Day 14

Change by Design

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, has written the book about Change by Design (2009). According to him Design Thinking is Human-centered: ‘The basic problem is that people are so ingenious at adapting to inconvenient situations that they are often not even aware that they are doing so. Our real goal is helping people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have’.

Observation is important too: ´When we observe people going about their daily lives, what is it that they don’t do or don’t say?´ as well as empathy, or as Brown calls it: 'Standing in the shoes of others'. Brown talks a lot about the importance of prototyping, because:‘Like every other kid, I was thinking with my hands…’. If you want to hear him talking about his book, we recommend you listening to this radio show.

Teaching Practices that encourage Design Thinking

Immersion:

Have students work together in small collaborative groups to do a deep dive into the subject/topic area. Ask the students to undertake research, observation and develop questionnaires or evaluate data to gain a technical, personal and community views on a topic.

Inquiry-based Feedback:

Instead of value-based feedback, inquiry based feedback coupled with observation encourages a more open-ended and in-depth approach to learning. Students are encouraged to minimise expressing their likes and dislikes, and encouraged to first spend time silently observing, and then asking questions prefixed by phrases such as "I noticed that...," "why," and "how."

Before this process begins ensure students brainstorm ways to gather information. For example:

• Research that includes eBooks, case studies, experiments, data, academic papers etc
• Observation that includes personal viewing, filming, online videos, documentaries, recorded interviews
• Questionnaires that includes personal questionnaires, online surveys, research and data including census, government agency information, non-government organisation data, OECD reports etc.

Synthesis:

Have students deduce interesting gaps to explore, problems to solve or opportunities to solve, using the information they have gathered from their immersion process.

Ideas on how to gain a new perspective

• Put visuals on the wall which relate to the topic but at the fringes of the core subject.
• Ask new questions. Create a how, when, why, what, who question and define the answers.

Note: Ask "thinking" questions – don’t make suggestions. Instead of asking questions to which there is a correct answer, ask students to create the problem. For example instead of saying"Does your girl need ears?" A thinking question would be, "What kind of music does your girl like to listen to? How can she hear the music?"

Students should pose their problem by first tapping into their own wishes and goals that might have real-life results or be largely theoretical and in end in the modeling stages. Such questions such as "How can we grow vegetables without using pesticides?" And, "How can we feed the world's population in a sustainable way?" Both encourage students to think divergently.

Questions, not suggestions, allow personal ownership based on observing, on experiences and on the imagination.

Zoom out:

Put the subject/topic in the centre of focus and scale out to the next logical layer. For example if the topic was endangered tigers of India, scale back and look at the life of poachers, the local communities, the black market skin/medicine customers etc. Explore each logical layer of influence as you scale back from the heart of the topic to develop a macro view of the subject.

Ideation, Prototyping and Feedback:

Have your students test ideas, solve a problem and extend their understanding without focusing on the ‘right’ answer. This part of the Design Thinking process

helps student to 'hold their ideas lightly' in order to review and gain feedback from other student groups and their teacher/s.

The emphasis is on thinking skills and mindsets that allow students to create early and often, adjusting the course of their learning and applying an iterative approach to outcomes that is tweaked from the input of feedback.

Note: Nurture a culture of divergent thinking. Encourage students to be choice makers. Ask students ‘what their work needs’. If a student asks for help, assist by asking the child to give several of their ideas to discuss..

Implementation or Display:

As ideas and defined the Design Thinking process moves to the celebration stage where concepts are shared. In this stage have students talk to the group about the changes they applied in their approach, what they reflected on, what evidence they found to support their findings and what new knowledge they gained or shared.

Useful resources

This free 'Design Thinking for Educators' toolkit, created by IDEO, contains the process and methods of design along with the Designer’s Workbook, adapted specifically for the context of K-12 education. It offers new ways to be intentional and collaborative when designing, and empowers educators to create impactful solutions. 

Stanford University Institute of Design has created many useful resources, such as the Design thinking for teachers The K12 Lab Wiki and Design Thinking Crash Course that helps you to run or participate in a 90 minutes long design cycle by redesigning a Gift-Giving Project. 

For you personal interest (LEADERSHIP 2), you might want to view the curriculum for the 6-week Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design -course that will introduce you to the concepts of human-centered design and how this approach can be used to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change.

Eco-innovators have also developed a range of educational resources for use in and outside of the classroom, these ones are though not free.

LEADERSHIP

Design Thinking in Leadership

Design Thinking argues very convincingly that we would need to provide more time for the discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation and evolution of ideas, both for students and for teachers. 

Instead of looking at what assets a company has to create a product, leaders who use design thinking first ask what their clients require and then identify how the organisation can fulfill those needs. Research, interviews and first-person observation identify problems that need solving, which in turn inform the products and services a company develops using creative thinking and diverse perspectives. For learning, design thinking could apply to how programs and learning tasks are developed and delivered. We shouldn't just teach design thinking to our students, but we should use it to create our projects and learning tasks.

This approach is said to help leaders by removing the taboo of creativity. According to Dr Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Design Thinking shrinks innovation to something that doesn’t require a massive strategic change in an organization, but can be applied every day; from how might we better communicate within a team to how might we increase our ability to identify new learning potentials and trends.

Organisational Focus on Design

Keep in mind that design thinking doesn’t solve all problems. Like Kolko in this Harward Business Review article suggests, it helps people and organizations cut through complexity. It’s great for innovation. It works extremely well for imagining the future. An organisational focus on design offers unique opportunities for humanizing technology and for developing emotionally resonant products and services. Adopting this perspective isn’t easy. But doing so helps create a workplace where people want to be, one that responds quickly to changing business dynamics and empowers individual contributors. And because design is empathetic, it implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.

'How Might We'? 

According to IDEO (http://www.designkit.org/) every problem is an opportunity for design. By framing your challenge as a How Might We question, you’ll set yourself up for an innovative solution.

• Start by looking at the insight statements that you’ve created. Try rephrasing them as questions by adding “How might we” at the beginning. 
• The goal is to find opportunities for design, so if your insights suggest several How Might We questions that’s great. 
• Then take a look at your How Might We question and ask yourself if it allows for a variety of solutions. If it doesn’t, broaden it. Your How Might We should generate a number of possible answers and will become a launchpad for your Brainstorms. 
• Finally, make sure that your How Might We’s aren’t too broad. It’s a tricky process but a good How Might We should give you both a narrow enough frame to let you know where to start your Brainstorm, but also enough breadth to give you room to explore wild ideas.

Design Thinking Mindsets

Human-centered design is as much about your head as your hands. IDEO suggests that how you think about design directly affects whether you'll arrive at innovative, impactful solutions. These 7 Mindsets explore and uncover the philosophy behind Design Kit’s approach to creative problem solving.

• Learn from Failure
• Make it
• Creative Confidence
• Empathy
• Embrace ambiguity
• Optimism
• Iterate, iterate, iterate

Four principles to Design Thinking (According to Plattner, Meinel and Leifer)

1. The human rule – all design activity is ultimately social in nature
2. The ambiguity rule – design thinkers must preserve ambiguity
3. The re-design rule – all design is re-design
4. The tangibility rule – making ideas tangible always facilitates communication

Rogers’ adoption of Innovation Adoption Lifecycle

Like innovations, also adopters have been determined to have traits that affect their likelihood to adopt an innovation. A bevy of individual personality traits have been explored for their impacts on adoption, but with little agreement. Ability and motivation, which vary on situation unlike personality traits, have a large impact on a potential adopter's likelihood to adopt an innovation. Unsurprisingly, potential adopters who are motivated to adopt an innovation are likely to make the adjustments needed to adopt it. 

Rogers outlines several strategies in order to help an innovation reach this stage, including when an innovation adopted by a highly respected individual within a social network and creating an instinctive desire for a specific innovation. Another strategy includes injecting an innovation into a group of individuals who would readily use said technology, as well as providing positive reactions and benefits for early adopters. 

Innovators, Early Adopters and Early Majority

According to Rogers (2002), whereas innovators are cosmopolites, early adopters are localites. This adopter category, more than any other, has the highest degree of opinion leadership in most systems. Potential adopters look to early adopters for advice and information about an innovation.

Early majority are pragmatists, comfortable with moderately progressive ideas, but won’t act without solid proof of benefits. They are followers who are influenced by mainstream fashions and wary of fads. Majorities are cost sensitive and risk averse. They are looking for simple, proven, better ways of doing what they already do. They require guaranteed off-the-shelf performance, minimum disruption, minimum commitment of time, minimum learning, and either cost neutrality or rapid payback periods. And they hate complexity. 

Robinson (2009) has summarised Rogers' ideas in of the Diffusion of Innovations and he suggests that when working with early adopters one should

• Offer strong face-to-face support for a limited number of early adopters to trial the new idea.
• Study the trials carefully to discover how to make the idea more convenient, low cost and marketable.
• Reward their egos e.g. with media coverage.
• Promote them as fashion leaders (beginning with the cultish end of the media market).
• Recruit and train some as peer educators.
• Maintain relationships with regular feedback.

Robinson describes the early majority as pragmatists, comfortable with moderately progressive ideas, but won’t act without solid proof of benefits. They are followers who are influenced by mainstream fashions and wary of fads. Majorities are cost sensitive and risk averse. They are looking for simple, proven, better ways of doing what they already do. They require guaranteed off-the-shelf performance, minimum disruption, minimum commitment of time, minimum learning, and either cost neutrality or rapid payback periods and they hate complexity.

Leading in a Culture of Change

If you haven't yet read Michael Fullan's book "Leading in a Culture of Change", we warmly recommend it. Fullan has written expansively about educational change and how to manage it. Since "Change is a double edged sword... for better of worse, change arouses emotions", it hopefully helps in your LDC2 planning that you are ok with your and others emotions.

He has proposed (2001) that leaders would become more effective with their efforts to lead in a culture of change if they would be constant in their efforts to establish these five components of leadership:

1. Moral Purpose: A commitment to betterment and improving life
2. Understanding Change: A culture of change consists of great rapidity and non-linearity on the one hand and equally great potential for creative breakthroughs on the other. The paradox is that transformation would not be possible without accompanying messiness.
3. Relationships, Relationships and Relationships: How people interact with each other and the trust and loyalty they are able to create is essential to the success or failure of a change.
4. Knowledge Building: The process of a person taking information in and creating an understanding that is then used in society.
5. Coherence Building: Accepting that change is inevitable and can be positive, this is helping everyone make sense of the ’messiness’ that comes along with the changes that are being experienced.

Lean leadership plan?

When planning for the leadership of a change initiative in your LEADERSHIP 2 assessment, focus on planning how you’ll lead the early adopters and subsequent followers. You might include aspects that consciously eliminate ‘muda’ (waste). 

References and possible resources

Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a Culture of Change. Wiley & Sons.

Harris, A., Jones, M. & and Baba, S. (2013). Distributed leadership and digital collaborative learning: A synergistic relationship? British Journal of Educational Technology 44(6), 926-939

Kilko, J. (2015). Design thinking comes of age: The approach, once used primarily in product design, is now infusing corporate culture. Harvard Business Review, 93(9), 66.

Nichols, J. (2010). Teachers as Servant Leaders. Rowman & Littlefield.

Papa, R., Mullen, C. & Creighton, T. (2012). Educational Leadership at 2050: Conjectures, Challenges, and Promises. R&L Education.

Plattner, H., Meinel, C., & Leifer, L. (Eds.). (2010). Design thinking: Understand–improve–apply. Springer Science & Business Media.

Robinson, L. (2009). A summary of Diffusion of Innovations. Retrieved from http://www.enablingchange.com.au/Summary_Diffusion...

Robinson, V. (2011). Student-Centered Leadership. Wiley.

Rogers, E. (2002). Diffusion of preventive innovations. Addictive Behaviors,27(6), 989-993.

Schleicher, A. (2012). Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century: Lessons from around the World. OECD Publishing.

Whitaker, T. (2013). Leading School Change: 9 Strategies To Bring Everybody On Board. Taylor and Francis.