design thinking

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Seth Godin’s concept of finding your Who, which is all about identifying who your products are for. The Who isn’t defined by demographics but by psychographics: their (customer) beliefs, their dreams, their desires. It’s a reminder that developing personas is so important to customer experience design. And it’s a reminder that we should be finding products for our customers, not customers for our products.

WHY PERSONAS

Personas…

I’ve been know to say, “You can’t transform something you don’t understand.” You don’t want to change things that are working well or that create value for your customers. So know the current state and what to fix and what to maintain before designing the future state. Know the current state so that you can make near-term fixes and improvements while you’re re-imagining and redesigning the future state, which can take some time.

In 2019, I wrote about this marketing phenomenon that I kept hearing about, that customers are in control, that they have all the power. I never felt like that was right. In that post, I wrote:

Thank you to Amit Asamwar for posing a question to me on LinkedIn, after I shared a post about journey mapping. His question is one that I am frequently asked.

I hate to tell you this, but you're just not.*

I've been doing a bit of speaking lately, either about journey mapping or with journey mapping as a piece of the talk, and I've learned a lot - or, rather, confirmed a lot. Namely, you might think you're journey mapping; you call it journey mapping; but it's not really journey mapping.

Here's what happens.

I start by asking the audience if they're mapping customer journeys, and a bunch of hands in the room go up. A lot of hands, as a matter of fact.

Lately I am more convinced than many companies still don’t understand design? Let alone design thinking. A lot has been written and many are just started to explore design thinking 101. Most of the efforts are applied on the front end of ideas generation which is really 10% of the problems. The problem we have not been training people to do this. Many design schools with a few exceptions are slow to respond to the market needs for design thinkers, or critical thinkers with design training.

It is the ability to identify patterns of insights and “connect the dots” in a meaningful way.

Bruce Nussbaum, in a blog post: 3 Paths Toward A More Creative Life, calls it “Pattern Sight”.

A few simple observations on how you can implement Design Thinking in your or any organization large or tiny. These observations have been validated time and time again during my continual involvement with this activity.