Organizing

Course Purpose

Marketing 2 students will develop the systems and processes necessary to lead the team forward with creating a great product for the client. This will require identifying areas of development and how to move forward in each group.

Defined: Promote clear systems for the delivery of projects that leads to stakeholder satisfaction.

Before launching into an exploration of ideas relating to the organization of material and content, it is worth noting that we are going to look at a particular approach to organization and process. There are many processes that could be considered, but we are going to use Design Thinking. Design Thinking is a process of creating and testing innovative ideas to improve a product/service or solve existing problems. Design thinking provides people with a “generic” framework and its applicable to all areas of expertise of a company and on the market. In marketing, the design thinking process will be used for branding. In newspaper, the design thinking process could just as easily be used to develop a story about an upcoming issue on a ballot.

Phases

There are useful starting points and helpful landmarks along the way, but the continuum of innovation is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps.

• Inspiration - the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions.
• Ideation - the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas.
• Implementation - the path that leads from the project room to the market.

The reason for the iterative, nonlinear (not straight) nature of the journey is that design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory process. When it is done right there will invariably be unexpected discoveries along the way. It would be foolish to continue down the same path if new information calls for an adjustment.

The point is simple, a team that understands what is happening will not feel bound to take the next logical step along an ultimately unproductive path. The idea can be taken a step further if you desire. At IDEO, the idea is to "Fail early to succeed sooner." Practically speaking, design thinking will likely lead to more failure, but faster, than it will to more success. The idea is to get prototypes in front of customers and clients quickly.

Constraints

Let's go back to the Inspiration phase now. I believe the key to inspiration is clearly understand the constraints that exist. The first stage of designing is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating how important they are.

These constraints can best be considered through the following lens:

• desirability - what makes sense to people and for people
• viability - what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model
• feasibility - what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future

Obviously, what innovation looks like for a gaming console compared to website development is dramatically different.

The important thing for you to understand at this point is that design thinking requires engineering, human centered design and business thought to come together. This process of coming together is where creative innovation has a chance to survive and lead to human flourishing.

Project Brief

A design brief is a set of mental constraints that provides clarity to the project team. This document will enable the project team to begin with a framework for how to measure progress towards meeting objectives.

The project brief is not a set of instructions or an attempt to answer questions before they have been posed. At the same time, the brief cannot be so vague that it does not set the appropriate parameters to operate in. Identifying the macro level goals and parameters is a critical requirement for managers.

Powers of Ten

Before we move on it is essential that you have grasped the complete picture of this concept. Design thinking is asking you to have a pulse on the macro and micro levels. It demands that you understand the nuance of an individual while grasping the bigger picture of the community. This is the art of mastering perspective.

Powers of Ten is a 1977 short film that illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery. It begins with a close-up shot of a man sleeping near the lakeside in Chicago, viewed from one meter away. The landscape steadily moves out until it reveals the edge of the known universe. Then, at a rate of 10-to-the-tenth meters per second, the film takes us towards Earth again, continuing back to the sleeping man’s hand and eventually down to the level of a carbon atom.

It is through the Powers of Ten that we can begin to understand the complexity of problem solving.

At a macro level, we must understand the bigger picture and be able to work this down into actionable steps that a novice (non experienced) person can follow. To do this well, you need to understand the different ways in which you will be asking people to think and process information.

• Divergent Thinking is probing into the future and creating new possibilities.
• Convergent Thinking is a practical way of deciding among existing alternatives.

Linus Pauling said it best: "To have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas."

Divergent Thinking and Covergent Thinking are processes that require analysis and synthesis. These two skills mirror divergent and convergent thinking.

• Analysis is like the process of deduction wherein you cut down a bigger concept into smaller ones. As such, analysis breaks down complex ideas into smaller fragmented concepts so as to come up with an improved understanding.
• Synthesis, on the other hand, is the act of extracting meaningful patterns from masses of raw information, is a fundamentally creative act. Synthesis could also be defined as the collective act of putting the pieces together to create whole ideas.

GE makes a great deal of money selling MRI machines. These machines help to identify a multitude of human problems and generate a great deal of revenue. The problem is MRI machines are extremely loud, and operate in a very small space. To a child, these are nothing short of torture chambers.

GE gave a guy named Doug the task of trying to improve the design of the MRI machine. He started by observing and gaining empathy for the young children at a day care center of all places. He then spoke with pediatricians and child life specialists. He even spent some time at a children's museum (think the Magic House).

Ultimately, he made no changes to the interior design of the MRI machine. The team applied colorful decals to the outside of the machine and to every surface of the room, covering the floor, walls, ceilings, and all of the equipment. In doing this they turned the machine into a voyage experience on a pirate's ship. Now the normally terrifying "Boom-Boom-Boom" sound was just the boat kicking into hyperdrive.

Patient satisfaction scores went up 90 percent. Practically speaking, kids could enjoy the process more and not be in fear.

Design Thinking is an organizational process that require you to fill in the blank for how to do each step.

1. Empathize - Understand people and the problem better
   • Empathize With Your End User - You come up with more innovative ideas when you better understand the needs and context of the people you are creating solutions for.
   • Do Observations in the Field - If you observe others with the skills of an anthropologist, you might discover new opportunities hidden in plain sight.
   • Ask Questions, Starting with "Why?" - A series of "why?" or "what if" questions can brush past surface details and get to the heart of the matter.
   • Perspective - Reframe challenges to see them from a different view point. Just remember, the problem is always human oriented in some regard. The human can be the end user, buyer or implementer.
2. Define - Clearly articulate what the issue is and the constraints that will impact how you move forward.
3. Ideate - Develop concepts/ideas for the solution. The goal is to get to a point of doing something as quickly as possible.
4. Prototype - Make something.
5. Test - See how people respond to the new creation. Make them interact with it.

Observation

Observations in the field are a powerful complement to interviews, turning up surprises and hidden opportunities. When you spot a contradiction between what you see and what you expect, it's a sign that you should dig deeper.

We are prone to seeing what we have seen and hearing what we have heard.

The next time you see something quirky, keep an open mind. Don't force it into a mental compartment for the sake of "understanding" it. Informed intuition is useful only if it is based on information that's accurate and up to date with the context you are using it in.

Don't be fooled by what you "know for sure" about your customer, yourself, your business, or the world. Seek out opportunities to observe and update your worldview.

No matter how high you rise in your career, no matter how much expertise you gain, you still need to keep your knowledge and you insights refreshed. Otherwise, you may develop a false confidence in what you already "know" that might lead you to the wrong decision. Informed intuition is useful only if it is based on information that's accurate and up to date.

It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that ain't so.

-- mark twain --

Delivering Feedback

This is a quick exercise to teach designers to hear feedback and see feedback as a gift towards bigger and better ideas. The quadrants mean what did the user like (upper left), dislike (upper right), what new questions do we have (bottom left), what new ideas do we have (bottom right).

Questions

• Explain how the design thinking process will lead to an organized process for creative innovation.
• In the Powers of 10 short film, the importance of perspective is clearly communicated. Explain why having a clear macro and micro level perspective is critical to good organization.
• How did organizational process of design thinking lead improving the MRI machine?

Sources

• Change by Design by Tim Brown
• Creative Confidence by Tim Kelley and David Kelley