This post is written by Randy Salzman and Jeanne Liedtka, authors of ‘Design Thinking for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector’.

  • The problem: Providing citizen-focused services is at the heart of governments globally, yet we don’t always deliver the best provision.

  • Why it matters: Citizens expect services that cater to them and their needs, and governments should be providing cost-effective, user-focused solutions.

  • The solution: A design-led approach that turns traditional methodology on its head to provide innovative and cutting-edge public services.

Using design thinking, New Zealand’s government is committed to ‘making smart choices easier’. Rather than focusing on penalising tax avoiders, the government seeks to understand why taxpayers make mistakes and non-payments, with the goal of simplifying tax paying from the citizen’s perspective. Similarly in Singapore, its government is ‘reimagining’ its philosophy on governance, seeking to break the grip of bureaucracy and its focus on following the rules to make solving citizens’ problems the priority. In Washington DC in the US, Health & Human Services’ Ignite Accelerator has used design thinking for a decade to invite HHS employees from around the country to take local leadership in driving innovative solutions to citizen problems.

More than buzzwords

Design thinking today is making thinking ‘outside the box’ and ‘being user-centred’ more than simply buzzwords in both business and social sectors. Combining the creative approaches of artists with the analytical abilities of managers and engineers, it helps to balance society’s need for innovative concepts with existing workplace, human and societal realities.

By immersing practitioners in the experiences of those they are designing for, design asks, “what if anything were possible?” before introducing constraint-driven thinking. Design-led innovators generate a portfolio of inspiring possibilities, unhindered by common idea stoppers like “that’s not how we do things” or “we don’t have the resources”, then let feedback from users determine which ideas rise to the top. They use learning from experimentation and prototyping to iterate their way to better solutions.

Design emphasises collaborative creativity using a structured, teachable and scalable process that makes innovation feel safe and achievable even in the most entrenched bureaucracies. It brings a simple tool kit that can change conversations across diverse stakeholder groups from contentious debates into thoughtful dialogues.

An ‘outside-in’ viewpoint

Design thinking doesn’t exhort its practitioners to ‘be creative’, it equips them with tools to understand and empathise with those they are designing for. In doing so, it helps innovators escape the biases of their own worldviews. That immersion in user experiences is the first, and key, tenet of design. It creates a shared focus on users that transcends parochial perspectives and organisational silos and helps create an ‘outside-in’ rather than ‘inside-out’ orientation.

Another tenet of design focuses on building team diversity – and not just in terms of age, race, or identity. Different professional backgrounds and thinking styles are equally important. Then it asks teams to stay in the problem space – however murky and uncomfortable it may be – so that solutions ultimately emerge from dialogue based on shared problem definitions and design criteria. Rather than ‘satisficing’ (picking the least worst solution a group will agree to), a team’s diverse repertoire and shared intent creates the conditions for the real-time emergence of higher-order solutions which are then tested in real-world experiments that acknowledge organisational realities while ensuring their ability to meet users’ actual needs.

A focus on what users really desire

Such an approach echoes the world of ‘fail fast and cheap’ thinking, more characteristic of start-up cultures than government, and conserves resources by keeping investment in any prototyped concept in line with the designers’ learning. Rather than ‘build it and they will come’, design thinking encourages careful attention to what users need to have built. Ultimately, it gets to successful solutions faster by slowing down the rush to fix problems before they are deeply understood.

This approach treats both problem definitions and solutions as hypotheses. Unlike traditional assessment approaches, design begins by collecting deep qualitative information rather than adhering to simplistic quantitative data. Early on in the front-end stage of idea generation, designers focus on deeply personal human stories and experiences in order to generate fresh insights that lead to new ideas. They then switch to more ‘scientific’ and objective thinking as design moves into testing.

Like venture capitalists (who research tells us expect only two in ten of their investments to survive), design-led innovators recognise that in a world of uncertainty one can not prove a new solution is right in advance – you have to learn your way to smart choices. And so knowing when to stop investing in any given idea is as important as knowing which ones to originally invest in. Being willing to “call your own baby ugly” as one of our innovators described it, doesn’t come easy. Yet, extrapolating from past data doesn’t work in a changing environment where the goal is to create a new future.

For those schooled in traditional analytic approaches, this can be a difficult transition. Even data-oriented MBAs are challenged in learning to be hypothesis-driven as they’ve generally been taught to start with the data they’ve got to solve problems, not go out and find the human information they actually need.

Over a half-century ago, Albert Einstein noted: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Design thinking seeks to restore that balance as humans face a future of increasingly thorny problems which status quo approaches simply can’t solve.

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