Transformation & Design Thinking

Pretext

Regularly, the attentive reader of our blogs and the viewer of our vlogs will notice that we repeatedly write and speak about design thinking in connection with transformation projects. The word is now not so new in companies and in management everyday life. But still, it is a concept that is subject to its own constant evolution and transformation. This is decisively due to the fact that it is an open concept and globally the phenomenon of Design Thinking is also being researched in all its manifestations.

Our clients also know from projects that we never sell Design Thinking as a tool in projects and proposals. We, iManagementBrazil, are convinced that it is not a tool that you "sell" as an interim manager or consultant, use and then just finish the project and leave.

Quite the opposite!

We have been applying the Design Thinking mindset for many years, evaluating with every project. We see again and again that Design Thinking is probably one of the most important aspects on the path of corporate cultural change in a transformation. Therefore, we come to the project with the evolutionary knowledge of Design Thinking and implement this way of thinking. It should take root and stay in the project and in the client company.

It should not matter whether we are present afterwards or not. Design Thinking should gain a life of its own in your company and continue to develop.

Design Thinking Model of a transformation project with a Brazilian coffee shop franchise, São Paulo, Brazil (cover image of present blog on social media channels)

Business Model - Business Plan - LoFi Test - Startup

In the many years as founder of iManagementBrazil, I have actually never seen a business plan as I learned it at university and later in the Executive MBA. This is even true for our own startup iMBdigital.Gallery_, which we got up and running this year.

Do you feel the same way?

No matter, whether in iManagementBrazil's own entrepreneurial environment or in the conception of iMBdigital.Gallery_, or in the project missions with Brazilian startups, almost never did the companies emerge from a perfect document. Rather, we or our clients put what was developed into practice by creating micro-hypotheses and validating them in real time.

Lean Startup

If you talk about Lean Startup, you can't avoid Steve Blank, the father of modern entrepreneurship. He never tires of calling for today's professionals, planners and managers to leave their buildings. By constantly and massively interacting with potential customers and understanding their real needs, you get the ingredients to develop products and services that people actually want to buy.

Why do start-ups and new business models of traditional companies fail?

high rate of fall by the wayside

If you believe the many sources available, on average almost 52% of these initiatives fall by the wayside.

If you extract the reasons and summarize them, you are actually left with one overwhelming fact written on the wall in big red letters:

they can't find demand for the solutions they develop.

In other words, something has been designed that no one wants to consume.

Is the fast world out there the problem?

artificial digital interpretation of “too fast”

So that's the risk of staying "in a building" too long in today's super-fast world. By the time you get around to visualizing what you've designed, the environment may have changed so much that the design no longer makes sense.

Yet many planners and managers stay within their four walls and spend a lot of time and effort trying to create perfect plans.

In reality, there are no perfect plans because the market is always "more perfect" than we are!

And this is where Design Thinking comes on stage in full force.

Test LoFi models

design thinking needs LoFi-model testing

Nothing is more tangible than a road experiment to test a business model! But first with a LoFi model, not a HiFi model! We have explained the differences between LoFi and HiFi test models over and over again in many blogs and vlogs over the past two to three years, using lived examples.

Nothing is as tangible as experimentation on the road. Decisions made based on market reactions minimize the risks of a project.

To this end, we always quickly run many small tests in transformation projects, evaluate the results together with the client, then make the necessary adjustments and test again. This always runs in parallel with the internal project progress: it is mostly steady and incremental - not the big one-off throws and the new reality is already there.

No! This does not work!

Why?

Because we don't know what will happen along the way. Together with the client, we have developed an idea of where we want to go, strategically developed and visualized, without detailed figures in an Excel sheet. The many tests, the incremental progress, these are then the daily tactical steps in the transformation.

It's called rolling up your shirt sleeves, it's hard work, with setbacks and many small successes. The road is stony, hard and not the fantastic, glorious big step that many media outlets make it out to be. Anyway, we haven't seen anything like that yet.

focus, but move tactically

Most successful transformations, like startups, are not born out of a grand design. They are born out of intentions and actions. It is incremental development that leads to greater returns.

But let me be clear about one thing.

Yes, we need to plan. Yes, strategy is important. Yes, tactics are equally important.

And please don't mix strategy and tactics!

It's just that things have changed. And this is where tactics come in! Organizations used to guide their actions with three or five-year plans. Leaders built their careers with jobs for life. Now, however, companies and careers are constantly changing.

no time for the “perfect business plan”

And that requires you, and us, to be agile enough to change, too. Simply agility, another wonderful buzzword, cannot be reconciled with rigid plans.

Working out a strategy "in house" for months and then implementing it for months or even years no longer works in this environment, where working it out on paper and putting it into practice have to happen in parallel, not one after the other.

Technology is the product, innovation is the meaning.

Technology is often part of the transformation process and plays an important role in it. Transformation has innovation embedded in it. But it alone is not the basis for an offering. It's not just because things are new and technologically advanced that people use them, add them to their lives, and recommend them to others.

In short, innovation is not synonymous with novelty, nor does it consist of the breakthrough product gathering dust on store shelves and in customers' closets.

Some products seem more likely to boost a portfolio manager's ego and bonus than to fulfill a customer's want or need. Innovation is the fruit of creativity put into practice to achieve positive results for the business and positive impact for people.

be careful - a product might be born as an dinosaurs

In our project missions aimed at transformation, we consistently argue that there is no systematic innovation without a focus on the customer. Sometimes there may be a creative surge and a holy grail lighting up of an offering portfolio, but that is unlikely to be sustainable for a company in the long run. That's our experience, anyway.

For us at iManagementBrazil, innovation is the result of the people, the project team, processes and a lot of hard work and not the brilliant ideas of a single person. And about the ability to systematically create solutions whose value is recognized by customers.

design thinking and LoFi-model testing are iterations with incremental steps

The flesh-and-blood human component of transformation is much more important than a transistor or a chip. And the more we can involve these people in creating the outcome, the greater our chances of success.

Continued at playbook examples.

As a follow-up to this blog post, we would like to share with our readers and anyone interested in the topic of transformation, innovation and design thinking some striking moments and statements as well as insights, which we will share in very short Elevator Pitch Posts over the coming weeks across a wide range of social media channels and open digital platforms. We will publish them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing and Reddit.

Who knows, maybe it will help you too, just as it helped us in the specific project missions to communicate the innovative vision of living project work to our clients.

If you like, comment on the Elevator Pitch posts. It would be great to share your experience as well.

Transformation is, if nothing else, a never-ending stream of learning, channeled and documented through the mindset of design thinking.