Design thinking as a decision-making process
Some thoughts on how design thinking helps groups make better decisions
Published September 29, 2020
The last time you and your team faced an important decision, how did you overcome the sea of risk and second guesses and negative biases to make a better decision?
A few years ago, a client came to Avanade looking to redesign their website and help purchasing managers decide what product to buy. Although the client was certain we should design for the purchasing manager, design thinking methods to understand the purchasing process—like personas and user journeys—revealed purchasing managers were the least important audience. Rather, we designed for the technical engineer and boosted leads, organic traffic, and search positioning, all by double-digits.
Design thinking can help any team—teams like yours—make better decisions by countering the group biases that plague decision-making with incomplete or wrong data, misaligned criteria, and the wrong set of options.
Making better decisions
In “7 Strategies for Better Group Decision-Making”, Torben Emmerling and Duncan Rooders from Affective Advisory offer advice on how groups can make better decisions and avoid common bias traps.
Small groups for important decisions
Heterogenous groups (most of the time)
Strategic dissent
Generate ideas and feedback independently or anonymously
Provide a safe space for discussion
Treat experts as an input
Share collective responsibility
Strikingly, Rooders and Emmerling’s advice aligns with design thinking and workshop best practices.
It’s easy to forget workshop best practices. How many times have you or your team burned a day working through some issue only to emerge with nothing concrete to show for your effort?
Design Thinking workshops are for decisions. When you leave a workshop, you want to say: we explored this issue, have collectively come to this conclusion, and believe this is a better option than all the others.
Design thinking counters negative biases
People describe design thinking with the Design Council’s double diamond and highlight its two, key structures:
Problem framing and solution framing as separate areas of focus
Divergence and convergence as core activities
11 practical tools and 100s of tips from the trenches so agile, remote teams can build better products: Collaborative Product Design.
The Design Council’s double diamond illustrates how they apply design thinking to drive innovation
The Design Council described design thinking in terms of what you do to make better decisions. The double-diamond’s structure creates a set of discussions and activities that work against, account for, and overcome group bias, so groups can come to better decisions.
Unlike the Design Council who describe design thinking in terms of what you do, Stanford’s d.school describes each phase by its objective, what you want to accomplish:
Empathize
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
The d.school’s process focuses on the objective of each phase to describe how you get to innovation.
Like the double diamond’s structure, the objectives of each phase step through thoughtful approaches designed to counter group bias, so groups can come to better decisions.
“Creativity” as an analytical process
Design thinking as a practice is an analytical method that counters group bias and generates better decisions. Design thinking’s structure forces groups to:
examine base assumptions
understand the landscape and systems at play
identify clear criteria to support the decision, and
test the decision at lower investment with lower risk
As design thinking oscillates between analysis and synthesis, it takes the best approaches from both to counter the weaknesses of both. Groups make better decisions. They understand how and why they made them. As a bonus, the understanding of how and why the group made a decision fuels double-loop learning, critical to system and process improvement over time.
Its unfortunate we limit design thinking to a rarified process for coming up with new ideas and solutions. The objective of all design thinking is to identify a better option. As a core organizational function, design drives better decisions and outcomes, whether its in the workshop or the board room. At its heart, design thinking is a decision making process.
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