Program on Design Thinking

1. Design a religion that survives for three hundred years: Sikhism. In many practices of the religion like the common food everyone eats which is made in community kitchens, the washing of the floor by volunteers or the cleaning of shoes by devotees you can see principles of design thinking that are aimed at team (community) building. Guru Granth Sahib, their holiest is sacred scripture, a book showing knowledge is most important for them, it has to be protected and shared. They figured that Slokas are the way to do this with music as the encryption to protect the integrity of the message. Every person interprets the design and product in his own way but because of the rhythm of the music, you can’t change the words without messing with the original.

2. Let us think of designing a food system in South India. Bacteria is your enemy, so make it your partner. Idli batter is an example, easy to cook and it is nutritious. There is zero waste in preparation. For variety in taste and for getting vegetable nutrients and vitamins you supplement it with different chutneys and vary the recipe for each day of fermentation – Dosa on Day 1, Idli on Day 2, Uttapam on Day 3 and so on.

3. Designing a language: Sanskrit.

The arrangements for the workshop in Taj Coromandel, Chennai were professionally & tastefully done. It was a round table seating for all 150 audiences consisting of employees of Intellect, invitees and external attendees like myself. Each seat had a complete kit for practising Design Thinking including a whiteboard, markers to write on, cardboard boxes of various shapes to play around and 100 Cue cards (seen above) containing the workshop presentation used by Arun. Instead of reproducing everything from the presentation, I am recording here in this post the ideas he shared in the workshop.

Arun followed with a general background to Design Thinking:

• Technology the word originated only in 1920, before that there were only techniques
• The customer gives requirements based on the past. Change requests come up because you not taking into account customers’ unstated needs
• Design thinking is never an individual exercise. It’s a group activity. That’s the only way you will see the blinds spots that need to be spotted
• When you travel to many cities, it will trigger new thoughts, and you will see blind spots due to the exposure
• For example in a seminar doesn’t publish the agenda, you will not have spontaneous ideas or have an opportunity to see the blind spots. Corridors discussion will identify it, and non-published agenda will foster it. For me, blind spots are spotted in meditation sessions
• Imagination is a critical or unique feature of humanity as a species. We don’t have any of the bests – we can’t swim faster, run faster, hear more, see more, or smell more but we still rule the world
• The design mind is one which is curious
• There are six knowledge clusters in every organization – Human Resources, Customer Facing, Finance, Product Development, Execution & Operations, Branding & Marketing. The mindset required for Design Thinking happens when we have people moving between knowledge clusters, it happens when team rotation is done
• Knowledge is given by educational institutions, the industry has to give skills

What is Design?

What is Learning?

SEPIA, the five drivers of Design

• Something gets done regularly in an organization only when it gets boring. Don’t change often. It takes five years for something to get institutionalized in an organization. Otherwise, we are killing it without giving it a chance. Keep asking the same question multiple times, in an interview ask the developer three, or four times only then blind spots about him/her will emerge
• In dialogue, both parties must listen and not be focused on telling their views only. Discussion, the word origin is from conflicts
• Even if SEPIA is there, there are five frictional forces that stop it – doubt, ego, conflict, anger & fear. You can remember them as DECAF
• When you feel vulnerable your brand works ten times faster. You learn more. When you force yourself to unlearn, you make yourself vulnerable
• When I was in Nucleus and then changed it to Polaris brand, I made myself vulnerable, more possibilities were in front of me. Same thing when I demerged Intellect from Polaris. Demerger generally goes against market expectations, but it gives an opportunity for each unit to focus on its strength. Create your own vulnerability, Adobe got out from selling software licenses to selling subscriptions; only the paranoid survive
• Appreciation – how many times you have written emails to your customer appreciating his work? Each of us has appreciation needs or appreciation hunger. Your letter has to be genuine, honest and to the point
• Limited Beliefs. When someone says you are not good at something, especially at the age below 13, you will be limiting yourselves to that throughout your life. They are capacity holders. We generally want to avoid failures. Similarly, these hold back a company, you start believing it across the company

• In organisations we forget the power we already have, it’s in our mind that’s limiting. In design thinking, you take authority and influence
• When you are heading a design thinking session, you need to turn all the buts to ands. “Yes and” should be said instead of “Yes but”. A But stops the other person’s conversion, an and builds on top of it
• You should work like a cartographer, someone can who can turn the entire world into a sheet of paper, that is a skill. Then you need to get into a detective mindset, that is expertise. Then as a reporter, ask the right questions and then present the findings in easy to digest way – don’t pass judgement, lastly, you need to translate all this into a readable format
• Instead of thinking about how to reduce attrition, instead, we should think about how we can increase retention. Your mind will start to work differently
• At this stage of Design Thinking, we need to define the problem. That’s where Toyota’s why chain (5 whys) comes into use. In the 1980s value of the automobile industry was in the repair garages, they were bigger than manufacturing. Toyota with its vastly improved quality of cars changed that
• An idea should not be a personal idea, its focus is to solve the problem only and not ownership. The clustering of ideas will make the team collectively own the idea.

From his experience