The Bootcamp Bootleg (Stanford Design School)

Cover of the d.school Bootcamp Bootleg

Stanford Design School has developed a great tool for designers that is also of value to creative and innovative facilitators (and people facilitating creative and innovative processes).  The free PDF is full of tried and true methods to encourage people to identify and refine ideas.

Some methods from the Bootcamp Bootleg

Some of the methods are:

• Extreme Users - people whose needs and solutions are amplified by their situation.  Can the layout of a car's dashboard be improved by examining the dashboard in a jumbo jet or a nascar?
• Saturate and Group - plaster your immediate environment in cues about your project, using Sticky Notes or even miniature models; then group like-with-like.
• Bodystorming - move beyond discussing, sketching and imagining, and set up a situation and act out the situation in a range of ways.  (I am yet to get one of my groups to try out this technique - I find it intriguing.)
• Wizard of Oz Prototyping - I'm not giving this one away.  Go and find it and see for yourself what this is about, but first use your imagination:  What could this be?
• User Capture Grid - this is a method of collecting feedback along the way or at the end - a useful technique for every facilitator.

As well as providing detailed instructions for each method, the PDF provides some excellent general advice on how to facilitate sessions, including:  "show don't tell" and "embrace experimentation".

I encourage participants in a couple of workshops to explore these techniques for their own purposes.

You can download the current (2010) version here.

...Geoff
www.performancepeople.com.au

Design Thinking - Selective Application is OK

My friend Justin has complained about the time he frittered away reading various articles on the Internet after reading one of my blog posts.  He jumped from article to article, enjoying the reading, but re-discovering that it is easy to 'lose' considerable time in the endeavour.  (His complaint was tongue in cheek, I think.)

I recently had a similar experience - in reading criticism of the design thinking movement.  I was led from reading Helen Walters to reading Fred Collopy.  Fred writes about the risk of turning design thinking into an arcane art, as happened to systems thinking, a former supposed management panacea.

Fred writes:

Each of systems thinking’s various manifestations demands some degree of subscription to an orthodoxy (a particular view of just what systems thinking is). And each requires that the user master a large number of related ideas and techniques, most of which are not particularly useful on their own.

He then notes that this does not mesh with how we prefer to learn - a little at a time, trying things out and looking for surface validity (I added that last bit).  The 'tablets handed down by the high priest' approach appeals to some people - as I saw more than a decade ago among proponents of neuro-linguistic programming (not all of them, but more than I was comfortable with).  There is no room for critical thinking in the blind acceptance model.  It may get you a critical mass of adherents in the short term, but the behaviour change is unlikely to be sustained.

Fred goes on to encourage us to treat design thinking as "an arsenal of methods and techniques", and to provide "users of design thinking with 'trial-size' access to a growing body of knowledge".

The message here is that if you want to try out design thinking, just do it.  Who could deny that there is huge value in observing people interacting with your products, in order to produce better products?  The introduction to the the Stanford Design School's Bootcamp Bootleg states that it is OK to just do an exercise.  So go on, pick a page from the Bootleg, and do the exercise.

...Geoff
www.performancepeople.com.au

Design Thinking is Not a Panacea

Following my post Design Thinking & Facilitation, I continued reading and pondering about the concept of 'design thinking'.  I have been a 'practical rather than a theoretical instructional designer', and not a 'design school designer'.  So I am looking at this topic from the outside.

I guess I am interested in design thinking because I am interested in what might help my clients and my students produce better products and services, and better organise the work they do.  I am surprised at some of the criticism I have read about design thinking.  I really like Blanchard and Zigarmi's Situational Leadership Model, but I wouldn't throw out Colonel Tom Kolditz' concept of 'leadership identity', and I recently started teaching adaptive leadership, but I still wont throw out my materials on the other two topics.

Similarly, in strategic planning, stakeholder analysis and SWOT analysis are complementary, not contradictory.

So I cannot see why anyone would treat design thinking as the sole and ultimate solution to business issues.  It is another tool.  (I nearly wrote 'just another tool', but that might devalue design thinking.)

Helen Walters has some excellent things to say on this topic.  She is interested in Steve Jobs' approach to achieving greatness at Apple.  She quotes him as saying, "It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want."  Implying that observation and experience are not sufficient for product innovation and excellence.  But he does not seem to be suggesting that his designers ignore the consumer.

Helen writes "beware the snakeoil salesmen who promise you’ll never take another wrong step again if you buy into design thinking".  This is useful advice.

The need to choose between a range of tools, and to combine them to get a good outcome, seems obvious.  Beware not to fall into 'silver bullet thinking', seeking one tool to solve all of your problems.

...Geoff
www.performancepeople.com.au

Design Thinking & Facilitation

Message From andymangold, who says, "Design is much more than my job." 

If facilitation was design, how would you do it?

The 'design thinking' movement is infiltrating business and management.  Some examples include:

• The increasingly popular TED Talks put design alongside technology and entertainment when discussing 'Ideas Worth Spreading'.
• David Kelley of IDEO is an evangelist for design thinking; including in the magazine Fast Company (another forum bringing together design and business concepts) and in a video at the Design Thinging blog.
• Care of Edward Tufte, and more recently David McCandless, visualisations bring business data and often social data into the design realm.  For more on this, Cameron Chapman has posted a list of 50 Great Examples of Data Visualisation. 

My friend Simon Terry introduced me to Edward Tufte and his excellent book Visual Explanations many years ago, which incited the curiosity about visualisation and design that has led to this post.

Design thinking is about shaping people's experience.  It is a very user-centric approach.  It is about colour, movement, emotion and involvement.  It is also a process - from idea to implementation and beyond.  And it is hyper visual.

For the facilitator, there are some useful ideas here, including:

• Focusing on the user, or in your case, participant.  Shape the session around their wants and needs.  Or better yet, hand the reigns over to them.  (I have written about doing this with sticky notes and telling organisational stories.)
• Use colour.  Black markers on a white background may give a retro monochrome look, but is not particularly interesting, and you will struggle to distinguish between different pieces of information (such as pros and cons or headings and key points) in a single colour. 
• Use movement.  You don't want people to sit still too long, and don't stand or sit too long yourself.  Movement keeps your blood running, and creates dynamism.
• Emotions are tricky for the facilitator.  However, they can also be powerful in drawing people in, and in making an experience memorable.  Ignore the value of emotion at your peril.
• Involvement is about getting participants to participate - they are not an audience, so don't treat them as such for long.
• Many times when you facilitate you are seeking new ideas, or at least trying to lodge new ideas into the minds of others.  There are many processes for doing this, from brainstorming and flowcharting to experiential learning, such as imaginary and real simulations.  For some great ideas, see the Stanford Design School's Bootcamp Bootleg, a free online resource.  The Creative Whack Pack is also a great resource for identifying new ideas, transforming ideas, and evaluating and implementing ideas.
• By referring to 'implementation and beyond' above I mean that implementation is seldom an event, it is an ongoing process that can continue after the session is finished. 

There are a lot of links in this post.  If you only have limited time, I commend to you the article about David Kelley in FastCompany, in which he describes why IDEO started using the term 'design thinking', and the TED presentation by David McCandless which shows an amazing way to appreciate really big amounts of money.

...Geoff
www.performancepeople.com.au