Understanding Design Thinking - Part - 2 [Leading Design Thinking]

Leading Design Thinking

There are many types of leaders, some guide the team, some lead the team by putting effort, and some are good at making things happen. A good Leader in a Design thinking team should have the following four qualities.

• The first quality is the ability to frame a problem based on the inputs available.
• The second quality is to allow experimentation. While experimenting and prototyping, priority should be given to the hardest functionalities or features and fail fast methodology must be applied.
• The third quality is communicating ideas. A good leader must welcome different ideas generated by different members of a team and communicate them with the other members of the team to develop them.
• The fourth quality is collaborating with the team. It is important that the leader should work with the team to solve the problems. A good leader must make himself available to the team.

Skills of a Design Thinking Leader

This video helps you understand the qualities and skills of a design thinking leader.

Building the Team

A good leader must know the type of skills required to complete a team.

Often the team is so busy focusing on the needs and wants of the users, the problem and finding the solution that they forget the most important part of the team. i.e., knowing the team members and knowing the needs of each team member and their expectations from the team.

Team Leap Activity

• Team leap is a team activity to build the team trust and empathy.
• The length of team leap activity is about an hour. It is an activity where you focus on individual goals, working styles, pet peeves, etc.
• This activity is generally conducted during the beginning of the project when a new initiative starts in an already existing team when new members are added to a team to discuss the project objectives and know the working styles within a team.
• This helps in setting up norms in the workplace that the team is comfortable with.

The Common Goal

• There are different types of people in a team with different skills working on the different aspects of the problem.
• It is the Team Leader who has to set a common goal that every individual in the group should focus on.
• This helps in keeping track of the bigger picture and not deviating away from it.
• The team should agree on the problem statement and the reasons for solving the problem. This sets the stage for a successful design thinking collaboration.
• Mission Countdown is a technique of aligning the team in which rather than discussing the long documents the team meets up and summarizes the problem statement in four words, what, why, how and for whom.
• The team then builds a critical statement that works as a guide in every step of problem-solving, and every team member must remember this statement.