4 ms·

I hate that moniker and I hope it dies in a fire but it's nothing more than using the same thinking devices used by designers (contextual inquiry, making assump

• wpietri 8y ago
  I would agree, but unfortunately it's not a common kind of thinking. Especially at larger companies. So I think it's useful to have a defined name and a set of practices so that people who aren't used to thinking that way can start to grapple with it. For example, I got to sit in on a 3-day design thinking class at a large financial company. The attendees were from all over the company, from programmers to back-office people to account reps. Many of them had never met a customer in the course of their jobs. The design thinking concepts were deeply alien their normal work. But by half-way through they had a bunch of real users in for the attendees to interview. By the end, they were forced to produce new product ideas and mock-ups. It was really a revelation to a lot of the people there. Three days was only enough to give them a taste. But it was clear from the talk afterwards that a lot of them could now see why it was worth thinking beyond their designated jobs and really understanding what they were doing from the user's perspective.
  • chii 8y ago
    > thinking beyond their designated jobs and really understanding what they were doing from the user's perspective if a company treats their (low level) employees like replaceable cogs, and never involve them in decision making, then yes, this does seem like a revelation! However, this just goes to show that having trust, and empowering employees to be more autonomous and self-directed (with the appropriate amount of compensation based incentives of course) will achieve the same kind of results imho.
    • TuringTest 8y ago
      It doesn't help allowing employees to be autonomous and self-directed if they never see or get feedback from real users. A large part of design is validating whatever tool it is that they produce with the people for whom you're building it, and do it again at every step of the process with the intermediate designs - not just as a single upfront gathering of requirements. This is not something that you get from an eat-you-own-dog-food approach.
      • wpietri 8y ago
        Exactly. At a startup, it's easy to get outside the building: there aren't that many people inside, so you'd have to be pathologically insular to avoid it. But when a company grows, I think of it like a sphere. The average distance to a customer keeps increasing. At the beginning, most people have contact with the outside world. But when it's large, most people's lived reality is about other people who work at the company. And historically, that worked fine for large companies for quite a while. They were doing relatively stable, simple things that could be easily scaled. But things are hopefully changing. There are a lot of people who have spent their lives inside of large companies. Whatever it takes to rehabilitate them is fine by me.