How Design Thinking Fights “Wicked” Problems
A Summary
Design thinking is often defined as creative method used to solve problems. This is a kind of magic people use to solve wicked problems, problems those are too difficult or even impossible to solve, in a creative way others have never thought of. Then, how does this magic work?
“Build the right thing” vs “build the thing right”
Take a closer look at those sentences, they look quite similar but they are actually different. Build the right thing is talking about if what we are building is really the right thing, or if we are building something wrong.
When we look at problems, we have tendency to walk right away to brainstorm solutions, choose one, then spend a lot of time building the solution. When we create something, we will hope that we build a right thing to solve our problems. If we are lucky enough, we build the right solution for the right problem. But what if we build a solution that doesn’t solve the problem? Then we will take another lot of time to think what’s going wrong with our works.
The problem sometimes is not about building the thing right. We have a group of amazing people who can do things, even magic hands those can help us create something considered as impossible. But sometimes, what we actually need is not something magical, but as simple as something that provides the right solution that we really need.
“Without knowing the right thing to build, it will be just vain of energy to build the thing right” — Anderson (2018).
Building the right thing
Before we build the right thing, we have to know what the right thing is. To figure out what is the right thing that people really need, we have to figure out the actual problems they actually have.
Sometimes we look at problems with hopelessness, because we look at problems like tangled thread. We try our best to find solutions and try to disentangle the thread, but we don’t seem to be moving, or even worse, we accidentally made the thread tangle even more than it used to be.
But actually, problems are not like tangled thread, but more like fungus that has root. We often try our best to clean the mycelium , but we won’t be able to get rid of the fungus if we don’t pull out the root. So our task is actually to find the actual problem, the root which caused the other problems to appear.
Why is it so difficult to find the root of problems?
Look at the funnel above. This is called Roger Martin’s funnel, and this funnel explains how human tends to think.
We, human, are good at finding pattern. So when we look at our mystery box, we have tendency to filter those problems and go all the way converging to find the pattern, make algorithm, then come to conclusion. But the thing is, if our filter (the subjective one) is the right filter we actually need? Well sometimes yes, but more often, no. And then we will have a kind of difficulty to come back to our mystery box, simply because it’s not our nature.
Mystery box contains sea of problems, and we believe that the root problem we are looking for is there. But it’s hard to go back.
Here, design thinking helps us to go back to our mystery box.
Design thinking to re-framing
Okay, I chose the aesthetic illustration to explain design thinking. But that’s not the point.
Pay attention to the arrows. Design thinking is never a linear process, but more than one looping processes those are even messier in real life than what is drawn in the picture above. And these looping processes, are those embrace us to go back to our top of funnel: the mystery box.
In design thinking, we will return to one process backward or even more to figure out if what we are trying to solve is really the right problem. We will need to be a humble person to use this method, because we have to give up on our own filter and focusing on our users’ filter.
Actually, the process will always includes loops, because looking at something from other’s glasses are more difficult than from ours, and our own filter sometimes biases our sight. That’s why we need to loop.
And after more than a single loop, we will finally see clearly, what is the actual problem. After finding the right problems, it will be easier for us to find the solutions and figuring out (by looping even more) the solution our user actually need.
So, that’s the actual truth behind how design thinking help us solving even the impossible.
Source:
Anderson, G. (2018). Design Thinking 101. California: O’Reilly Media, Inc.