We know that the concept of education has changed and also the opportunities to obtain knowledge. In this same context, the work environment requires skills to adapt and face new challenges, creativity being one of them.
Creative minds that lead complex scenarios are increasingly indispensable in our society, people willing to propose and create solutions for new needs. However, people undervalue the skills involved in creativity, so they treat them as a “nice to have” rather than a “need to have.” This mindset must also change.
DTSWE ™ firmly believes in transmitting the necessary initiatives and conditions to thinkers so that they strongly trust in their abilities and use the power of ideas to transform the world, with the aim of impacting people and making their communities a more prosperous and happy environment.
Backed by more than 100 years of science and design, our Training Plan for the Last Decade is the first to help you stimulate creativity and turn the factors that limit it into learning experiences with high standards of autonomy, diversity and transcendence.
Design Thinker Attitude Prism
When you adopt the design thinking prism in your life, you already have a competitive advantage – a practical obsession with the possibility and consequences of innovation. That is the magic of Design Thinking. We are all creative to a greater or lesser extent, and the most exciting thing is that we can all develop it.
Design Thinking is:
- A human-centered methodology (human)
- A methodology based on specific environments and own needs (holistic)
- A methodology that uses tools that promote collaborative creation (co-creation)
Its primary objective is to create a product, service or experience that people want (desirability), has real potential to be useful (feasibility), and can be easily or conveniently built in terms of technology (feasibility).
Being a great generator of innovation, it can be applied to any field, the only limitation is our imagination!
“Design Thinking is more about seeing possibilities, than solving problems.”
Caro Salazar, CEO and President of Design Thinking Sweden ™
Founding Principles
The essence of the Design Thinker is based on 3 principles that we practice in our methodologies to train your creative confidence. It is a personal transformation that is divided into exercising, communicating and sharing ideas, where they enter thinking that they are “not creative” and leave feeling full of creativity.
We always fail to win
Let’s be clear: failure is not a good thing. It is not a goal. It is not a desired result. Failure is lack of performance. Failure is the opposite of success. Failure can also be an antidote to arrogance or exaggerated self-confidence.
The first thing that stops us from being successful is the fear of failure, then the fear of ridicule, and finally the fear of being humiliated. But what if that was a culture? If you could fail and also be successful, how would you feel? What if your organisation included failure as part of the growth of its executives?
“What is not exercised, it atrophies”, I like to say. Learning does not come from failure, but from the analysis of failure, change, and then attempt. This knowledge improves the chances of functioning successfully in new situations.
Obviously, being successful is a lot of fun and it has its rewards, but what about failing? Starbucks is a millionaire failure that has applied its mistakes all over the Glocal world, and we love it.
The Starbucks concept was formed by Howard Schutz, president and CEO, when he had the idea to model stores after Italian coffee shops with the goal of providing a new experience for customers in the United States.
Although Schutz’s idea was a good starting point, what we know today evolved through thousands of experiments, tweaks, and revisions along the way. In the original shops, the baristas wore bow ties, the menus were mostly in Italian (and it annoyed customers for being that way), non-stop opera music in the background, and there were no chairs.
Taking it as an example, let’s redefine the goal to find out how to succeed, not how to fail. Isn’t that what innovation is all about? Understand if a new idea, product, service or process is viable?
The faster we imagine, the sooner we can decide to stay the course, correct or throw away our failure, and move on with a great opportunity to have failed. Knowing that we work with failure, we go further with the “Decalogue for Freedom of Creation”:
- Work is designed on real projects or problems and their learning
- The most disruptive ideas are provoked through Ideation Sessions, through divergence techniques and we use error to turn it into an experience
- A radical community of “losers” work together (it is sometimes the joking term that we use in the sessions), we get together to work on the ideas from a very healthy perspective:
- I don’t judge an idea
- I do not criticize an idea
- I do not advise anyone on an idea
- Convergent thinking is used to select ideas and create community
- Work with habits and creative methodologies that allow us to think in a radical way
- Allow for metacognition and creative destruction to rebuild through disruptive innovation
- Study the great failures in Outbrain Sessions: we learn from Tesla, Virgin, Starbucks…
- Model failure through respect, humility and perseverance, as well as providing a suitable and comfortable environment where the group is capable of successfully failing
- Gamify the experience of failure and work with Storytelling to learn from it
- The goal should not be to glorify mistakes and catastrophes, but to cultivate the ability to adapt and learn from them, and we call that Serious Play
We build to think and feel
In 2019, Spotify wanted to better understand existing and potential listeners. They needed a durable and flexible solution that would work for autonomous teams around the world and in different parts of their products. To do this, they created personas.
What was interesting about the process was that they did not wait for personas to be fully completed before sharing them, and they tested their asset ideas in pilot workshops. The goal was to seamlessly integrate with their existing practices.
They separated the explicit needs (saying and doing) from the implicit needs (thinking and feeling), leaving genders, names and appearances (explicit) on the one hand, and keywords, colors, symbols and energy levels that reflect their enthusiasm by music on the other (implicit).
The latter is where ideas can be found, and that’s what you get with Design Thinking. We go back and forth within the learning curve (failing), where we prototype everything that is in the minds of our consumers and we turn it into tangible and experienceable ideas.
A prototype is an amazing tool to help you fail fast and learn fast. Build prototypes to learn, resolve conflicting ideas, start conversations, and manage the construction process.
It involves moments to grasp new possibilities (divergent moments) and moments to concretise an idea into something tangible (convergent moments). There are three stages in this phase:
- Inspirational – “What could it be?”
- Evolution – “What should it be?”
- Validate – “What will it be?”
It is forbidden to fall in love with ideas
The Design Thinking process is not linear. It begins with design challenge, moves to the empathy phase (interviews, observation or experience), then to the definition (or redefinition) of a problem or challenge, encompasses ideation (they diverge first and converge later), use prototypes ( build to think and learn fast) and continue with the tests.
When testing, let users play around with the prototypes, look at it, and listen to it. Small adjustments are easy to do, just make them and try again. Get closer to your users and, most importantly, never fall in love with ideas.
“But Caro, if the idea is the starting point to start playing, what do we do if we can’t fall in love with it?” Excellent question. Ideas are important, but not enough to stand on their own. They must be managed, sold and communicated clearly.
This exercise will become your day to day, only then will you master the art of detachment for the freedom of creation. You have to overcome the barriers of your comfort zone to stop needing, depending or living in fear of losing your mind and going into disruption mode.
Virgin CEO Richard Branson shared the words: “Ever tried.” In his words, “I have always failed. Never mind. Try again. Fail again”. Branson then revealed, “The quote is from the playwright, Samuel Beckett, but it could easily come out of your mouth indeed, as failure is welcome at the Virgin Company.”
Therefore, let us assume the idea of change and failure as vital. Because life is change, but also movement, and all of this is part of detachment.
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