Creativity is cornerstone to innovation.  The ability to generate and harness great ideas and put them into action establishes a platform for progress that is directly linked to innovative organizations.   Being deliberate in the creative process is essential to an organizations ability to apply innovation.

During a recent Ambassador webinar Pam Antil, Assistant City Manager, Palo Alto, CA and Victor Lauria, Assistant Chief of Police, Novi, MI reviewed the Design Thinking Process.  Design thinking is an approach to creative problem-solving explored by Tim Brown, President and CEO of Ideo a Research and Development company from Palo Alto, CA in his book “Change by Design.”  

Unleashing the design thinking process allows organizations to:

• Permit innovation to occur
• Erode artificial barriers
• Foster creative solutions
• Break down bureaucracy
• Share responsibility for problem-solving

Design thinking is a human-centered tactic that taps into overlooked capabilities of team members and uses their varying perspectives to explore different possibilities.  This approach challenges conventional problem-solving practices and converts need into demand.  Most importantly, design thinking starts with the user experience and looks at problem solving through the consumers lens.

We all know good and bad design when we see it.  Take for instance the experience of riding on an airplane.  Which of these images demonstrates good design that is centered on the customer experience?    

According to Brown design thinking belongs at every level of the organization.  “Design thinking is a collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and a viable strategy.”  Brown says, that this is a human centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and creative in the solutions they bring forward.

And while design thinking is important to improving the customer experience, it is equally important for creating team synergy.  An example in government is the mimicking of private sector customer service models from banks and service center to improve the “window experiences” in government such as the DMV, or the permitting process.  Not only do these new approaches make the environment more friendly for the customer, it also removes barriers for knowledge sharing and promotes team unity.

Another important aspect to design thinking is the ability to effectively communicate to the customer.  Take for example this field sign used in Hawaii to express the dangers of bicycling.  The point was that there are hazards to bicycling on Hawaiian streets and the traditional signage was not getting the point across.  The point of this size was to capture the attention of cyclists and approve safety as a result.  

There is a perfect storm that is creating the need for design thinking.  The value is as much in asking the questions as finding answers.  The storm includes:

• Digital convergence
• Growing global influences on such things as competition, warming, terrorism, etc.
• Changing national economy
• Citizen/consumer confidence and behavior
• Governments need to do more with less

The storm establishes the essential elements to creating new design for old and new problems and allows for things to work better. It redefines the challenges facing an organization through reframing the agenda.  In the end, it is the notion of change or die that is driving the new process for design thinking.

The stages of design thinking as illustrated in this chart focus on three innovation stages (define, research and ideation) and four implementation stages (prototype, objective, implement and learn)

One way to unleash creativity is from the melding of perspectives representative of diverse backgrounds.  This can create an openness in your culture to ideas that are generated from different and non-traditional sources.  It also involves finding the strengths and passion people have and putting them into practice in unique ways to bring new thought and energy to old problems.

In Novi, MI city leaders used the Strengths Finder 2.0 to vette out the strengths of internal team members.  It supported the use of Venture Teams that combined varying strengths of employees to create teams for problem solving.  This methodology recognizes strength in diversity of perspective and experiences.  It also helps to identify idle knowledge and resources to share and collaborate.

Looking at the strengths and interests of team members creates an environment of sharing about oneself that people wouldn’t typically know.  According to Lauria and Antil, “If you want to get at the passion you have to go a little deeper than the role someone holds… knowing oneself and what people are passionate about and allowing that to come into the work can maximize their potential.”

The lessons learned in applying design thinking in local government is:

• Provides the opportunity to reach better public policy decisions
• Unleashes creativity and innovation
• Brings subject matter experts to the table – even if they are from another department
• Shared knowledge and resources thereby achieving increased capacity
• Becomes a more flexible and nimble organization
• Increases governments reach within the community resulting in more solution choices