Let’s get back on track with this blog series! Learn and practice the skills that will help you pick up from where you left off – whether it’s your career or business – after the covid-19. In this part of the series, let’s practice Design Thinking.

Parts of the process of overcoming challenges and crises are figuring out the problem and finding a creative solution. To creatively solve complex problems, many educational institutes have come up with the well-known Design Thinking process. But, in this blog, let’s refer specifically to the concept from the Stanford d.school.

Design thinking consists of 5 elements:

1. Empathizing with your customers
2. Defining the problems they’re facing
3. Ideating possible solutions
4. Prototyping the solution
5. Testing this solution

Although it looks like a straightforward process, it is more cyclical, where at any given stage, you may have to cycle back for review.

Understanding this process is one thing, but how do we effectively apply it in our work and business? We can apply design thinking to understand our customers and provide them solutions. But, we can also do the same with our colleagues or personal connections. We need the right skills to put our understanding of the process into practical application.

Here are the skills to develop.

Empathy

Empathy is part of the design thinking process, and it’s about understanding the needs of the customers. It is a great and much-needed skill because it helps you understand others better to know how to help them better. Not only does it help develop and maintain relationships, but you are also able to provide the other person quality solutions to the problems they bring to you.

Analytical Skills

The gathering of information during empathy doesn’t end there. We analyze the information to create a better understanding. This helps will also help in defining the problem and also understanding the results from the prototype and testing stage. The main question we should be asking here is: how do I take the learning from empathy sessions into information we can use to solve problems?

Creativity

Solving problems isn’t logical alone – it requires a level of creativity. To solve problems, we also require some creativity as it helps us expand our options and opportunities. In a world where anything can be automated, creative problem-solving is what sets us apart from machines.

Team-work

The entire process of design thinking isn’t a one-man show – it requires a team to bring in different ideas into one cohesive working solution. Additionally, working in a team opens up new possibilities.

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