Design Thinking is one of the new management trends based on a new approach to problem solving, new product development or process improvement. Innovative thinking is about the involvement of the team at the most fundamental levels. Because creativity, contrary to the popular myth, does not arise out of nothing, one way of achieving this is the synthesis of large amounts of data. Therefore, invite your innovative team and, along with the Business 2 Community website, to try the following set of tools to enhance the information base of your process innovations.
1. Journey Mapping
Design Thinking involves a quest for the bases to complex problems and, ideally, transforming them into innovative solutions. Journey Mapping is one of the methods to help sharpen creativity and use the data uncovered in new ways. The aim of this method is to understand how the team works on a project from beginning to end. How do your people deal with the procedural shortcomings? Do they have to improvise in certain situations? What hidden dangers may arise from such a situation? This method may be tedious, you get an objective overview (and the amount of data for innovation) about what is really happening.
2. Mind Mapping
This method aims to find useful patterns among the scrum of irrelevant information obtained in different phases of a project. Train your team to formulate data and ideas, so you can cover the whole process of the project. Equip everyone in the team with cards for notes and then let them share their ideas with others, and use the data to create innovative solutions. This is a method for capturing the institutional knowledge of your team, giving you a rich data structure for finding patterns and thus isolate problems.
3. Generating hypotheses
This method aims to find a way to solve specific problems through understanding causes. However, solutions are not solutions until they do not work as expected. Until then, they are only hypotheses to test. It would be useless to propose solutions for a hypothesis that will prove to be wrong (and therefore even a solution is wrong).
4. Prototyping
This tool helps you to test the accuracy of the hypotheses. The prototype can be designed for anything, including processes. This method gives you hard data, rather than ephemeral comments about "good" ideas.
These steps have already revealed many reserves in the business processes in companies such as IBM or Toyota. The methodology works best when it engages as many team members as possible. Improving cooperation and team communication helps to find complex and elegant solutions to problems and, therefore, an information network for the idea sharing between members should be supported. Many solutions today are unfortunately only a short-term patch on the urgent problems of a company. With this method, however, you can go in depth and eliminate the cause or the problem itself.
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