Valuing terrible ideas doesn’t mean all ideas are of equal value

StephBeathCEOComsen

I love arguments for and against anything to provide nuance and to help refine thinking.

So having seen huge benefits flow from well facilitated design thinking practices, I was interested to explore A critical piecesuggesting that some of the fundamental principles are flawed.

Only three lines in I ran straight into this statement -

“The people who speak the language of design thinking are the cool kids. Not just the people with the awesome glasses and the black clothing. These are the people who have those awesome jobs with “innovation” or “disruption”on their business cards.”

It’s wrong to position design thinking as a fashion.

I wish I’d taken photos of workshops in the early days,before I carried a smartphone with a camera, the record would show a 16-year stream of walls or tables covered in post it notes, index cards, coloured paper and groups of people standing around them pointing at things, making sense of things and creating their own futures together.

The market may have updated the language and repackaged the methodology for ‘innovators’ or ‘forward thinkers’ but the reality is that it’s been around since the sixties.

The author’s other key assertions; that design thinking assumes no prior work and that not all arguments are of

equal value, suggest that he must have had a poor experience with low level facilitation and little external input.

Unfortunately, the poor practice of any methodology creates a problem for

practitioners who know how to use it. The watered down, all froth and no beer versions leave clients with a bitter taste associated with the practice rather than

the provider.

Let me break it down

He says - “The great thing about participating in a design thinking inspired workshop is that you don’t have to come to the session having done any work. Everything starts from the work created in the room. This approach lets the participants off the hook. There is no need to spend hours preparing a talk or a paper to discuss, as the work happens within the session.”

Design thinking assumes no prior or ongoing work

Criticism

If you are doing work that benefits only you and your immediate workmates then it’s true that you only need empathy amongst yourselves, but it also means you are not in business.

Design thinking is not a step by step process you follow without ‘thinking’.

You must test if your assumptions and instincts are pointing in the right direction. This requires self-awareness and an ability to be wrong. It also means working through multiple ‘if this, then that’ branches, far too complex for a script, which means that a facilitator who works to a ‘script' can be painful for participants.

Design thinking runs on the premise that the best answers to a problem are shaped by the people you are designing for.

Reality

Facilitators don’t run a process, they help make the process easier for those designing solutions by enabling plenty of discussion grounded in actual rather than imagined needs.

Criticism

You don’t need to spend time if you already know each other

He says – “The problem with this approach is that much of our work is ongoing. We don’t need to spend time defining our problems because we have already been working together. We don’t need to develop empathy because we already know the people that we’re working with.”

Whenissomething‘complete’,‘highquality’,‘innovative’?

Whatdoesitlooklikewhenyouhave‘trust’,‘integrity’,‘empathy?

Howaboutbeing‘bold’,‘unique’,‘professional’?

Reality

The variation is huge.Unless you nut it out, people agree to something with different expectations of what that means with respect to behaviour.

No matter how well you know one another, I have yet to be with a single team where people had clarity about language without first directly addressing it in a workshop.

Take any word and ask people what it translates to in terms of activity – what it looks like when you see it in life.

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CriticismThat design thinking means all ideas are equally good?He says - “The vibe of design thinking inspired meetings is relentlessly positive. All ideas are welcome. We are told to say “yes, and” - following the principles of improv…. How did we get this idea that all ideas are equally good? That every perspective must be understood as valid?”

Reality

One stupid idea may lead to another brilliant one, but only if it sees the light of day and is treated as a valuable part of the creation process.

When it comes to getting ideas on the table, there is a time for building and tearing down arguments and during the building phase it’s critical to say ‘yes, and…’.

Laugh about poor ideas later, but in the medley of terrible ideas is a concept that’s trying to surface and is found through the patterns in language describing the terrible ideas.

This makes terrible ideas ‘valid’ in a way that author and/or facilitators he’s experienced have either not understood or explained well.

Clear understandingWhen you start to tear down and offer arguments against ideas you must do it with the clear understanding. Once you hit on a great idea, it’s amazing how quickly the method for delivering it can appear.

Being inclusiveNot everyone likes arguing, but many who like it least also hold the best ideas. We want to hear them. We need to hear them.

Design thinking is about

Design thinking is not about you, your product or

service or idea or talent. It’s about helping. That means dropping our

assumptions, that we ‘already know’ the answers and creating space to be wrong, space for ‘bad’ ideas to

lead to great ones, and space for new answers to flourish through old conversations approached in new

ways.

Steph Beath – www.comsen.co.nz @stephbeath