Design Thinking for Business Agility

Thanks for the energizer. I hope I can have an awake audience, thanks to that. I run our design consulting business; it is called Monsoon Fish. I am not an agile coach or a business agility person like most of you are, so forgive me if I say something wrong about agility. When I was looking at agility, at what is happening, especially in the world of design, the world has never changed so fast, and it will never change as slowly as it is changing right now. There are huge amounts of change, not only in the tech space, but also in all kinds of other spheres. The customer is changing faster than ever; the competition is changing faster than ever. This is happening everywhere. The way HR works, the way talent works, is changing faster than ever, and it will keep changing even faster. The speed of change demands new ways for running businesses, which is where I think business agility is becoming an imperative.

A question to all of you: what was the whale before it was a whale? Does anyone know? A whale was a fox, actually, and it took the fox close to a million years to become a whale. You can still see some remnants of the fox inside the whale, but the fox would not have survived if it did not learn how to swim, how to go deeper, how to have bigger lungs and stay underwater for longer amounts of time, because dinosaurs were evolving, and they were eating all the smaller terrestrial animals. It was important for the fox to change, or it would have died. Businesses need to change, or they will become irrelevant, like the examples that she was giving. Nokia became irrelevant. They tried to change, but it was too little too late. I want to spend some minutes on this slide, on what kind of change we are looking at.

On the left, you have how traditional businesses work, how traditional business models, smaller or larger, have been working, and how the new business has to work. They need to move from control to purpose. This has a lot to do with how we are motivating and controlling our talent. What organizations have been doing since the Industrial Revolution is timing their talent, seeing that they are in at 9:00, they do not go out before 6:30, putting punch cards in place, having metrics that ensure that the talent puts in the labor that is expected. However, they were lacking purpose. In the Industrial Revolution time, they probably needed that. The worker at Ford did not need to know that he was going to improve people's lives; he just wanted to fix a few hundred nuts every day so that he could feed his family. But that is not how the worker thinks today. We are not at such a basic level of living. We need to drive people by purpose, not by control. We are out of that stage.

The second change that we are looking at is moving from value capture to creating value. A lot of businesses worked on capturing information or having access to certain markets or goods, and they would use that access, that value capture, to earn money. Look at a lot of traditional trading businesses that earned money like that. Something has happened to the ticketing industry; it has become so open and transparent that now you can see ClearTrip, you can see Uber trying to create value, rather than just capturing information and distributing it.

Moving from repetition to innovation. Businesses would say that if they keep doing what they are doing, they are going to keep making money; they do not want to change. But that has to change now, because the world has become open and transparent. Everybody knows how everybody else is making money. For instance, 50 years ago, you did not know how a steel mill made margins, whether it was in the ore, or in rolling, or in refining of the steel, but now it is all open. So, you have to innovate.

Moving from competition to collaboration. You see a lot of people trying to get together, and when they are getting together as businesses, they are creating more value for each of them.

From preservation to evolution. You do not need to preserve old processes, old ways of doing things, but you need to evolve and adapt to a changing world. I think this is the kind of change we, as designers, would like to see with companies and clients that we work with. It becomes a more innovative business in general.

When I am talking about business design thinking and business agility, what I am looking at is that if businesses are able to adapt quickly and efficiently to contextual changes, then and only then can they survive. This change would require empathy towards not only your customer, your client, your end users, but also internal people across departments, your colleagues, etc., and some lateral thinking, which is imagination and creativity. What I am going to do today is touch upon six mindsets of design thinking that will help make a business agile. In no way is this all-encompassing, or a definition of design thinking, or a prescription, but it is just six mindsets, and I am going to take you through a few stories that really represent them.

This is what design thinking is for us: it lies in the center of market desirability, business viability, and technologically feasible products and services.

The first story is about this product that we were working on. The product was a booking product. It is a Bombay-based startup, where they were looking to sell inventories of fitness-based destinations. So, you have swimming pools, badminton courts, football grounds, futsal grounds, and they were planning to integrate this and create a booking system around it. And they did that. They also included societies' gymnasiums, badminton courts that are available in housing complexes, etc. They created an inventory, and they were trying to sell that. When they came to us, they said that it was not working. They were gaining users through their marketing, but the users were not sticking around. So, we went and checked with users what they were really looking at when they wanted to become fit, and we learned that fitness was not about booking courts and deciding to go for a swim; it was about habits. So, we transformed their entire application to a fitness coach application, which would create fitness habits for the user, and through those habits, we started cross-selling fitness products. Fitness is not just about exercising, right? It is also about having the right food, having the right meals, and trying to create all of that as good habits. So, it became a habit creation platform, and to create that habit, we had sales opportunities within those habits. That is one of the stories where I thought we delivered a lot of value through focusing on the user and asking what value this user who is looking to become fit is really looking for. They are not looking at a solution that helps them book badminton courts; they are looking at something more personal to them, something that they can see themselves changing through, and only then would adoption happen. So, that was what we did in that case study. We constantly encourage our people to put themselves in the shoes of the customer, and if not, to go and talk to those customers and really understand the core value that that user is looking at.

The second mindset that I am going to talk about is "show and do not tell." A lot of us end up talking about what we do to our customers or product owners, and very little about showing them what is happening. In this one project, what we did was, we developed very quickly, and in design terms, quickly means on a daily basis. So, every day, a four o'clock kind of cycle, we had for about 10 days, where we kept showing, where we kept meeting people and bringing them together. So, we worked with game designers, psychologists, behavioral economists, graphic designers, patent writers, doctors, and product designers to come up with a solution. The problem was, there is a lot of counterfeit medicine out there in the market, and we were trying to solve the problem of supply, consumption, and even recommendation of counterfeit medicine. This was not possible to do, this system was not possible to evolve, from within an office, with only designers or management people sitting together. So, we had to collaborate with people from the pharma industry, from the medicine and healthcare industry, which was doctors, people from pharmacies, and designers. We were able to evolve a system that could not only derive from all of these inputs, but also pay back to each of those systems. The system could pay back to the healthcare system, could pay back to the patient, could pay back to the pharma, could also pay back to the insurance and hospital systems. Only then would it really work. For us to have that kind of understanding of all these systems, we had to get these people together in a room and work at it.

This is the third story. Essentially, what we started doing was showing people what they were going to get. At dinner yesterday, I was talking about this application. This application was a booking application, like Booking.com, where you could book hotels. We went and asked people how they plan for their vacations, and most of our users said that they do not start with booking hotels. They ask a friend where they went last time, and how it was, and a lot of their inspiration is from word of mouth. "It was really good fun; the views were amazing. So, that is why I want to go there," right? Or they hear stories about somebody doing bungee jumping somewhere, and they want to emulate that story. So, they are not thinking about a destination; they are actually thinking about an experience or a story. That is where we started. We started making this travel app depending upon how people get inspired to travel. Before you actually make the booking, there are a lot of stages to it. First, you have to decide to take a vacation, right? How do you decide to take a vacation? By getting inspired from a story, getting inspired from somebody else's memoir, to emulate that. So, that is where we started. We said that this is going to be an inspiration platform for people who are still deciding whether to go for a vacation or not. Then we started with, "Can we help you search for a plan?" That plan did not include just that you start from Hyderabad, go to Goa, stay there for four days, and come back, so we can do your flights and your hotel. It was more about where you want to have lunch, are you going to go by bike, are you going to go by train, which are the great chai wallahs there, which is a beach that you should not miss, etc. So, we started putting them on maps and creating travel logs out of those places. We also showed what other people's experiences, real people's experiences, were in those places. All of this was done through showing this prototype to a lot of users, and these users started putting in not only their inputs, but ideas on what could go into the product. So, we started doing this kind of Quora interface for bike riders, and they have very particular questions, like, "I am going to take four hours to drive from point A to point B, and it is a hilly road, so do you have a mechanic for this kind of bike in that zone?" You can ask this question only to someone who has already been there. A TripAdvisor or a Google Maps is not going to be able to give you that information. So, these people came up with these kinds of silly suggestions, requirements, or needs, and we were able to quickly put this together and show it to them: "Does this work for you?" This is how this product was built, and all these features came together and created this product. It is just about to get launched; the beta is already up on the App Store. It is called Dusty Rhodes. This was about the culture of prototyping. We created many prototypes for this app, very fast. The good thing with design is that you can, without actually building the product, quickly create these screens, show them to people, get their feedback, and then go ahead.

The fourth story I am going to talk about is demonstrating value. This is for an industrial IoT client of ours. They had a customer, and the client was collecting data across a lot of... They make battery chargers, and these battery chargers work at certain voltages, and this is the voltage graph of each kind of circuit in a particular location. We started looking at this and asking the users what they were really looking at, and the CEO of the client's customer said, "I do not know. Why do not you talk to my service engineer, who is on the field?" The service engineer was actually looking at this graph and trying to see where the error was going to occur, and he had developed his own methodology to do that. So, we learned that showing every data point possible is not actually going to help, and we started looking at it from the other side, and we said that this guy is looking for errors, so why do not we just show errors and then drill down from there? What happened was, since we started recognizing customer needs and demonstrating value to the CEO in terms of the number of hours saved from this service engineer recognizing the problem, it really gave us a lot of mileage in terms of getting the product right immediately.

I am a little short on time, so this is the last story that I am going to take you through. This is for an arcade game that we were working on, and I am trying to cover various kinds of domains. This is an arcade... There is a huge arcade gaming industry in the US, and it is not just for kids. Kids also play games, but even 70-year-olds play arcade games in the US. All our development team, the product design team, is in India, and the idea was, whatever we were building did not seem to really click in the market. So, the idea here was to get the team there. What we did was, we transported the engineer, the product designers, even the game developers, the mechanical engineers, the marketing people, and the sales people, all of them. We had an excursion there. We saw the entire industry, how games are made, how they are played, who is playing the games. This was not just designers going and doing their research, which is common, but we took the entire team, so that we could create empathy across the board. Therefore, now we are able to create successful products. This is a huge change in how the team is thinking around this. Bias towards action is extremely important when we are looking at business agility driven by design thinking. So, we need to have people acting rather than talking.

Lastly, this is not a story, but there is a method to the madness. In the interest of time, I will say that I will talk to you about what the method is. It is very close to what somebody was saying in the morning: it is between chaos and bureaucracy that you have to balance creative processes and agility. So, focusing on process is extremely important for our team, and being transparent in terms of their progress and encouraging everybody to reflect, learn from mistakes, and work with each other is important. That is the last slide, and I think for me, being agile, above all, needs integrity and ownership. Agility does not have time for hidden agendas. I see that this, for me, has been the biggest block with whatever customers and clients we work with. If people have agendas other than product goals or company vision, agility just breaks down, because people are trying to do things that are irrational, and the team cannot move faster. So, you have got to build a team that is in there for the purpose. They are not in there for the money, they are not in there for anything else, they are just in there for the purpose.