You heard about Design Thinking and you read up about the process. It seemed easy enough to follow, you got a team together and some great ideas came out of the exercise, but they did not set the world on fire, nor did they go anywhere. Everyone said your Design Thinking workshop was really interesting, but they did not really seem convinced that Design Thinking was the answer to faster, more successful Innovation.
NOW WHAT?
You are not alone.
“Ninety percent of my career was made up of failure, but failure is not defeat for those who innovate and look for new horizons.” Sara Little Turnbull designer of the 3M medical mask that has become the N95 mask today.
This is an important point. Failure to succeed is not defeat in innovation (by definition a process of moving forward in small improvement steps), look instead for what worked, what you learned and look for the good ideas that you gained from the process. These are all small incremental steps that can add up to a bigger step when combined or executed simultaneously.
60-95% of Lean Six Sigma process improvement projects fail. The numbers vary widely, but what is clear is that what starts with a lot of enthusiasm for the project often wanes as the task goes from let’s make things better to this is what it will take to do that, and the real work needs to get done.
The numbers for innovation projects are similar. According to Clayton Christensen of Harvard University. The failure rate for innovation is 95%.
And yet, 84% of executives consider their future success to be very or extremely tied to successful innovation. Innovation is important, but it is also not easy, otherwise we would all be winning, all the time! It is amazing how relatively unsuccessful innovation is as compared to how important it is. Making even small progress on your innovation success rate will have a big impact on your business.
Realistically then, if you could get 5% of your innovation projects to deliver a successful result, you would be doing well. If you got 10% of your projects to deliver success, you would be doing 100% better and be 100% better than the rest of your competitors! To do well in a market does not require a 100% improvement. In fact, the competitive advantage in any race or competitive endeavor often comes down to a few 10ths of a percent! In motor racing, the difference in lap times can be in the 10ths or 100ths of a second over a lap that takes about 80 seconds!
Hopefully this helps you to understand how small a competitive advantage really is to enable you to win and hopefully it provides you with a much better perspective on how to measure your success with Design Thinking. Start by measuring how many of your Design Thinking projects are “successful”. Are you at the 5% level, above, or below it? In other words, start by setting realistic expectations for success within your own business. Know where you are starting from.
What is a realistic improvement step? How about 10%? That means you would need to get another 0.5-1% of your projects to become successful. The implication here is that you only need to find incremental ways to improve. If you do this, you will be better than most of your competitors already. That is already some form of success!
Next, analyze the projects that failed and look for patterns and trends. Start with the big components. In which phase of the process did it fail? Was it due to the idea (quality, lack of, feasibility, viability or desirability of the idea) or the execution and follow through to take the idea from prototype to product/service/experience after the Design Thinking project? All too often good ideas from a design process are blamed for failure when the real reason is poor follow through and implementation. This is particularly true when the ideas are generated by a different group to those who have to implement them.
Let’s consider the outcomes that you might expect from a Design Thinking project.
- Ideas
- Collaboration
- Trust
- Buy-in
- Solutions
- Business
- An understanding of the things that matter
Any one of the above is a success or improvement step on the way to a more successful innovation company. A combination of them and you will be making great progress.
Larry Keeley of the Doblin group talks about 10 types of innovation. He says that if you get five types of innovation across all three categories in his model in a single step, it creates a breakthrough. A good start to analyzing your ideas would be to categorize them into the 10 types of innovation. Why? It will let you know where your ideas sit and what type of innovation step they represent and guide you to look for a match of multiple ideas that can be implemented. Remember if you get five types of innovation in a single project, your chances of breakthrough success are much higher.
Now you have an index of ideas that you can add to over time. Innovation takes time so this is an important step to take to record your ideas in a form that helps you to refine your next innovation steps. You may not have the one right idea or even set of five innovation ideas, but you will have a way to look for the types of innovation where you are missing innovation that you can come back to in a follow up Design Thinking workshop with a much more specific focus on the gap area.
Keeley also says that what you achieve is a function of what you are willing to install in terms of a platform for innovating, i.e. the structures that will support the innovation process. In this talk, he lays out a good, better, best scenario that will help you lift your success rate from around 5% to 35% (7x improvement) to 50% (10x) and a best-case scenario of above 70% (14x).
Keeley’s work will help you to think about the support system that needs to be developed in your company to improve the translation of your ideas from the Design Thinking process to a finished solution.
There are so many places where Design Thinking projects can result in failure. Many are not within the Design Thinking process itself. Be sure to recognize this as it is still necessary to fix in order to improve the chances of success within your projects.
By this point, I hope that you are thinking about failure in a different way. Specifically that failure is not monolithic, but made up of many small elements and that you now have some ways to move forward to identify and improve your success rate and that success is not measured in terms of 10’s of percent, but rather in tenths or even hundredths of a percent.
It’s a profound thought because very few groups have any way of measuring a tenth or hundredth of a percent improvement in their process today. Don’t beat yourself up too much, we have not even invented the means to measure with any accuracy the results of a Design Thinking process.
Instead, focus on continuously learning and improving your project outcomes with a broader perspective of what to expect as results out of the process.