The number one question I get asked in Design Thinking Workshops
For the last six months I’ve been delivering a lot of Design Thinking workshops for non-designers. The participants were mostly knowledge workers whose work touches service delivery or influences how people use complex products.
The workshops all went well.
And then at the end, when I say “any questions”, people regularly say:
“I love this; I get it; how will I get my boss to let me do this”?
My cheeky answer, which I rarely give, is: “it’s already your job; why is your boss stopping you?”
The real (or perhaps realpolitik) answer is: just start doing it. Instead of writing notes to yourself or for others in a document, start making notes on post-its and move them around. If you are making something that will be seen or used by customers, get as much feedback as you can, as early as you can, in the most structured way you can, from people who are as much like real users as possible. And then as you make changes based on that input, keep getting that feedback and keep learning from it.
Everything else is details.