Leadership by Design

Leadership by Design

By: LaTrice Ross

Improving leadership skills could depend on the same thing that drives business success in today’s economy – innovation. Applying “design-thinking” to leadership may be the solution.

First, what is design-thinking? Tim Brown, President of IDEO, explains,
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from
the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities
of technology, and the requirements for business success.” It is a
user-centric methodology used to identify and solve problems.

Characteristics of a design-thinking leader:

1. Sees the world in terms of problems and products. This perspective
   includes information, artifacts, activities, services, systems, and
   environments.
2. Views self as a product. A leader viewing herself/himself as a product means adopting a designerly approach to her/his own attitude, behavior, and outlook.
3. Rigorously cultivates the abilities of a designer. These traits
   include: empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism and collaboration.
4. Deeply understands the process of creative problem-solving and knows how to act as a catalyst for creativity. Within the creative process, leaders should seek to be conduits, provocateurs, shepherds, and motivators.
5. Collaborates and communicates outside of PowerPoint. Design-thinking leaders think of new ways to engage groups.
6. Embraces ambiguity and seeks opportunity to use models and other ways to tame chaos and to create order. Leaders understand that they should embrace ambiguity and chaos but in doing this with a design-attitude empowers leaders to tame this through ‘designerly’ activities like modeling, sketching, and storytelling.
7. Prototypes visions, not just products. Design-thinking leaders should look for ways to prototype and test out different visions for their organization. This could include things like role-playing, or writing magazine articles about the future success of the company. There are always opportunities to “prototype” a more desirable future.

Applying design-thinking to leadership begins with three steps:

1. It’s about the people: Design-thinking becomes a tool to engage with people, find the purpose that is meaningful and as a result, it should
   generate a positive solution.
2. Be collaborative and participatory: Design-thinking involves radical collaboration and by bringing group members from diverse backgrounds to work together to solve problems. This allows for a diverse array of potential solutions.
3. Experiment: Experimentation in design-thinking gives you the ability to test ideas in a low-cost, low-risk, and potentially a high-reward format.

For instance, a Toastmasters club executive committee wants to apply the principles of design-thinking to identify solutions to better meet the needs of its members and thus grow the club. The executive team would begin keeping the members at the center of the problem. They would then work collaboratively to identify potential solutions, perhaps even inviting in club members to participate in the ideation phase. Once the potential solutions have been identified, the executive team would begin to experiment with the identified solutions.

Design-thinking can be used as a catalyst for creating more effective leaders, stronger teams and a collaborative culture, all of which potentially will have positive and far-reaching impacts on our professional lives.

References

Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin, Discovering Design, (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Buchanan, “Design Research and the New Learning”; J Kolko, “Abductive Thinking and Sensemaking: the Drivers of Design Synthesis,” Design Issues, 2010; V Papanek, Design for the Real World, New
York, (Pantheon, 1971).