Design thinking facilitates an onward mindset, playing chess instead of checkers. Design thinking principles can also holistically guide leaders when solving complex and intertwined DEI challenges in the workforce.
Most companies' diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts fail even with the best intentions. Let's explore two questions: How can we challenge old assumptions and thinking about DEI from a history of decades to redefine our ways of working to solve problems effectively? And how can we move toward our work as a design challenge in this developing digital world?
DEI executives and practitioners often desire to dispute assumptions and inspire innovation. The traditional DEI "best practices" approach is tactical because it is compliance-driven with marginal thinking and reactive mode. And as a result, organizations experience stagnant effects with limited value creation in the workforce. Thinking like a designer can help transform and accelerate DEI efforts by being more human-centric and strategic.
With its foundational traits of constructing systemic and growth mindsets, being problem-oriented, and seeking an out-of-box solution and innovative breakthroughs, design thinking can offer you an effective tool to tackle expeditious change and complex problems and can strengthen your organization to outperform the competition in the future.
1. Research and Analyze to Understand Existing DEI State (Empathize)
A solid DEI design solution rises through a continuous focus on attention to the people who matter. Because of its human-centric essence, design thinking helps organizations achieve DEI solutions centered around breaking barriers for employees to fulfill their career aspirations with equal and inclusive policy, practice and opportunity, and co-creation and co-ownership of DEI initiatives with internal stakeholders, rather than the legacy top-down and perspective tactic.
Empathy is the start of Design Thinking. The essence of DEI work is people. Organizations must comprehensively understand their people's feelings and needs to generate value through DEI measures.
Leads must immerse themselves in their stakeholder experiences, empathize with them, build rapport, and picture the world through their lens, including their pain points, feelings, and perceptions about an inclusive environment, growth and learning opportunities, career aspirations, and team citizenship.
Leaders must maintain continuous feedback loops to have a timely cadence, map the progress, and correct course-correct when necessary.
I recently worked with a client in Healthcare. I was tasked with determining the health of their organization and what was missing along their journey. Comprehensive metrics like descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analyses enable me to validate insights collected from their associates to shed light on what barriers to remove in their career life cycles. And as a result, my senses refueled the organization's strategy, process, and program with innovative solutions.
2. State and Define Key Roadblocks That Impede Sustainable Progress (Define)
The insights we can discover from the second phase of design thinking, Define, include:
Ask the right questions and discern the correct issues.
Tackle the game-changer.
Motivate others with head, heart, and hand.
Research exhibits that organizations waste time and energy solving the wrong problems. When organizations double down on the right problem, they yield twice the result with half the effort. Leaders must equip themselves with the proficiency to ask the right questions, choose the right indicators, discern the suitable themes and come up with the proper solution.
The insights and knowledge that emerged from the Empathize phase aid in adequately reframing the perceived problem and gaining perspectives, which allows a more holistic look at the path toward the expected solution.
Most importantly, position your associates at the heart of the problem-solving process while defining the problem. This effort lets us create the most authentic and emotionally resonating solutions.
Intentionally Invite Different Perspectives to Spot the Core of Issues and Options to Tackle (Ideate)
Conventional DEI approaches tend to react to standalone issues, and more focus is placed on the numbers game.
Design thinking advises adopting a strategic lens, perceiving the different symptoms in an interconnected web, revealing the root cause of the problem, and intentionally inviting and seeking diverse perspectives to tap the collective wisdom.
In this phase, we can first employ divergent thinking styles to excavate more possibilities, defer judgment and construct an open ideations space to allow for the maximum number of ideas to emerge. We then apply convergent thinking techniques to preserve a general direction and purpose by isolating possible solution streams, combining and refining insights, and mature ideas, which pave a path forward.
4. Design With a Big Picture and Ecosystem in Mind (Prototype)
Many of today's DEI programs are created with a one-size-fits-all approach and control-and-commend manner. They are based on improving others' attitudes.
Instead, design thinking focuses on the user's needs and pain points and customization to accommodate differences.
Linked to DEI, can your programs build upon each other to touch people's hearts and minds so that transition improves additional change in their behavior? You can deliver a program prototype to test the solution's effectiveness and relevance by understanding the elements that work and don't.
5. Archetype the Solution to Test Results and Assess the Next Iterative That Builds on the Current Components (Test)
Before deploying a solution on a large scale, always pilot it with controllable groups to test the results and investigate the experience.
Founded on the collected observation feedback, you have a chance to refine early prototypes into solutions with additional favorable possibilities.
This is also the right time to consider "what's next," which may uncover new and unexplored courses of action to pursue in bringing about ideal quality to DEI work.
Journalist Suzy Welch created a 10-10-10 concept, which brings the future into the present by asking ourselves, at a moment of decision, how we will feel about it in 10 minutes, ten months, and ten years. We envision being accountable for our future choices, which motivates us to get ahead of the game.
In short, Design thinking is not a sprint; it's a marathon—continuum process to dodge failure, embrace a process of constant observation, developing a hypothesis, validating it with a broad range of perspectives, piloting and testing the solutions, explore the data and formulating new ideas and continually looking out for new tools to boost our efforts.