“It is not about how differentiated our stuff is, but whether we can make a difference to people.”
This excerpt appeared in End Malaria, a remarkable collaborative effort championed by Seth Godin that I had the privilege to contribute to. For every copy of End Malaria sold, $20 is donated to End Malaria Now ($over $250K raised so far!)
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Design and business once seemed to occupy opposite ends of a spectrum. But in the last 10 years, we’ve seen a growing number of people challenge this assumption. Recent articles on design thinking proliferate – ranging from those that highlight its potential for business to those that warn of its impending decline.
But despite news-cycle driven waxing and waning, the case for adopting a design thinking approach to business is quite simple and clear. Design thinking helps creators get over unintentional biases and misconceptions to create better, more useful things. Time and again, initiatives falter because they’re developed with the host brand, organization, or cause—rather than the target individuals’ needs—foremost in mind.
When deep empathy isn’t applied to guide decision-making, fear of failure exerts influence over decision processes and rapid prototyping is rarely used to solicit quick and early feedback. Design thinking offers tools to address these challenges. It helps creators get into other people’s heads and hearts, understand their needs, and iteratively test alternative approaches to learn how best to fulfill them.
So now we know that design thinking encourages a human-centric orientation, hypotheses testing, and frequent, rapid prototyping. But how do you actually incorporate design thinking into your work?
Here are three ways to get started:
Think Human. Focus on your audience rather than make assumptions about them. What are their goals and dreams? How can you help them achieve them? What do you want them to do? How might they resist? Where are your leverage points that will cause them to act? Don’t rush in with a single solution, though! Test some alternatives, and be prepared to return to square one several times.
Connect with People. Tell stories. Stories are sticky: they bring facts to life and infuse them with context and passion. Physiologically, our brains are hardwired to process stories. Stories organize and orient complex information for us. Psychologically, we need patterns to help us understand the world. Telling stories also increases the chance that your audience will be able to visualize what you are talking about and thus remember it (humans remember 85 or 90 percent of what we see, but less than 15 percent of what we hear). Salient, meaningful messages, however brief, mobilize communities.
Turn Ripples into Waves. Learn from trials. Think critically. Iterate. The right tests—and the subsequent tweaks—can amplify growth. Small details (wording, images, placement of links, etc.) can massively impact your campaign. Use social media tools as a cost-effective way to observe users and refine your approach.
While greater success is a welcome and likely outcome of the application of design thinking, the key to understanding it is to realize that it’s not just about making a product that will sell more. As Umair Haque writes in The New Capitalist Manifesto, “In the industrial era, firms sought to differentiate products and services. The name of the game was adding perceived value through more elaborate brands, cleverer slogans, or more gripping ads. Difference, in contrast, is not about how differentiated our stuff is, but whether we can make a difference to people, communities, society, and future generations.” If all you want is to differentiate yourself, there are a million tips and tricks out there waiting for you. If you want to work more meaningfully, design thinking will help you lead the way.
If you enjoyed this, you’ll enjoy reading End Malaria, Nicholas Carr’s chapter ‘Build Bridges’ in particular.