Ensuring students learn effectively is the subject of rigorous study, whether the learners are young children, college students, or employees. Many, many methods have been tried, with varying degrees of success. Most recently, some have become strong advocates of a method known as design thinking. According to the Association for Talent Development (ATD), typical instructional design applications are focused on promoting an analytical mind-set.
What can design thinking do for you and your organization?
Today’s work requires more than an analytical mind-set. Increasingly, employees in any role are required to exhibit innovation and creativity. As the ATD says, “Enter design thinking, a human-centered, collaborative, and iterative approach for deeply understanding an audience and its members’ challenges in order to generate effective solutions.”
The Interaction Design Foundation further defines design thinking as “an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.”
Sounds great! But how to implement? The ATD offers five steps.
Empathize
The first step is simply understanding your audience. What is important to them? What do they hope to achieve? What do they need to achieve? What barriers might exist that could hamper their success?
Define the Problem
Too often, we jump to conclusions when it comes to identifying a problem. Design thinking emphasizes spending sufficient time up front to correctly identify the problem so that the proper solution can be reached. That means research rather than supposition.
Ideate
Think of ideation as brainstorming. Come up with as many ideas as possible, and then start to pare them down to identify those that have the greatest potential. Importantly, during this step, avoid the tendency to edit your ideas as they come up. Simply ideate; don’t edit! (No “Yes, but” or “We tried that and it doesn’t work.”)
Prototype
Once you’ve generated some ideas and narrowed them down to one, or more, that you believe could hold the answer to your issue, it’s time to test that assumption. So, the next step is to create a prototype that could take the form of a sketch, a mock-up, and a small implementation.
Test
What else would you do with a test version of a solution but test it? Come up with a strategy and execute it to test your prototype in the field.
Teaching and learning—the processes by which knowledge and skills are transferred from person to person—are essential in effective employee development. Design thinking represents another potential tool that learning and development professionals can use to stimulate innovation and creativity in the workplace.