Problems - the better half of innovative teams

"We've got 99 problems but innovation isn't one"

Using Design Thinking in an organization that is yet to adopt the innovative practice can be daunting. However, there are ways to leverage the practice with minimal resistance: make the team the primary user and their experience the main goal.

When working with a development team, with minimal resources, we discovered that spending the leadership's time in management meetings complaining about limited resources was setting us up for failure and unmet expectations. To seek a way to remain productive and achieve positive outcomes, we set up a weekly playback session aimed to raise all the problems and challenges that team members experienced. However, we did not limit it to resource issues, we widened the scope to include social and productivity gaps.

The output of the session was a whiteboard full of sticky notes and an air of despair. In order to improve the output of the session, we used design thinking to target specific outcomes:

1. Cultivate a skill of deriving insights from gaps
2. Cultivate a positive perspective towards problems
3. Create a safe space to communicate dissatisfactions

Design Thinking offered a window into a universe of discourse surrounding problem-solving techniques. Our team adopted a root-cause analysis method called the 5 Whys that built on Socratic Questioning. This coupled with our desired outcomes taught us the following:

1. Structuring data reveals unexpected opportunities and insights
2. Metadata reveals shared perspectives and cognitive biases within a team
3. Pairing team mates to perform the activity outside the playback session yielded greater adoption of the practice
4. Pairing team mates together to perform the 5 whys was a more efficient method of creating a safe space on a macro (team) level.
5. The structured data offers the leadership actionable inputs into their strategy plans
6. Asking Then What after identifying the root cause of an issue led to innovative practices and this was enhanced by creating room for failed experiments.
7. Structuring data with Notion or other productivity tools allows for further analysis and provides more channels to quantify events.
8. Naming of the tool or the artefact shapes the team's attitude (E.g. problem reporting brews negative emotions coupled with increased levels of cortisol while Opportunities or Innovation Report leads to positive emotions and increased serotonin levels within the team. These reduces coping practices such as procrastination, passive entertainment, snacking, when challenges are presented to the team)

So if you are trying to increase adoption of innovative thinking and practices such as Design Thinking, raise your team's experience and then share the impact with your colleagues. The deepest satisfaction is revealing your team's genius to themselves.

Need help, doing so? Reach out for a free brainstorming session.