Design Thinking: Is it a Floor Wax or a Dessert Topping?
Do you old schoolers remember the Shimmer Floor Waxcommercial from the early (and best) days of the TV show “Saturday Night Live”? In case folks don’t remember (because we are old) or never saw it (because you’re too uncool), the Shimmer Floor Wax commercial asked the question: “Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping?”
Yes, Shimmer Floor Wax did everything. And that summarizes my frustration with Design Thinkers!
Design Thinkers have bastardized Design Thinking into a concept that presupposes to solve every problem. The over-prescription of Design Thinking as a cure-all for all that ails you is a farce; a lie, a façade, an empty shell. Design Thinking has become both a floor wax and a dessert topping. So, go ahead and kick me out of the Design Thinking “Kool Kids Club.”
My issue with Design Thinkers is that they are not taking the time to understand where and how Design Thinking fits into the overall scheme of things; what role Design Thinking can play in driving towards specific business and organizational outcomes. The fault lies with Design Thinkers who forget that “Design Thinking is not an end in of itself; Design Thinking is a means to an end.”
Design Thinking is a powerful additive that can supercharge outcomes, but it’s critical to understand you use Design Thinking in the context of the outcomes you’re trying to achieve.
I find that Design Thinking – in the context of identifying, validating, valuing, and prioritizing the business use cases – supercharges our data science envisioning process. Design Thinking not only helps in improving the completeness, effectiveness and relevance of our analytic models, but equally important is the resulting organizational alignment, adoption and buy-in around the analytic results.
Let me share some specifics as to where and how we use Design Thinking in context of our Data Science envisioning process.
One of my favorite Design Thinking tools is the Customer Journey Map. A Customer Journey Map captures the tasks, actions or decisions that target customers or stakeholders needed to make in the accomplishment of a specific activity (buying a house, fixing a wind turbine, going on vacation, improving on-time deliveries).
