PD Spotlight: Human Centred Design

Involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process seems a compassionate and effective approach to corporate life. Martin Grant, Director at ThinkPlace, takes us through an introduction to this framework.

Human centred design is a fantastic methodology, but it encounters its limitations in approaching challenges in complex social systems, like organisations. With human centred design, you can develop a strong understanding of the individual user, which leads to powerful and valuable solutions. Add in elements from systems thinking, and you learn how the interdependent parts of the organisation interact and the effect this has on your area of focus.

We want to avoid spending effort on solutions that don’t meet the needs of the user. We want to enable teams to get jobs done, remove pains and make gains. We also want to avoid unintended consequences emerging or the dynamics of the system overpowering our intended improvements.

What are we talking about here?

Human centred design, sometimes called user-centred design or customer-centred design, is an approach to generating new solutions that look to mitigate as much risk as possible around a proposed solution failing to hit its target.

It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are purpose built to suit their needs. The process usually starts with building a strong understanding of the people you’re designing for; generating ideas; building prototypes of solutions and testing these with your users; and, eventually, putting your new solution out in the form of a scalable pilot.

It is a process of divergence and convergence. The divergent steps orient the team towards generating a wealth of possibilities, either through research or ideas generation. The convergent steps aim to facilitate selecting and prioritising those possibilities.

Human centred design relies on multiple iterative cycles or ‘sprints’ to accomplish each cycle quickly and prioritise learning over perfection. Doing so reduces the risks of trying new ideas by incorporating the learning from the previous iteration.

A small force produces a substantial change.

IDEO’s Tim Brown adds a further nuance. He explains that successful innovations rely on some element of human centred design while balancing other aspects. Design thinking, he believes, helps achieve that balance by introducing the ideas of feasibility, viability to userdesirability and finding the sweet spot of all three.

Roger Martin, professor and renowned business writer in the field of integrative thinking, adds another dimension, describing design thinkers as “willing to use all kinds of logic to understand their world”. He reasons that neither analytic nor intuitive thinking alone is enough because each, while providing tremendous strength, also creates systemic weakness if applied in isolation.

Seeing the organisation as a complex social system

Now let’s think about the organisation as a group of interdependent people (‘agents’ in systems thinking terminology). Agents have agency. They are capable of acting independently and making their own choices, based on their hypotheses about what will make them more successful – assumptions about why doing things should work.

It is a process of divergence and convergence.

Let’s think about how these people interact within the system with a shared purpose or goal and where experimentation and crossfertilisation create new patterns and behaviours – known as emergence. The system is self-organising, selflearning and continually changing, even inside artificially imposed constraints such as organisational structures and processes.

These dynamics are what we see in all complex social systems.

By focusing on inter-relationships and connections, the tools for systems thinking allow the team to identify causal reactions and feedback loops. This knowledge is key to navigating complexity and identifying the most effective ‘leverage points’, where a small force produces a substantial change.

The power of blending the two methodologies

You can intentionally integrate systems-thinking elements with design thinking to enhance the chances of creating the right responses to improve the performance of the organisation system.

For example, a valuable principle that systems thinking can add to human centred design is the need to bring the whole system into view from the beginning. If problem formulation

is the first step in the design process, then adopting a systems mindset can help with framing or reframing the problem.

The system is selforganising, self-learning and continually changing – even inside artificially imposed constraints such as organisational structures and processes.

The two approaches complement each other, so we end up with an approach that explicitly incorporates the strengths of both, thereby addressing the gaps and increasing the chance of creating sustainable solutions to the wicked problems facing organisations and society today.

Martin Grant sees a bright future for New Zealand, where commercial and social organisations use their scarce resources wisely, and business decisions are genuinely customer-centric and system focused. With more than 30 years’ experience in the design of communications, brands, retail spaces, digital products and services in B2C and B2B categories, Martin is wellplaced to understand design in human complex systems. Martin’s recent work includes bringing a system-based approach to the transformation of the building and construction industry, helping design services and train service designers and helping a dairy co-op reconnect with its shareholders through purpose. He has also helped numerous export companies get bigger and better faster through work with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. Martin has a degree in business management with a major in marketing. He is a De Bono Lateral Thinking instructor. Martin attributes part of his success to being a pragmatic life-long learner and explorer in the areas of innovation, design and systems thinking.