TGIW 001 ⎹ Design thinking beyond design
Dr Bo Kelestyn de-mystifies design thinking from a business and strategic standpoint 💡
🎉 Thank God It’s Wednesday! (TGIW)
TGIW: Every Wednesday, we will try to de-mystify design together and explore the unique relationship our guests have with design.
If you missed the podcast, it is the perfect opportunity to have clear takeaways from the interviews. It is also your chance to dive deeper into the podcast’s content and discover what has been said off the record.
001: You are reading the first issue of De-mystify!
This first edition is very special to me as it features Dr Bo Kelestyn. Award-winning professor and course director at Warwick University, she is also a design thinking and innovation consultant.
Bo has also been the first person that convinced me of the true business value of design thinking! I made a point of interviewing Bo for this first episode to give you the opportunity I had about a year ago to experience her pedagogy.
Co-create the newsletter with me and take part in the movement ⭐️
De-mystify is also the perfect opportunity to put into practice the design principles that we learn along our journey. I will be iterating and prototyping to make this newsletter tailored to your preferences! But for this, I need your help and feedback!
Answer this week’s poll ☺️ or scroll down to the bottom of the page.
🎙 On-Air
De-mystify is not only a newsletter, but a podcast!!! I interview designers, entrepreneurs, investors or consultants to understand their unique relationship with design. TGIW is based on my conversation with the guest. On-Air features the latest episode and the key message shared by the guest.
🌱 Design Upraising
Bo lets us explore her relationship with design and her path to the discipline. Bo comes from a business background and did a master's in Information System Management + Innovation. Design thinking was at first "just a fun way to solve problems and work with other people". She is now the course director of the master's that she did 10 years ago!
In the podcast, she walks us through her first design projects and the challenges she faced when stepping outside of the academic environment. It was the first time she felt she was lacking graphic design skills.
🎓 Design in Education
Eventually, Bo explains her decision to step into education, specifically teaching, rather than research only. Bo tells us what it means to teach a mindset rather than merely a set of tools. She always starts by empowering her students and letting them explore their own design thinking. She tries to lift all the creative barriers they might have and free their creative confidence.
Bo later reminds us of the distinct stages of the design thinking methodology and argues that although "empathise" comes first, empathy must be used all throughout the journey. Yet, empathy is a challenging concept to understand. Bo explains that it is about being truly confident in being vulnerable.
It was insightful to also understand how she applied design principles to her own teaching style by meeting students where they are, wherever it could be.
💡 Innovation Consulting
Eventually, in the third and last part of the podcast, Bo comes back to her innovation consultant role. She de-mystifies the relationship between design, innovation and entrepreneurship, three words almost used interchangeably and yet very distinct.
I have been intrigued by her mission to democratise design thinking as a mindset. She describes what innovation consulting is like as well as the obstacles non-designers face when using design thinking and how to overcome them.
Being a designer is first being able to advocate the value of his work. She confesses the problems she faces, the mentalities she has to deal with, and the biggest misconceptions outsiders may have about design thinking.
Bo shared her most precious piece of advice! Accept your vulnerabilities and ask your stupid questions! Science proved that the most brilliant innovators ask way more questions than they give answers
⭐️ Off The Record
Off The Record is to dive deeper into the relationship our guests have with design! I keep chatting with them after the end of the recording to gain exclusive insights into their work and the challenges they face.
The discussion is on:
💡Design Consulting
➗ Design Metrics
🥊 Designing for Social Impact
💎 Her advice to you
💡 How to provide design consulting services to a 100 years-old institution?
As mentioned before, Bo is also an innovation and design thinking consultant. Among many others, she has undertaken consulting projects for Warwick University.
I was intrigued to understand how easily the lines within a 100 years-old institution can be moved.
As a consultant, your role is to solve a problem. Large institutions struggle to communicate with their students and tailor the change to their needs. It is where design thinking comes into play. Bo’s mission was to gain insights into the change the students wanted to see implemented and report it to strategic management.
To accomplish this vision, Bo created the Warwick Secret Challenge while she was still a student. (Be the change you want to see in the world, they say! 😉) It is a problem-solving workshop where students work on problems their institution faces. The goal is to reach a collective understanding of the issue and build an inclusive and representative solution through a co-creation process between students and staff, audience and decision-makers.
The Warwick Secret Challenge has become a key methodology to tackle innovation challenges not only in Warwick but in the UK! Bo now runs internal consultancy projects for Higher Education teams (including at LSE, Oxford Brooks, Bristol or Exeter) that want to leverage design thinking to get closer to the student’s needs and desires. She teaches:
How do we design co-creation?
How do we train HE teams to adopt design thinking and use these tools?
The Warwick Secret Challenge scaled and started to address plural thematics such as Warwick Employability Challenge and the Warwick Sustainability Challenge!
➗ How do you define success for a design thinking mission at a strategic level?
If you are a designer in an operational position, you can evaluate your projects with qualitative factors such as aesthetics, feel and satisfaction ratings, but also with quantitative design metrics. It includes usability assessments such as Success Score, Task time, or Efficiency. Find more here! However, at a strategic level, how do you know that a design thinking mission has been successful? Are there any metrics you can rely upon?
Has it taught us anything that we have not seen before?
For Bo, the answer was crystal clear. "Have we seen, learned, noticed, or heard something new? Or discover other ways in which to capture data or to reach out to the intended audience".
In her experience, the answer has always been "Yes, we have!”. During her missions, there has always been something new discovered that will help employ better judgment and take decisions.
Design thinking helps you make the right decision faster at a lower cost! Indeed, your most valuable asset is your time. Having a better understanding of your audience, therefore, being able to prioritise precisely with more certainty that it answers your clients’ needs is invaluable for a business.
💡 What does a consultant bring to the table?
Based on the precious questions, we understand that a consultant will help a team to gain more insights into their users and processes. However, we can argue that this same team already have a lot of insights and know the tools and frameworks to leverage it.
In this respect, what is the value a consultant really adds having no previous experience nor understanding of a new business audience?
Design thinking always delivers! You look at the ordinary to see the extraordinary!
Bo affirms that having no previous understanding of a customer segment is the biggest strength of a consultant. It limits biases the teams developed. A consultant brings a fresh perspective to a problem. A consultant is the one person in the room that will be asking what many others consider to be stupid questions.
Bo insists that there are no such stupid questions but rather stupid answers. Asking the same question twice brings unique perspectives.
Innovation consultants will try to find what else could be better or different and be proactive in this respect rather than solving pain customers might be experiencing. It is not about reinventing the wheel, but how to make the wheel better.
They will help you get the answer that you would not have heard otherwise through more traditional methodologies.
💡 When do you stop asking questions and get your prototypes out to the world?
If the role of a consultant is to ask a lot of questions that other teams never asked themselves before, it can become quite overwhelming. It can make the decision-making process as well as prioritising a lot harder.
Bo tells us that you must get it out to the people as soon as possible! You should not be the one prioritising but let your audience decide.
People tend to work on their ideas and solutions for way too long! It is the way we learned in school after all, work on your own for a long time to submit it and at some point later in time receive a mark and some feedback to do better the time after.
In real life, put it out there to people the quickest as possible so that you don’t get lost in your own thinking! It will help you narrow down your choice and speed up growth and acceptance.
Be ready to kill your darlings 🔪
It’s a theoretical concept that says that your motivation to forgo a project you have already invested a lot of your time in is very low.
If you work on something for a long time and someone says: "Oh that needs change, it would be better this way…", your motivation to change it will be incredibly low because you have already invested all this time and effort into this idea.
Bo advises us that the sooner that you can get what you are working on out to the people, the sooner you are going to get to the final solution that you are ready to implement. It would save you a lot of suffering too from killing all your lovers 😉
⭐️ When is a lot of innovation simply too much?
I noticed that sometimes innovation is overwhelming for the users. Adding one feature on top of another might be confusing and detrimental to the overall usability of a product or service.
A design is ready when there is nothing else to take away!
Bo refers to Desing in Everyday Things, by Don Norman. Mr Norman tells us about Design Featuritis. A singular disease affecting successful products that kept implementing new features to the point it overcomplicated a once simple, elegant, straightforward solution. This article gives you a really clear overview and main takeaways of the book 😉
Moreover, she insists on the role of the designer which is to produce a good design and not only aesthetic features. A design is ready when there is nothing else to take away. Therefore, innovation framed correctly can never hurt since it focuses on the user’s experience and the usability of the product.
To make sure to add value through innovation, Bo tells us that must leverage prototyping as early as possible in the process. Designers are not thinking to build, but they are building to think! The sooner you start the co-creation of your product with your audience, the sooner you will reach the final version of it.
But realistically, at the end of the day, it comes down to your company and how they decide to allocate resources. Time, money and people will represent constraints to take into account. An organisation may have decided to invest in design but also to ramp up sales and marketing departments to accelerate growth. Balancing engagement in exploitative and exploratory activities is referred to as organisational ambidexterity. The greatest organisations find a balance between the exploration of new opportunities and their capacity to leverage innovation in business terms.
🥊 Design for Social Impact
We are always talking about innovation and design thinking in business terms. Bo has also taught Design for Social Impact at Warwick. I am wondering to what extent design thinking is a relevant tool to drive social impact.
Bo argues that design thinking is an extremely powerful tool for social and climate innovation rather than something that start-ups have taken ownership of to make money! For instance, Bo teaches design decolonisation and fosters in class a safe and inclusive working environment. She believes that the greatest designs give a seat to everyone at the table.
However, she acknowledges that designing for social or environmental innovation often faces constraints, such as a tight budget. Working with limited resources can also be empowering as designers have co-design with their intended audience. Design thinking becomes so powerful because you are creating with individuals that will use your design from day one rather than trying to push a beautiful design lacking inclusiveness onto the community that will struggle to accept it.
Bo loves teaching this module as she meets students from many diverse backgrounds trying to make an impact in their close environment. Framing Design Thinking as Designing for Social Impact help individuals that don’t want to be entrepreneurs to have an impact on their communities by providing them with innovative tools to rely upon. It makes it possible for people resistant to business jargon to learn about design and take it outside of the tech ecosystem.
💎 What is the one thing that contributed to your success?
Speaking to people, undoubtedly!
If she must attribute her success to one specific behaviour it would be reaching out! Bo invites everyone us to put ourselves out there and ask questions! Science proved that the most innovative persons had a larger questions-to-answers ratio! We all can leverage our speech, develop empathy, ask people for their perspectives and make our own judgments!
We were laughing at the number of design enthusiasts she contacted and bought coffee for when she was still at school! She remembers the many loyalty stamp cards that she completed and never got to use for herself!
🛰 Take It Beyond
Find all the resources our guests mentioned (and more) to supercharge your learning journey!
Reach out to Bo 💌
If you have any questions, reflections, feedback, ideas or projects you would like to share or discuss, Bo would love to hear from you!
Dr Bo Kelestyn SFHEA on LinkedIn
@BoKelestyn on Twitter
bo.kelestyn@wbs.ac.uk
bo@sprintvalley.com
My favourite quotes from Bo ⭐️
There are no stupid questions, there are only stupid answers!
The most innovative people have the largest ratio of questions to answers!
Designers are not thinking to build, they are building to think!
A design is ready when there is nothing else to take away!
Be the change you want to see in the world!
All the resources mentioned and more 🔍
Bo also made available for you a ton of resources you can explore here on Notion!
It includes (1) Tools to level up, (2) Design Thinking in Action, (3) Design Thinking in Higher Education, (4) Readings, (5) Critical Lens, (6) Mindful explorations and (7) Framing and reframing.
If I had one to recommend, I will recommend watching David Kelley on How to build your creative confidence 💡
David Kelley is the founder of the global design and innovation company IDEO. Kelley also founded Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as the d.school.
✨ What’s new?
Follow the De-mystify co-creation experience (aka the Co-Demystification Experiment)!
💡 Where are we at: We started to build a solid understanding of what is design thinking and that there is neither a single path to it, nor one way to leverage it in the workplace.
🎙 Next guest: Jess Cogswell, Head of Design at Rume Health (Boston). We will be jamming on her design philosophy, how she uses design to lead and the design needs in healthcare.
💌 Poll outcome: ?
💌 Be the change you want to see in the world
Every week, I will ask you one simple question to tailor the newsletter to your preferences. You can also leave a comment if you have more to say (or just want to say hi!).