The empathy-based social technology that addresses biases and hampering behaviors
At Monash Health, a public health provider in Melbourne, a program called Monash Watch – that aims at using telemedicine to reduce hospitalization rates and keep vulnerable population at home - used detailed storyboards to help hospital administrators and government policy makers visualize the new approach in practice, without having to build a digital prototype, that would cost in terms of design restrictions, money and time. The practice is one of the seven activities of design thinking, called pre-experience. This activity calls for low-cost artifacts, often much rougher than the “minimum viable product”. Design thinking is a different approach, a mindset to organizing the work around innovation in order to unleash its potential, by putting empathy in the center of every activity. It provides a structured process and tools that helps innovation teams overcome the intrinsic human biases and behavioral norms. It actually does for innovation what total quality management did for manufacturing. The problem to be solved is the struggle that most innovation teams face, when it comes to realizing the greatness of innovation, although all know quite a lot around practices that stimulate new and creative ideas. The reason lies with the intrinsic biases and habits that protect certain assumptions about what could work well and what not. The first three activities of design thinking are immersion, sense making and alignment. They help in identifying the customer´s needs, the job to be done in other words. Certain exercises, like the Gallery Walk, help get deeper insights from the ambiguous data gathered during the immersion activity. Once the needs have been identified innovators move onwards with offering specific solutions and choosing the most attractive and feasible ones. This phase of the process includes the emergence and articulation activities. The testing experience phase comprises of the last two activities: Pre-experience and learning in action. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, a basic artifact is needed for the envision of the solution. This way the innovators will be able to go back and add design features or even construct a totally different product, based on the feedback generated from the experience activity. Learning in action minimizes the fear of change both for the employee and the customer. When bringing the solution to the customer, it is very important to take into consideration that, between the innovation teams and the users, the business ecosystem comprising of socializers (irrespective of their title, these individuals foster collaborations) and delivery (manufacturing, marketing, etc.) individuals, play a vital role. Last but not least, in order to apply design thinking successfully, it is important to understand that culture is the vehicle to results. A fresh approach to parameters like time, data gathering and management, customer needs, open feedback, ideas generation, empathy and team working, is essential.