Reading La boîte à outils du design thinking, by Emmanuel Brunet
Updated : april 2023.
The book reviews on referenceinnovation.com are based on the principle of serendipity (understood here as: stimulating creativity through exposure to content). For that reason, they never follow the book's outline. They comment on it freely, breaking loose from its structure.
A bit of history
Design thinking is already more than half a century old. It was born and grew up in mixed environments — hybrids of communications, artistic, and industrial worlds in particular. It moved into service activities late, notably on the back of a movement to professionalize the ergonomics of user interfaces for online applications. It is said to have inspired the co-creation sessions behind the invention of the iPhone, as well as a range of other concepts such as lightweight breathable sportswear or sharing-economy business models.
Situations
The situations suited to applying the design thinking method are many, hence its popularity. Fundamentally, it serves three ends: creating, improving, or reconciling.
Creating
Design thinking lets companies of any size invent a product or service by drawing on the creativity of their employees, customers, and potential customers. Co-creation is the very essence of the method — viewed as the best way to gather a maximum of ideas, foster employee engagement, and reach the best possible outcome. This principle aligns with one of Walt Disney's rules, which holds that an innovation emerges from the encounter of different personalities and profiles brought together around a common project (the Dreamer, the Realist, and the Critic in Walt Disney's terminology — see Innovate like Walt Disney). Organizations that have placed design thinking at the heart of their concerns therefore spend time soliciting and retaining their community. Le Colibri Frenchy, for instance — a French-made sportswear brand committed to the environment — has institutionalized the practice. From the "co-creation" page of its website, it lets potential customers take part in the product creation process. Athletes have the opportunity to answer questions posed by Le Colibri Frenchy's team, to test early prototypes, and to help the company refine products that will best fit their needs. The idea is that nobody is better placed to try out and judge a prototype than its future users.
Improving
When a product or service deserves to be optimized, modernized, or better aligned with current consumer usage, a company can rely on the design thinking method to get there. At DHL, for example, customers and employees are mobilized in a co-creation project aimed at gathering ideas to improve a supply chain.
Reconciling
Team cohesion — and the virtuous effects it triggers — is also potentially fostered by applying design thinking. Why does an organization struggle to innovate? You often hear that a lack of resources (economic, material, intellectual) is to blame, or that the innovation strategy lacks maturity. In short, a story of "shortfalls." More precisely, according to the article 5 Reasons Why Global Corporations are Struggling to Innovate (which in reality lists 4), the scale-up hurdle, an unsuitable corporate culture, employee stress, and a lack of alignment between the various teams involved rank highest among the reasons for the underperformance of an innovation dynamic — backed by quotes from academics and executives. And the first reason — the scale-up hurdle — is framed as an inability, on the part of those tasked with industrializing a prototype, to put themselves in the heads of its designers and prospective customers, in order to fully grasp its underlying logic and faithfully extrapolate it. So the 4 reasons would in fact boil down to a single one: the ineffectiveness of teamwork in the context of an innovation initiative. Design thinking can help solve some internal communication problems, rebuild bonds between teams, and raise the level of engagement. The method fosters listening and mutual understanding, for instance through play.
Doing design thinking without knowing it
Many innovators practice design thinking without knowing it, or without admitting it to themselves. As soon as an active community of witnesses from an ecosystem is at work, and goodwill and trust in human creativity are foregrounded, there is a "suspicion" of design thinking (just as there is suspicion of lean startup, or other variants of trendy movements). To confirm it and distinguish it from other approaches, you need at minimum to add a playful dimension and to consider the presence and contribution of a professional designer invited to the party. While it is not strictly indispensable to invite a designer to every design thinking workshop — just as it is not indispensable to invite every expert ultimately required — you will nonetheless have to engage with such a specialist at some point in the innovation cycle. In another book, Tim Brown — a key author and practitioner on the subject — notes that the development of design thinking has done much for the recognition and valuation of the designer's craft inside companies, including in unusual contexts where designers had not historically — or not naturally — had a place at the table.
How does it work?
The method is therefore characterized by a triptych — community, play, design — that develops an ecosystem's creativity. It comes at the right time, since a sizeable share of French employees (40%) feel their employer pays too little attention to what they have to say (according to a Qualtrics-Augmented Talent survey reported in an article by Fabien Soyez for Courrier Cadres in July 2021); and more than 20% of them think the company listens more to its customers than to its employees — which can be read as good news if you consider that the customer is always right, but which nonetheless reveals, in light of the other statistics provided, a failure to recognize the asset that an employee suggestion represents. The book's author specifies that a project team is typically composed of 6 to 9 people, including of course the employees who need to be heard, but adds that this circle should not remain closed. Suppliers, contractors, and friends are therefore also welcome, just like customers and potential customers (i.e. prospects).
The project team and the creativity room
The project team represents the community's varied viewpoints. It explores possibilities without restraint through play and locks in its conclusions through design. Where there is play, there must be materials and a place suited to a playful activity. A "creativity room" can be equipped with salt dough, paint, colorful objects and supplies, building bricks — and there is a risk that some participants will react badly, refusing to indulge in childish things because the place reminds them of their children's kindergarten. A negotiation then sets in. It can be fertile, provided the rules of the game are clearly stated and the link is never lost between, on the one hand, this place and its materials, and, on the other, the reality of the company, the customer, and their ecosystem. A drawing or an assembly of differently-coloured modelling clays should not be purely abstract — it might represent, for example, an electronic box equipped with buttons, screens, sensors, and speakers, or a symbolic association between complementary skills, or a process and its steps (these are just examples, and this list makes no claim to be exhaustive). It will then be up to the designer (professional, amateur, or apprentice) to transform this vision into a representation closer to a possible reality.
Example of application: eating one's spoon, or edible cutlery
The benefit of bringing complementary skills together in a single place is the same as in an agile-organization context: things move faster. Provided you go through the right steps in the right order. Take the example of a real company and visualize the application of a design thinking approach to its context, step by step. Koovee, founded by Tiphaine Guerout and Johanna Maurel, offers an "obvious-in-hindsight" product: edible cutlery. Starting from a blank page, how do you arrive at generating such an idea and at the broad outlines of its implementation?
Step 0 : objective and criteria
Let's imagine we have travelled back in time and that a project team is meeting with the shared goal of seeking out a high-potential innovative idea that motivates them, together with the means to implement it. Meeting this goal means satisfying the fundamental criteria of desirability (fitting the expectations of a persona — a typical consumer profile), viability (the product's forecast profitability), and feasibility (the project's realism).
Step 1 : immersion and empathy
The first step consists in stepping into the customer's shoes. Two keywords take center stage: "Immersion and empathy." Team members must first succeed in placing themselves in the position of the targeted customer. To do so, they need to go and meet them, in order to better understand their needs, habits, and feelings. In the Koovee context, one can imagine that early feedback from respondents touches on a deep trend — particularly for the "foodservice professionals" persona: following the ban on single-use plastic cutlery in January 2021, foodservice businesses now face new regulations since early 2023, which prohibit the use of disposable tableware for meals eaten on the premises. Moreover, as several studies show (35% of French people willing to make efforts for the ecological transition; To relaunch the economy, the French are willing to spend more on local products), French consumers are increasingly concerned with ecological and made-in-France products. Lastly, by polling users of disposable cutlery, one cannot help noting that they are unpopular: they break easily and alter the taste of food. Two personae emerge: professionals (including restaurateurs, food-industry companies, and caterers) and the individual consumers who are these professionals' customers.
Step 2 : data organisation and analysis
In the second step, the gathered data are organized and analyzed. Additional questions arise, prompting new outreach to witnesses from an ecosystem that is beginning to take shape. Retaining this community of innovation contributors is a permanent challenge and likely a key success factor for the initiative. If this community is active, proactive, and communicative, it feeds the analysis process with growing precision — and with it, the relevance of the model being shaped.
Step 3 : ideation workshop
Then, third, an ideation workshop is organized. It unfolds in three phases: warm-up, brainstorming, and prioritization. Warming up means playing, breaking the ice. The game must be chosen carefully, depending on the personae invited — here, foodservice professionals and their customers. On this point, bringing the two personae together naturally moderates the session: the professionals are not only potential customers for the offering being defined, they also have their own customers in the room and must take them into account when voicing their expectations, favoring flexibility over demand — let alone authority (these last two attitudes, which correspond to imbalanced customer-supplier relationships based on power and intimidation, have among other drawbacks the effect of killing creativity). Brainstorming together means putting forward ideas, desires, plain remarks, and bouncing off them via the "yes and" method. "No" and "yes but" are banned by mutual agreement at the start of the session — or even earlier, when prospective participants sign a charter including that clause. This second phase yields a list of products and services with neither hierarchy nor feasibility judgment. The prioritization phase orders this list by scoring each item along the axes of desirability, viability, and feasibility. We can wager that at this stage, the idea of eating your fork lands at the top of the list.
Step 4 : prototyping
The fourth step is prototyping. The first specimens of the product come to life. Even if they are not perfect, they are already served up (literally, in this case) to community members so they can sink their teeth into them and provide detailed feedback. The critical size of such a community typically ranges from 100 to 1,000 correspondents. By integrating feedback from potential consumers, the prototype will evolve to become, little by little, ideal. The sizes, tastes, and textures of the cutlery are not trivial and must match expectations stable enough not to have to keep changing them every other day.
Step 5 : implementation
Finally, implementation starts with a scoping phase, specifying the volumes to be reached on a defined horizon, why and how, with whom, under what financing plan, and with what forecast profitability profile. A storytelling exercise is useful to visualize not only the final product but also the various stages of its industrialization, the measures taken to comply with applicable sanitary standards, and the different use cases. Rather than thinking straight to the final product, you can also start from an MVP (minimum viable product) in the sense of Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup) — that is, a minimal offering that meets the consumer's earliest expectations; the company then preserves the option to iterate at its own pace, later, to improve it.