Design Thinking and the PDCA Cycle

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

To everything there is a season

In a world of tumultuous and endless technological change, Design Thinking has rightly become a core methodology.

In many industries, we can no longer confidently claim that we understand the customer’s problems. An thus, we can no longer define Value with any certainty.

A generation ago we rediscovered, seemingly, Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle.

Deming’s work, in turn, was heavily informed by Walter Shewhart and the idea that operational data comprised both a signal and noise.

And that through patient observation and statistical methods, we could separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

Before Shewhart, Deming and the other great pioneers of modern management, business processes were essentially unknown – unknowable.

(In a some sectors this is still the case, no? The ‘Noble Savage’ approach to management…)

Both Deming and Shewhart informed our Toyota senseis. Every day, a little up, Pascal-san!

Is Design Thinking entirely new? Or is our current expression of the timeless ideas that Shewhart and Deming conveyed in generations past?

Like PDCA, Design thinking entails a Diverge-Converge pattern. The 4 D’s are perhaps its most succinct expression:

Discover – (Diverge)

• Develop empathy with the customer
• Go see and experience for yourself
• Seek thereby to understand their jobs/pains/gains in a direct way

Define – (Converge)

• Define the customer’s jobs/pains/gains
• Pick a focus and define the essence of problem

Develop – (Diverge)

• Ideate possible countermeasures
• Develop and test prototypes
• Focus on the best solution

Deliver – (Converge)

• Test and confirm your design choice
• Once the design is confirmed, develop a deployment plan
• Release and scale

Each of the 4 D’s finds unique expression in different industries. Develop, for example, entails very different activities in, say, web design vs car detailing products.

In the former, Develop entails developing, say, the web page’s content, and the front and back end – (translation to HTML, functionality, database, logic).

In the latter industry, Develop entails testing the various chemicals and application methods in the lab. This one works, that one does not…

Like PDCA, Design Thinking entails a journey up a staircase in the fog, during which we learn through rapid experimentation and iteration.

In my view, both are rooted in the same tradition but differ in that one is aimed at continuous improvement, the other at continuous innovation.

We need both arrows in the quiver, no?

Best regards,

Pascal

Lean Design is Hard Work

By Al Norval

I was talking to a VP of Research recently who espoused the idea that “You can’t schedule inventions”. While I agree with him, he went on to say “Therefore, there is no merit in applying lean to design work”. That’s the part I disagree with him on. While the odd invention happens in a flash of brilliance most are the result of tirelessly applying the scientific method. For every discovery of penicillin as moldy bread there are a hundred others that are the result of a process of experimentation and testing the results against a hypothesis.

Experimentation, testing and trialing are processes and all processes are made up of both value added and non-value added steps. In design processes, like most processes, the vast majority of the lead-time is waste. Lean enables the elimination of waste in these processes so the time to cycle through these processes is reduced. The cycle time for an experiment may be reduced from 4 weeks to 2 weeks and eventually to 1 week. While no one can predict how many experimental cycles will be needed, what is certain is that the shorter the experimental cycle, the faster we learn and the faster we’ll reach our end goal.

Thomas Edison had a wonderful quote that captures this beautifully.

“None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”
– Thomas Alva Edison

Using lean in design work allows us to reduce the amount of perspiration required.

Design is hard work. Using lean to eliminate waste in design processes allows us to focus more of our energy on things that truly drive value add to our customers. Isn’t that the purpose of design in the first place?

Cheers

Beyond the Voice of the Customer

By Al Norval

I was reading an article recently in BusinessWeek about the merger of United Airlines and Continental Airlines and the issues the integration teams were facing. For all the technical issues dealing with reservation systems, operations systems and passenger service systems the part of the article that caught my attention dealt with determining which coffee to serve onboard the aircraft.

United had been serving Starbucks and Continental used a company called Fresh Brew. Obviously they wanted to go to one, common food service supply chain and it made no sense to have two different types of coffee.

They assembled a 14 member panel that tested 12 different blends of coffee. After deciding on a lighter roast coffee, they asked the CEO and company officers to sign off on it. Then they took it on the road and asked 1,100 flight attendants to try it and overwhelmingly it was approved.

Following that, it was launched on flights with passengers who collectively protested and initiated a barrage of complaints saying the coffee was watery.

Upon investigation, it was discovered that there was a quarter inch gap between the brew baskets in the coffee makers and the coffee packs which was allowing water to flow into the carafe and diluting the coffee.

Think we’re at root cause?

Actually, the coffee brew baskets were designed that way to allow water to flow around the coffee packs since passengers had complained in the past that their Starbucks coffee was too strong.

Now, what’s the real root cause?

I believe it’s not testing the coffee in live passenger situations. It’s easy to second guess and hindsight is always 20/20, but to do that much taste testing and not use the equipment onboard aircraft that would actually be used to serve coffee to passengers is absurd.

How many times do we do this when we design product or service improvements? We have what seems like a better idea but we either don’t involve the customer or use the product ourselves in the customer experience. We don’t mimic or observe closely how the customer uses the product. We assume we know.

Great design comes from having insights into the customer experience that can only come from living in the shoes of the customer and developing a deep understanding of problems from their perspective. Problems that our new improved products and services should provide a solution for and in doing so provide more value to the Customer.

The key to Lean Design is to be able to do this quickly which means taking prototypes and semi-finished products out to test and getting quick Customer feedback which allows for rapid adjustments.

Steve Jobs had an amazing ability to do this. To listen to the Voice of the Customer and to go beyond it to see the unspoken needs of the Customer.

For United Airlines, perhaps just sitting in a window seat at the back of an airplane drinking a coffee trial would have been enough to avoid this embarrassment.

Cheers