Using Design Thinking In Your Organization

Design thinking has been around for a while, but it’s been a buzzword lately in the nonprofit sector. And for good reason. Nonprofit organizations often get stagnant or at the very least tied up in slow-moving funding cycles and large programs that can stifle growth.

You can google design thinking and find all sorts of definitions and steps, but today I want to share a quick rundown about what the main principles are and how it relates to the work you do at your nonprofit.

Design Thinking is first and foremost about the Root Problem, not Finding Solutions
I am always quick to jump to a solution. Most people are. If your tire is flat, what would you do? Put on a spare and get to a tire store, right? But what if your tire is flat because your driveway is full of nails and broken glass?

Design thinking invites you to step back and ask, “Is this a band-aid or is this a cure?”

How this relates to you:
Think about your products and services in relation to your vision statement. Are they enough to get you to your vision? If your vision is to eliminate hunger in your area, is your soup kitchen going to do that? Probably not. That doesn’t mean that you have to scrap your whole program, but it does mean you should ask, “Why are these people hungry?” and either provide the products and services that address that or work in collaboration with other organizations in a way that will address it.

Design Thinking is about the End User
Who is your audience and what do they want? Pretty much everything you do should revolve around these two questions.

How often do the staff at homeless shelters walk out onto the street and ask their constituents, “How can we serve you better?” How often to teachers ask their students, “How do you want to learn and what do you want to learn?” How often do museums ask their visitors, “What kind of art speaks to you?”

I’m willing to bet that the answer to that is, “Not very often.”

How this relates to you:
Make sure to always think about the user when you are planning.

When you are looking to launch a capital campaign, ask yourself, “Who do we want to donate and what will matter to them?” Thinking about the donor’s needs and wants and what kind of marketing material will appeal to them will bring in the money. People don’t donate to a cause, they donate to people. Who do your donors want to be approached by? What stories will cause empathy in them?

When building a program, ask yourself, “Who is this program built for and what do they need?” What location is best to provide the products and services? What time of day works for them? And don’t forget to think of the Root Problem. Are these services what they really need to get them where they need to be?

If you can improve the end user’s experience, you can create greater impact. Think about constituents first and your organization second.

Design Thinking is about Thinking Differently
Design thinking often involves out-of-the-box participants and processes. It involves space for shooting for the moon and room for error.

How this relates to you:
Don’t be afraid to flip things on their head – Meetings, programs, structures, systems – anything. Try approaching challenges from a different point of view. Don’t be locked into doing things a certain way because that’s how they have always been done. Try drawing your mission or services. Try inviting someone from outside your organization or sector to a strategy meeting. Try role playing. Be creative.

Design Thinking is about Starting Small and Failing Fast
When I was in 5th grade I won a spelling bee at my school that sent me to compete against other 5th graders at a county-wide spelling bee. I was so excited. I was going to win this thing.

But I didn’t win. I misspelled aggravate and lost with only a handful of people left.

20 years later you better bet your ass that I know how to spell aggravate. I do not, however, remember any of the words that I spelled correctly and there’s probably a few that I would misspell today.

Design thinking works on the theory that working small will allow you to provide solutions and improve on them quickly and failing fast will help you learn more deeply and more quickly.

How this relates to you:
In a society that is focused on succeeding and results and winning, winning, winning, it is difficult to be ok with failure. But failure is an amazing opportunity to learn and make things better. We need to give ourselves permission to fail (and funders need to think about how they might fund failure, but that’s a whole other blog).

Your average nonprofit program involves hours of planning and working on logistics, meeting after meeting after meeting, months of writing grants and talking with program officers. When those programs fail, they fall hard. By developing a smaller prototype program that starts off with a loose frame and a general idea and goes through several feedback loops, you can create a pretty successful program that works for your constituents, have some data (which helps with funding), and any failures would be relatively small.

How do you fail fast? Consider creating a more open environment. When working on a problem, pull out a whiteboard and ask everyone around the table to list all the possible solutions that come to mind – even the absurd, weird, dumb, impossible ones. Use the “yes and” model and ask everyone to build on each other’s ideas (YES, we will serve three hot meals a day AND provide tutoring). See what happens.

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Using these principles in your work may seem uncomfortable at first, but that’s kind of the whole point. By disrupting the ordinary, you can make a new path toward extraordinary.