In this post, I’ll comment on the Design block of our SOS academia.

Keep in mind, too – the lessons in SOS are meant to flow into each other; even though the main topic has shifted from Leadership to Design, the concepts and tools introduced/ revisited from the previous academic block are still valuable – if not outright critical – for effective personal/ team development during this block.

Now, where the purpose of the Leadership block is to help students better recognize what leadership is and how to develop themselves and their team members, Design’s purpose is about problem solving.

…In my opinion, this should be provided in primary education, especially as the problems we face globally are less and less clear cut over time. Hopefully, those of you that have attended or will attend SOS soon will agree. For those only reading this and not getting to attend SOS, I’ll try to provide a decent explanation.

Design’s lesson structure is built around the five phases (not steps) of the design process as taught at Stanford’s school of design (apparently more commonly known as the d.school):

• Empathize / Analyze
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

There’s also a piece called Strategic Messaging that weaves throughout. I’ll tag that onto the back of the five phases.

Like the other post, these phases essentially try to answer a series of questions to address and attempt to solve problems:

What do people think is going on, and what is actually happening? What would be a nice outcome – regardless of the limits of reality? What might we do to bring about that outcome?

What consequences might ‘those things we might do’ have? What actually happens when we try some of these things? Did we do what we meant to do, and did that action we took have the intended or expected result?

Empathize / Analyze

Before you even bother to step into the phases of design, you need a prompt in the form of a problem. I recognize that my personal professional environment comes with a lot of unique features that might not be relatable to many readers, so rather than try to dive into an example, I’ll be fairly general. That said, if you have specific questions or thoughts you’d like to discuss after reading this, there’s a nice comment box that will facilitate us having a discussion!

That said, a general example that anyone in the US is probably at least a tiny bit aware of is the issue of understaffed offices/ job sites. What do people think is going on, and what is actually happening with that?

During the Empathize and Analyze phase, the goal is not to come up with a solution. Instead, the point is to try to get information that will allow you to understand the perceived problem and the need that needs fulfilling. Note that this is not understanding the problem or fulfilling the need. The emphasis is simply on gathering information.

Research, surveys, interviews, and observations are part of this phase. There may be statistical information that can be used to provide context into understaffing. I am not going to check if these actually have data tied to them, but my imagination suggests that there is stuff out there if I were to hunt it down.

• The COVID-19 pandemic event may be tied to this massive understaffing problem.
  • Some people have died, resulting in literally fewer employees.
  • Some people had loved ones die, causing…
    • A gap in home care for other loved ones.
    • Recognition of the frailty of life, causing early retirements.
  • Unemployment payments proved better than employment payment for some.
  • Some people may be afraid to be in public places of work.
• Understaffing may have led to burnout of some remaining employees, leading to burnout, leading to more understaffing.

Anecdotes and opinions on the internet perhaps fall somewhere between surveys and interviews:

• People just don’t want to work anymore.
• People are lazy and want more money for no additional work.
• People do not deserve more pay (often accompanied by sentiments similar to ‘I always got by with x pay, just deal with it’)
• Mental health is more important than financial health
• People aren’t paid enough for the work being demanded of them
• People aren’t paid enough for the skills they’ve developed

This sort of cursory analysis provides information that can help shape the problem. Maybe the problem rests with potential workers. Maybe the problem rests with employers. Maybe the problem rests in the negotiations/ interactions between the two parties. Maybe the problem is at a societal level. Maybe the problem is systematic. Maybe there is a misalignment or misunderstanding somewhere across the field of potential sources.

The perspective of the solution’s stakeholder(s) will have a gigantic impact on the next step, but it’s still valuable to ensure you have some perspective from those with indirect stakes in your solution, too – call it the Butterfly Effect or universality or whatever, sometimes there are not-so-obvious connections that make The Difference.

Define

After you have as much information as time, money, or expertise allows you to access, clearly identifying a problem should be possible. This phrasing is intentional: the above example regarding understaffing continues to help us examine this.

While complaints might be about understaffing, the problem chosen for solving varies depending on who you are trying to support. 

For example, if you are an employer, it is within your interests to maintain employees to execute work. If you are understaffed, your ability to complete work is limited, both from the perspective of quality (our employees have sufficient experience to do the work and do it well) and quantity (the number of employees we have is sufficient to address the amount of work demanded in our organization). 

However, if you are a potential employee, your perspective is likely to be different: it is likely within your interest to complete work, but just as much as employers may preference getting the most work out of someone for the least amount of pay, an employee economically may preference completing the minimum required quality and quantity of work for the most pay. Having fewer coworkers but no less work to complete in the organization may encourage employers to add quantity to an employee’s tasks, but an employee will either wish to minimize additional work or demand greater pay because of it. If an employer then denies some form of compensation, the simple economic interests of the employee become disregarded and disincentivize the employee from performing work at this organization…

I think I started going on a slightly unrelated tangent, but my point is that the different parties examining a situation resulting from the same source(s) may have very different perspectives. Therefore, they are likely to have very different problems to solve.

That prompts the crux of the purpose of the Define phase. After gathering information via Empathy and Analysis, your team will Define what problem will attempt to be solved.

The purpose of Defining the problem is to focus your efforts, limiting your field of view to minimize distractions, and optimizing your resource allocation.

Once your clear problem is established – once you have tried to understand, in another turn of phrase – you can then begin to take steps to solving that problem.

Ideate

After defining your problem, this phase is all about coming up with ideas for solutions – finally.

Of course, the beginning of this phase is still not about specifying a solution. Ideation starts with generating several ideas and ends with ideas that can be tried.

In developing those ideas, your team wants to use the information that was gathered and analyzed and with regard to the defined problem to think up as many ideas as you can without any regard for limitations.

This piece of the process is often difficult for most people because it requires us to let go of a lot of our grounded expectations and to embrace our imagination. No limits means no limits: if money was not a concern, if technology could instantly be developed to execute the idea, if the necessary people and their skills were handily available, if the laws of physics needed to be violated, if ethics were not a concern, if biological mandates were not in play, what ideas can you conjure up that would solve the problem?

After you collect those ideas, you categorize them based on their payoff and difficulty: 1) low payoff and easy; 2) high payoff and easy; 3) high payoff but not easy; 4) low payoff and not easy. Obviously, this also requires a little thinking as to the measurement of payoff and difficulty, but that will be based on your situation: what resources do you have available and how much of an impact would the ideas have if executed?

I would also posit that this is probably the most fun phase of the design process. Once you’ve done it, you can take those ideas and begin to prototype and test them.

Prototype and Test

After you’ve identified a potential problem and a potential solution, the time to move from idea to action comes in the Prototype phase. Due to the nature of the Prototype phase, the Test phase is also included in this section because the two phases often rapidly transition into one another.

In executing your idea for a solution, you have a lot of options. It’s likely that you’ve only identified how you want something to look in the end, and it’s up to you to figure out how to bridge from Nothing to That Solution.

The questions that should constantly resurface during the Prototyping phase are “Did we make what we meant to make?” and “Does what we made do what we meant it to do?” The first question ensures that your prototype is what you designed, whereas the second question uses Testing to attempt to solve the Defined problem.

These phases will prompt a lot of visits to previous phases of the design process:

If the Prototype design was off, maybe we made mistakes and now need to Prototype again.

If the new Prototype is still off, maybe we need to Ideate again.

If our Tests do not seem to solve the problem, maybe we poorly Defined the problem.

Maybe the Tests prove the efficacy of the product to a great extent but we’re just barely missing the mark on actually solving our problem; perhaps a bit more information needs to be collected via a revisit to the Empathize/ Analyze phase.

Even after a Testing [phase ultimately concludes, the nature of complicated and complex problems in our modern world adds great value to ensuring that lessons learned are collected for future use – perhaps a method of test or the rationale behind a test change could be used for solving another problem or avoiding wasting time on a new project.

Strategic Messaging

A related piece to the Design process is interacting with stakeholders that might facilitate or benefit from your team’s efforts.

The ideas in this lesson are that big and small things can be communicated to critical effect. This is also a callback to the leadership development block, particularly with regard to telling stories – it’s one thing to be the shadowy hand of altruism and an entirely other effect to make a connection with a community.

That said, there is more to messaging than writing out a memo or talking shop. Consider the Empathize phase: sending out a survey will get you information to support Defining a problem, but sitting with individuals and learning about the obstacles to taking full advantage of lunch time or what have you gets you much greater fidelity information. Plus, when it comes to the nuances of Defining your problem or when your resources may be a bit more limited than you would like, who do you think will be more invested in engaging you with support? The faceless survey respondent or the secretary with whom you took the time to directly interact?

I added this to the end as a little bonus item, so let me be sure to add the sort of questions this lesson seeks to answer: Who comprises our audience? What do we want our audience to interpret? Do our words and  actions align with each other? Are our words and actions interpreted as intended?

Conclusion

This is my loosely organized summary of ideas taught during the Design academic block at SOS.

I want to convey that this was my absolute favorite segment of the entire class. As I mentioned before, this is the sort of thing I wish was taught in OTS and absolutely should be taught in any leadership course. While this may sound like a process for creating products or processes, it’s absolutely a way to address human concerns in our various offices or businesses.

Thanks for reading through yet another post! I hope this serves as a decent cliff notes or provides small insights that might be useful to anyone headed to SOS. Regardless of intent to attend SOS, I hope this proves to spark some curiosity or interest in the overall Design process; it really is a powerful tool to have as a leader.

Plenty of resources are out there, and I can help point to a few of them.

With that in mind, always feel free to comment below with thoughts, questions, criticisms – anything!