Conversation design: turn-taking and no-debate rules

My guest is Jeanne Liedtka, Professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and an absolute rockstar of Design Thinking. She's the author of (most recently) Experiencing Design and joins me this episode to talk about getting started with Design Thinking and some pitfalls that can happen along the way as you move yourself and your organization towards not just doing design thinking but experiencing it - the road to mastery, moving past the surface level with Design Thinking.

Jeanne's latest book Experiencing Design is organized around a powerful framework that separates Doing vs. Experiencing vs. Becoming. This frame clarifies the transformational journey of an individual as they engage more deeply with Design Thinking.

If you want to deepen and expand your understanding of Design Thinking past the Stanford Design School Hexagons, I highly recommend Jeanne's books. Her 2011 book, Designing for Growth, co-authored with Tim Ogilvy, was a crucial moment in my introduction to the power and breadth of Design Thinking.

Jeanne and I have both had this experience with folks we've worked with, and maybe you have had it happen to you: you take a workshop and a lightbulb clicks on in your head... You find a new way of working that you see limitless potential in, that you want to implement and share with others.

People say, "I wish my team, my organisation, could work this way. Where can I start?"

And when you bring the tools and tips back to work, something falls flat…transforming how we work together is non-trivial. It's not just about the tools - the doing. It's about the mindsets - the experiencing and becoming.

Jeanne and I talk about getting started with the tools of Design Thinking, some of the pitfalls that happen along the way, and how learning in action is a really fundamental and challenging shift both for the individual innovator and also for the organisation as a whole.

Many people who I train in these new ways of working say their primary block is that others are not doing it too, that *everyone* isn't trained in these tools. And while I'd love to train the whole organization, it's not always possible, or even wise. My advice is usually, "Start really, really small, and do it in ways that no one can tell you no. Ask for forgiveness instead of permission."

The ROI of DT

Jeanne and I also talk about the real ROI on DT. Organizations focus on the visible ROI of Design Thinking - what we will see- first the outputs, the templates, the workshops, and then the innovation they hope for - moving the needle in the business.

But the real transformational aspect of Design Thinking is the way people are changed by the activities - what they experience and what they become. (check out the show notes for images of Jeanne's Iceberg model of the ROI of DT)

Design Thinking is, of course, doing activities like gathering data, identifying insights, establishing design criteria, generating ideas, prototyping, and experimenting...but each of them results in the individual person experiencing sense-making, alignment, and emergence - some of the real gold in Design Thinking.

And all the while, they are becoming more empathetic and confident, collaborative, comfortable with co-creation and difference, able to bring ideas to life, resilient, and adaptive. This is the more deep, more durable transformation that is possible with Design Thinking...this is the real ROI of DT.

MVC: Minimum Viable Competencies

One of Jeanne's really profound contributions in the book is the idea of "minimum viable competencies": the things we can look for in the people that we are trying to transform and bring on board to this new way of working. Can they listen to understand? Can they separate facts from interpretations of the facts? Are they comfortable with ambiguity? Can they respect other viewpoints? Check out Jeanne's book for a comprehensive list of MVC and a survey to help you benchmark your organization's skills.

Jeanne and I also dive into how Design Thinking catalyzes organizational change at the conversational level. For example, in the Emergence phase, she talks about thinking broadly about who you invite to the conversation, and she highlights requisite variety: the idea that the diversity of people in the conversation should match the complexity of the conversation, of the challenge we're hoping to solve.

Refer back to my interview with Professor and Conversational Cybernetics expert Paul Pangaro for a deeper dive into requisite variety and how it applies to conversation dynamics. Also check out my interview with Jason Cyr, a Design Executive at Cisco, where he shares similar reflections on diversity and coalition building in driving a Design Thinking transformation.

We also talked about how Design Thinking has a lot of tools, a lot of doings, that help with upfront discovery and testing, but when it comes to learning in action and alignment folks find it challenging to find turn-taking structures that help scaffold the process - in other words, they need facilitation skills: structures to help our conversations be productive: listening non-defensively to critique, exploring disconfirming data with curiosity, accepting imperfect data and moving on... these are not Design Thinking tools, these are conversation design tools. This is where DT bleeds into leadership and self-management.

Another point from our conversation that is really important is that different people have different experiences throughout the arc of the design thinking process. Jeanne has this wonderful diagram in her book about how the different DISC profiles of influencer, analyst, driver, and supporter will have different emotional arcs as they go through the Design Thinking process from beginning to end. I think it's really, really important to understand that we need to have empathy with all of our collaborators. We may have a great time with the upfront part of the process, like discovery, and have a really hard time during prototyping and testing. We need a diverse group of collaborators so that we can draw on their perspectives and balance our experience with theirs.

It's important to push against our own biases and to continuously ask, "What kind of diversity is needed for this challenge?" For that, I highly recommend you listen to my conversation with Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, who I spoke with earlier this year about Decolonizing Design Thinking. It's a really powerful conversation.

It was a great pleasure to be able to sit down and talk with Jeanne Liedtka, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did!

Links:

Jeanne's Website

Why Design Thinking Works

Jeanne's books

The Iceberg of DT ROI: from Jeanne's interview with Mural: https://www.mural.co/roi