These are exciting days for us at Pensaar. The Summit, which we have planning for a while is right around the corner.
Here’s what you can expect from our Summit workshop (Phase1 on 15, 16 and 17 July hosted at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore). The co-creation session is carefully designed to be a completely immersive and experiential 3 days. You’ll learn how to understand customers, articulate insights that will inspire innovation, ideate till you get disruptive ideas that you rapidly test with customers. The entire conference is focused on learning by doing. And, what’s more you will learn design thinking with a group of 50 people across startups, large companies and academia. We are envisioning creating change makers. You will walk away – empowered and inspired.
We are thrilled to be partnering with Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM, Bangalore) to bring the Design Thinking Summit. We are humbled by the tremendous response that’s already poured in.
Our mission is to raise the levels of awareness for Design Thinking in India and elsewhere. Particularly in India, where we think we’ve had a strong legacy of an engineering led culture. Sadly though that legacy is a big factor in India being perceived as an outsourced development center. The opportunity though, as we see in every challenge, is to bring about the perfect marriage of engineering & product development with a design thinking mindset – a mindset posited on a user first, design led solutioning
In our experience, many teams and organisations are deploying a tactical workaround – that of hiring designers. Merely hiring designers isn’t enough, its critical for leadership teams to harness the power of design thinking to create experiences for customers, which are awesome.by design
But I get ahead of myself here. Let me back up here a bit.
What comes to mind when you think of Innovation? Ever so often, it means it’s a flashback to one of three ways we experience the pursuit of innovation across organizations:
- The Eureka moment
- Start thinking out of the box
- BOHICA: Bend Over Here It Comes Again
Not surprising that companies (of every shape, size and origin) are struggling with innovation. Good work is happening, the right interventions are being made but these interventions are happening in silos. One is left with the feeling that “some secret sauce is missing”. Is there a secret sauce? And is it missing?
Design thinking is the answer. It’s missing for sure. But it isn’t missing as an ingredient – it’s missing as a mindset within teams and across organizations.
So, what is Design Thinking (DT)? Design thinking or Human Centered Design is a process for solving problems. It’s a perfect blend of divergent and convergent thinking allowing for a wide exploration of possibilities vs. being fixated on a single solution (a uni-dimensional solution)
We approach DT as a “disciplined pursuit of disruption”. Let me explain the 3 key words there:
- Disciplined: It’s disciplined, because innovation isn’t about happy accidents and good fortune (serendipitous innovation). We believe in “engineering serendipity” to get to the future we want to create (note: we don’t say get future ready, which is an ever-shifting frame of reference)
- Pursuit: it’s a relentless pursuit with rigour. To fully harness the potential of DT, you have to anchor it within the DNA of the team / organisation. For organizations to realize the full potential of their innovation capabilities, they need to look at it holistically, from up skilling talent, empowering them with the right processes, values and decision making, allowing them to push the boundaries of what’s possible
- Disruption: This is an oft quoted (largely misquoted) and we make an effort to make that distinction. Disruption is doing new things that makes old / existing things obsolete. Innovation on the other hand is just doing new things.
We are super excited at how uniquely positioned we are. And the DT Summit is our chance to share this unique perspective with the broader audience. We love diversity and we embrace it wholeheartedly.
We fight educated incapacity, because we bring to bear the power of design thinking, which is domain agnostic in its approach and application.
So, what is that Pensaar way of Design Thinking? Our process: Discovery —> Insight —> Dream —> Disrupt is designed around some core principles:
- Co-creation: We love co-creating with our client partners (and in turn, encourage our clients to co-create with their users / customers). We love to share the ownership of problems (product or business or social) and solutions we co-create.
- Designing for Human behaviour: We love technologies (emerging and disruptive) but only as the means to the end. We believe humans are the best technology and our emphasis has always been on designing solutions for behaviour change – human-to-human interface. (No we don’t think apps are a business model)
- Problems & Goals focused: We are obsessed and fall in love with problems. Our approach has been carefully designed to avoid the path of least resistance. To be honest, it does make a lot of our partners edgy, because we spend a disproportionate amount of effort in building customer empathy, generating insights and carefully crafting that problem statement.
- Addressing a genuine human need: Most product / business failures come from lack of customers and NOT products. That’s really from NOT understanding customer’s evolving needs and yet trying to design a fancy product. Unless you’ve understood the customers real pain points and his/her hierarchy of problems, any product, no matter how good it looks on paper – its bound to fall short of its potential
- Assumptions test: It’s simple really. Any idea or thought you have, is a hypothesis, which needs to be tested. Without, rapid experimentation to test for assumptions and hypothesis you aren’t managing the risks in favour of success.
We can’t wait to meet you and co-create with you at the workshop. We hope to see you, both at the workshop (15 – 17 July) and at the Unconference on 12 Aug.
Please do share this event #DTSummitBLR http://designthinkingsummit.com and help us spread the word on the summit.
Guest Post by Venkat Kotamaraju – Growth & Strategy Leader, Pensaar