Step 1. Provide Value
Design thinking can make a big contribution to the social aspect of any business, but most potential clients are unfamiliar with what design thinking can do. When communicating your offerings, you must demonstrate the value of your approach. So providing opportunities such as workshops, or raising awareness through educational institutions about specific issues your users and partners face will establish you as an authority in your niché. What’s more, collaborating with other industry leaders and referring opportunities to each other will allow for more honest conversations and stronger solutions for your customers to play a role in.
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That being said, choosing opportunities based on the potential for real social impact for your business and the community can be a challenge. Do you choose between the innovation needs of a single partner or customer? (Too limited in scale?) Or with projects that are more broadly targeted at an entire sector? (Too generic?) The answer is that there are two types of people: those who get stuff done, and those who talk about it to look good.
Design thinkers look for workarounds and improvise solutions, and they find ways to incorporate those into the offerings they create. They consider what are called the edges, the places where “extreme” people live differently, think differently, and consume differently.
Step 2: Catalyze Users with Storytelling
When you have data, both challenges and solutions can be easy to illustrate. But when you don’t have it, how do you represent the needs you’re solving for, or what exactly, your solution will look like?
A great story that I always think of when dealing with a project that has little data is when the IDEO.org team had a project focused on creating a digital tool to help lower-income Americans improve their financial health. The team came up with the idea of a chatbot that could encourage people to make better financial decisions. But some members and stakeholders had preconceptions that chatbots might come off as too automated or insincere. So one designer put together the story of a user named Janice and what her daily interactions with the chatbot looked like as she worked to manage her finances. With a very simple story of an individual’s experience with this chatbot, Roo, the whole team was able to align around what it was they were working towards, and they were also able to get partners and customers really excited about what that would look like.
This story is a perfect example of how storytelling before, during and after can get people excited and get a solution unstuck when an antagonistic perception can halt doing things in their tracks. People are always hungry for a story, for the collision of good and bad, or for a simple explanation on how you’re doing what you’re doing. Feed into that lust for knowledge and that curiosity about what’s just around the corner. Your business will thrive and your customers will forever be hungry.
Step 3: Always Set Up for Success
Optimizing for impact and thus success online can be achieved through several processes. Being humble and leveraging the experiences of others within and outside your network is one. While another is consolidating business development with social media to create a more focused team that effortlessly creates projects and content.
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Leveraging The Experiences of Others
While a “fresh eyes” perspective is a valuable way to uncover new insights and ideas, remembering that passion and enthusiasm are not enough to have an impact and can often result in unintended outcomes is important. So investing in quality hires and training staff to do social impact projects, should provide cultural and situational information that will better assist teams who are working in unfamiliar environments that often arise while diversifying your online brand voice.
Consolidating Business Development & Social Media
We must tailor our way of doing business appropriately when working with clients and consumers in person vs being connected online. I think that we all can agree that meeting someone in person versus online can lead to very different relationships moving forward. Thus like designers, your business must learn to speak the language of social clients and communicate their passion for their work as well as yours. So connecting both the best practices of your business development with social media will provide a less fragmented brand voice. While creating a better understanding of who each respective business is, and what they’re targeting for future initiatives.
Conclusion
Many social enterprises already intuitively use some aspects of design thinking, but most stop short of embracing the approach as a way to move beyond today’s conventional problem-solving. Certainly, there are impediments to adopting design thinking in an organization. Perhaps the approach isn’t embraced by the entire organization. Or maybe the organization resists taking a human-centered approach and fails to balance the perspectives of users, technology, and other organizations.
One of the biggest impediments to adopting design thinking is simply fear of failure. The notion that there is nothing wrong with experimentation or failure, as long as they happen early and act as a source of learning, can be difficult to accept. But a vibrant design thinking culture will encourage prototyping—quick, cheap, and dirty—as part of the creative process and not just as a way of validating finished ideas.
As Yasmina Zaidman, director of knowledge and communications at Acumen Fund, put it, “The businesses we invest in require constant creativity and problem solving, so design thinking is a real success factor for serving the base of the economic pyramid.” Design thinking can lead to hundreds of ideas and, ultimately, real-world solutions that create better outcomes for organizations and the people they serve.
