Last week, we discussed the innovation mindset and the concept of vuja de: seeing something familiar, but approaching it with a different perspective to gather additional insight and generate new ideas. We highlighted three guidelines to help you prepare your mind for innovation:
Now that your head is in the right space, we will dig into how to drive innovation in the workplace through design thinking; a model described by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie in their book, “Design for Growth.” The authors recommend tackling these four questions when approaching a new or existing challenge in the workplace:
Tools to use during this stage: customer surveys, interviews, focus groups, user experience tests, and customer persona generation
Tools to use during this stage: visualization, group brainstorming, customer journey mapping
Tools to use during this stage: assumption testing, prototyping
Tools to use during this stage: experimentation, measurement
SHIFT’s work with a client in the media and advertising space is the perfect example to help illustrate how design thinking is applied in the workplace. As an industry becomes increasingly competitive, it’s critical that revenue generating roles, like advertising salespeople, are equipped to perform consistently at the highest level.
Our client saw changes in the industry quickly approaching: traditional standalone TV advertising declining and integrated omni-channel media rapidly rising. With this knowledge, the client partnered with SHIFT to explore methods for accelerating sales amidst the inevitable changes on the horizon. The SHIFT team leveraged the design thinking model to develop an innovative, sustainable solution.
Before we could find a solution that solved the client’s needs, we needed to get to the root of the problem. We interviewed and shadowed key stakeholders within the business. By studying the executives, sales managers, and salespeople – during client and prospecting meetings – we could better understand the barriers preventing peak performance. We synthesized our findings and narrowed down the issues at hand:
Now that we understood the core issues, we could start to generate ideas on how to resolve them. Through group brainstorming, visualization techniques, and the introduction of customer personas, we were able to develop new ideas that the organization had not previously considered. We quickly moved from idea generation to concept generation and presented our action plan to the client:
In this stage, we moved from brainstorming to execution.
We put our solutions to test. We identified specific markets within the organization to implement these new concepts and defined specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure strategy success. We actively tracked the progress of each initiative to identify what was working, what required modifications, and what was ineffective.
This is design thinking in action. This is innovation in action.
These leaders took a chance. They recognized the problem and didn’t grow timid; instead, they transcended. They partnered with SHIFT to face these challenges as an opportunity to maximize performance and embrace the innovation mindset.
This is a familiar story among our clients — and one I am incredibly proud to facilitate.
Want to discover tools that will drive the creative and progressive thinking your organization needs to thrive? Join me for a SHIFT exploration session. You’ll work one-on-one with me, or a fellow SHIFT expert, to identify your goals, devise an action plan, and identify where SHIFT can propel your initiatives.
It’s the first step in each of our client success stories and promises to be the best 30 minutes you’ll spend all week (perhaps, all year). Because together, and only together, we can change the world.