At last, we made it to the first phase of the design thinking (DT) process named Discovery. This phase aims to understand your problem or challenge ( I will use these two words interchangeably), identify knowledge gaps, and find inspiration in new ideas and perspectives. Here, you will engage in divergent thinking to obtain loads of information and a bunch of insights. If it sounds counterproductive and overwhelming, don’t worry, you will narrow down the options during the 3rd phase.
Throughout the process, especially initially, it is helpful to exercise the DT mindset I described in the previous post. In addition to radical acceptance, growth mindset, and creative confidence, I invite you to keep in mind that you are no longer a higher ed professional but a brave designer who incorporates the following DT features into your daily work (IDEO’s DT for educators):
- Human-centricity – shifting focus from your agenda to the needs and wants of other humans;
- Collaboration – choosing a group of 2+ diverse brains in contrast to a solo one;
- Optimism – believing that you can find a solution by trusting the DT process;
- Experimentalism – giving up on perfection by getting your hands dirty with designing, failing, and learning from these experiences.
Once you feel semi-comfortable with this new belief system, you are ready to re-discover your challenge through a series of 3 steps:
- Understanding the challenge,
- Preparing research,
- Gathering inspiration.
Let’s start with the “Understanding the challenge” part. You might be frowning because you already know what’s going on, and the only thing you are after is the solution. However, I’d like to pose a few questions before you disengage:
- Is your problem “approachable, understandable, and actionable” with a defined scope and clearly outlined measure of success?
- Do you really comprehend the challenge at a deep, human level?
- Have you seen/felt/sensed the issue through the involved parties’ eyes?
- Have you looked at the situation via multiple prospective, excluding yours?
- Have you checked your assumptions and biases that might prevent you from clearly seeing the current situation and possible solutions?
If the answer is “No, Maybe, I am not sure,” then I’d suggest you hang in the Discovery Zone to avoid spending hours chasing after a solution to a different problem altogether.
Now, the first step in “Understanding your challenge” is to review the problem by yourself as if you have never seen it before. Tabula rasa it is. When doing the review, get curios by asking the following questions:
- Why is this topic/area important for me, my target audience, and stakeholders?
- What stays on the way to solving this challenge? What are the constraints? Minimum requirements?
- Is this problem too broad or too specific?
- What assumptions do I have about this challenge? What assumptions might others have?
- How do I know that I achieved success?
This is how this step would look like in the researcher development realm. To start, I’d outline the challenge, for example, “Postdoc development programs have low participation rates, and I need to increase the engagement levels within the next 12 months”. While I already have a few potential fixes in mind, such as increased advertisement and expanded speakers’ pool, I still need to address a few critical questions.
- So what? Why is it important?
- For me: This task is a part of my annual goals that I have to fulfil to receive a positive evaluation and promotion. In addition, since putting together such programs requires time, effort, and money; I’d like to impact as many people as possible and decrease per participant cost. Not very human-centered, isn’t it?
- For postdocs: attending the programs will enhance their employability and ensure a successful transition to the next job.
- What are the challenges? I see the main constraint to be the limited time and HR resources.
- Is this challenge too broad or too specific? Re-examining the challenge, I think it might be too broad because there are many programs offered at our institution. Would it be better to focus on a small subset of the events? How about “Postdoc career preparation programs have low participation, and I need to increase the engagement by 20 % by the end of this fiscal year.” Sounds more doable, for sure.
- The assumptions are many… I consider these programs to be important and appropriate for the audience; however, no data exist to support this claim. I also speculate that the reason for low participation roots in the lack of time and interest in the postdocs’ side. Finally, I secretly know that I have a solution: just make it mandatory, that’s it.
By going through the review process, I made a few changes to the original plan, and now I am ready to put together a project brief with the sections including but not limited to:
- Challenge description
- Constraints and barriers
- Scope
- Measures of success
- Knowledge gaps
Note that there is no rule on how long and detailed a project brief should be. Try to keep it simple though, since, next, you are going to share it with others.
When the draft is completed, you are ready to solicit feedback from your colleagues, professional network, even your grandparents. From my experience, we tend to send our docs to our immediate supervisors or close team members, but often these people are too involved to see to the unknown. By disseminating your challenge brief to the “remote” others, you will likely uncover knowledge gaps and novel insights that will help to refine your challenge and the project direction. As you collect various opinions, keep adding new information, unexpected questions, new resources to your brief. Everything is handy. Once you reach a saturation point where no new data is coming in, you are all set to re-write the brief and redefine your target audience.
A word on the target audience: In the case of the institutional services, there is often an obvious core audience defined by your job/service descriptions. However, there are many people who are interested, involved, or touched by your work, aka. extended audiences. Consider including the extended audience(s) into your brief as they could enhance your project by providing novel ROIs and unexpected collaborations, among other benefits.
Now, let’s go back to the example of the postdoc challenge. After sharing the brief with my network, I received more feedback than I wished for:
- How do you advertise your programs? Do you offer food and beverages as incentives?
- Do you see the difference between on-site and distant learning?
- How are you doing on the feedback surveys? What do people like and don’t like?
- What is the reason behind 20 % increase? Who would benefit from it?
- It sounds like you are trying to offer programs across disciplines and cultures. What if different disciplines have different needs for career-preparedness. Did you consider employability across the STEM fields? How would you address it?
- What if people don’t want to increase employability but enhance soft skills?
- What do leadership and group leaders think about this effort?
- It sounds like the scope is too narrow. Have you considered including other groups such as students, scientists, etc?
- Are you more conserved with participation or impact? What would be a good measure?
- What do you mean by engagement? Happiness after the workshops?
- …..
Having these responses helped me to subsequently change the project.
1. Re-evaluate the target audience. While the postdocs were my target audience, I saw a chance to grow the program reach to graduate students, administration members, and even adjacent department staff.
2. Clarify the challenge outcome. The comments also pointed out that I am unclear about what I want to work with: participation rates? Impact? Engagement? After a long pause, I updated the brief and redefined my challenge from “Postdoc development programs have low participation rates, and I need to increase the engagement within next 12 months” to “How to increase impact and participation rates of career-development programs for ECR (early career researchers) within next 12 month”.
A scientist in me wanted to keep analyzing the feedback and optimizing the challenge statement, but a designer said: “Enough, it is only the beginning, let’s move to the “Preparing research” and “Gathering inspiration” steps which will be described in the next month post.