Design Thinking is a concept that was introduced to during my MBA at Griffith University. The purpose is to evoke a human centred and creative solution to a problem, or to recognise the fortune of an opportunity.
In exploring this concept, I discovered Design Thinking for life, a concept which founded an entire school for alternative thinking at Stanford University (see: http://lifedesignlab.stanford.edu/). Design Thinking for life encourages you to map out your wildest dreams and brainstorm ideas to create them. At the tail end of realising a life transition period and the beginning of a new era in discovering the world of business, the application of Design Thinking for life was perfect for my current life stage.
While on this journey, I attempted to invest in new mindsets including being curious and open to re-framing, collaborating with others and having a bias toward action. Simply, the goal was to get curious, talk to people and try stuff. The Design Thinking model requires that five stages are traveled through on the journey toward creative outcomes. These five stages include - empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. The starting point may be something as simple as, what do I want to be when I grow up?
Empathise
The empathy stage for Design Thinking is traditionally embedded in speaking to the people that have a stake in the problem or opportunity being analysed. These human discussions build an understanding of personal needs, experiences and values of the people affected. Appreciation for the human position allows more creative and sustainable solutions to be discovered, considered and implemented. In designing life however, the idea is to identify personal happiness triggers or some other form of measurable trigger that works for you. I used happiness because I associate this with contentment.
Now, obviously you can’t sit in the mirror and only empathise with yourself to progress through the empathy stage. So, you may consider a few exercises that I undertook -
1. Map experiences: consider 10 – 20 big (or small) moments in your life and note down how they made you feel. Note the things that triggered happiness for you.
2. Identify key values: sit for five minutes and scribble down your thoughts on what your values are, then identify 3 key themes from your scribble. From your key themes try to understand your top 3 most important values for life.
3. Survey your peers: seek the opinions of how others would describe you, their strong memory of you and what they could see you doing. Surveying others allows for a more rounded empathy stage with input from your peers.
4. One-on-one conversations: seek out conversations with people that are able to assist you to understand how others see you. Take notes when you are chatting with people and listen to how people really perceive you, not just how you think they do.
Some of these may be a little difficult to do but choose at least a couple to work through the empathy stage. The results may surprise you! Try to understand patterns of interest, find what ignites your excitement and create a list of potential opportunities for the next steps in life. This stage is the most important so make sure you spend time working through it.
Define
Once you have deeper understanding and clarity of your strengths, weaknesses, happiness triggers and fears, you can define your problem or opportunity. Essentially, re-frame your starting position. If you started with, What do I want to be when grow up? Perhaps your new point of reference could be, ‘How can I use what I have learned to create a career (or life) that embodies my strengths, improves my weaknesses and triggers my happiness?
Ideate
Then begins the process of ideation. An insightful mapping of all the crazy ideas that you could do in alternative lives. One way to do this is to challenge yourself to map three different versions of your life, looking forward to the next five years.
Life 1 is if everything goes to plan in your current career trajectory;
Life 2 is if life 1 wasn’t available anymore, this is your Plan B; and
Life 3 is your rockstar life - money and image don’t matter in this version of yourself (this is a version of Odyssey Planning).
To visualise each reality, draw a mind map on three separate pieces of paper and try to join the dots on themes, ideas or dreams for future you. I like to use coloured pens and drawings to help me connect things.
Prototype
Once the ideas are out on paper, it’s time to prototype the versions of your life that you want to live. This obviously can’t happen in the regular way of prototyping – building things with sticky tape and matchsticks, rather you must seek out experiences and conversations that align with the life you want to live.
Essentially, seek out future versions of yourself and figure out what a day in the life of INSERT DREAM LIFE really looks like. With the conversations, try to be selective. You want people that are really going to show you the nuts and bolts of what it’s all about, not just tell you what you want to hear.
Or better still, seek out experiences in your INSERT DREAM LIFE, and while doing so, look for the latent wonderfulness in your alternate futures.
Test (and accept)
After dabbling in a few different pathways, you should start testing your INSERT DREAM LIFE.
Importantly, the start of this phase should begin with a mindset of acceptance. The testing phase is not the time for dabbling. If you are constantly questioning what could have, would have, should have happened had you chosen differently, you will never be satisfied. If you going to test something, commit to it 100% and strive for contentment (and happiness).
Finally, and most importantly note that the process doesn’t end at the testing phase. Rather you will continue to look back to the empathy and prototyping stages and check in with yourself and others to see where things are at and if things could be different.
Keep in mind why you started this journey, hold your values true and believe in the power of human connection.
‘Be curious, talk to people, try stuff’ – Dave Evans
Happy designing!
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Special thanks to Professor Frank Pollard at Griffith University for introducing me to this concept and Stanford University for creating a whole school around design thinking. Both have helped shape this article and my pathway.
Some great talks to watch if you enjoyed reading this article:
Bill Burnett, Designing your life, TedX Stanford --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SemHh0n19LA
Dave Evans, Designing the rest of your life, TedX San Francisco Salon --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkvIwq7oxzM
Tina Seeling, 6 Characteristics of Truly Creative People --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgCdsERkqrc
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