination could take you just about anywhere and could very well involve re-imagining the very foundations of the business.
Many of us know the story of how in the year 2000, Reed Hastings, the founder of a small company called Netflix, flew to Dallas to propose a partnership to Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and his team.
The idea was that Netflix would run Blockbuster’s brand online and Antioco’s firm would promote Netflix in its stores. Hastings got laughed out of the room; Blockbuster believed then that the idea was too “niche” to succeed at a large scale.
Fast-forward 20 years, Netflix is now in 120 countries across the world, banks USD 28 billion a year while Blockbuster is bankrupt.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results” – Albert Einstein
Let’s talk about change, or rather — the lack of it. True, it’s hard to change and this has been an inherent human condition. After all, organisations are run by people, and people are human.
Many organisations therefore remain captive to this inertia of rest/ motion or continuing to do what they have always done. The heuristics of decision-making drive people to form judgements about things, via mental shortcuts that focus on certain parts of a problem but ignoring others.
Organisations too, end up selectively ignoring the parts of problems they don’t fully understand, and these often continue to cloud better judgement in making changes that may seem inconsequential today but perhaps, will address a much larger issue or opportunity tomorrow.
Incidentally, these biases also creep into consumer’s usage habits and ultimately social mores that include customs and manners and shapes their ways of valuing things in the world around them.
So then, how do we break the mould?
It’s easier said than done. We have in our years of experience encountered situations where we have been enthused at the willingness to change, in rooms full of attentive executives who acknowledge the challenges of modern business and the sea of changes digitalisation is causing.
Disappointingly, more than a few of those conversations have been lost in organisational bureaucracy, and the C-suites best efforts are often rendered toothless by vested interests from overpaid executives who have done all they could to protect their “turf” and guard the perceived success of the structures or silos within which they work in organisations.
Fast-forward eight months … Didn’t we completely forget about the customer there?
Enter Design Thinking, and in the words of one of its best-known practitioners, Tim Brown of IDEO:
“Design Thinking is neither art, nor science, nor religion. It is the capacity, ultimately, for integrative thinking”
Also Read: Why online marketplaces have lucrative startup prospects
Now a critic might ask here, “how is this any different from say, ‘out of the box’ thinking or ‘lateral’ thinking?” Ultimately, you are perhaps all correct in a way – Design Thinking as we see it at TheEngage is really just “thinking” under yet another name but without the barriers of having perceived constraints from our environments.
Encouraging design thinking involves understanding consumer trends that are continuously re-setting the expectations of customers. This requires thorough investigations to determine their effects on the business environment and thinking of ways to integrate them into an organisation’s services and products.
The process doesn’t end there as businesses also need to know the most agonising moments along the decision-making journey of customers and exploring how to convert those points of despair into ones of delight.
In other words, implementing a customer-focused perspective that reveals opportunities to create services and products that can empower and satisfy customers is a critical decision. This perspective allows businesses to take insights from the market and the customer journey and turn them into services and products that customers need but make business sense at the same time.
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About Neel Banerjee
Neel Banerjee has Design Thinking credentials from the DesignSingapore Council. He has also trained as a Level 1 Executive Coach. Neel has trained and enabled organizational audiences in the Retail, Banking and broader entrepreneurial sectors using the Design Thinking methodology. These sessions have extended into program grants such as Capability Development Grant [Government of Singapore]/ roadmaps for builds for new apps or digital platforms.
Are you a key executive or business owner who is done with your share of “big” talk from professors or professional speakers but wish to drive some real change in your ways of doing business?
Want to learn more about how to use Design Thinking to catalyse new business plans that can ultimately make real money for your business? Visit Neel here and #EngageTheEngage
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