The Collective Mind

[Former Member]

We are all spreading the word on Design Thinking. What it is, how one should do it, and most importantly, what is the value it brings to the creative process. There are some obvious answers which we will reel off almost automatically. However, there are some added values that you basically get for free: real added values that you receive in addition to the creative solution concepts, the crazy ideas in form of wild prototypes as input for the proof of concept. I am of course talking about the collective mind, as my much-cited and esteemed colleague Marc Dietrich is calling it.

Maybe in the past, like myself, you have been also witness to discussions between representatives of the wonderful world of IT and people from the “other” mystical world we like to call “The Business”. Being a transient between both worlds and coming from “The Business” world, very early in my career in IT I learned that there are some serious language problems given. Just imagine a conversation about architecture between someone from marketing and someone from the infrastructure team.

                                    Architecture 1                                                            Architecture 2

This is easily sorted out, sometimes with a laugh. But think about what a process means for both of them. This is much harder. Now, how do you get them to align these visions?

If you put these two people through a Design Thinking project, within hours, sometimes days, a collective mind will form. During going through the paces of scoping, research, synthesis, ideation, prototyping and validation, they will gain insight into each other’s way of thinking. They will understand each other’s realities and start understanding and accepting different positions. More than that, they will be incorporated in finding the solution for a shared challenge and the solution will be thus much better for it. Most of the time, after a day or two, the team is in agreement of the challenge they are facing and of the best possible solution to it. And these are the people who usually could not agree on the color of the new board room curtain without weeks of alignment and sometimes escalation meetings. This makes it so much easier to then get the solution implemented later on.

What do you think? Have you seen this, too?