Design Thinking and the church
Sooo…why the long blogging absence???
Well, in a word. BUSY. Very busy.
Several months ago I decided to put together a new website that would cover a different area of my consulting life: Design Thinking.
At the time, I thought it would be a small site that might get a little traffic, and maybe inspire some people to consider the effectiveness of the Art of Design Thinking. Wrong.
It has been a HUGE surprise to see the amount of traffic from all over the globe. As a result, I have spent a great deal of time blogging, Tweeting, and consulting on the topic.
So how does this fit with the primary topic of this blog??? Well, it’s all about the ability to bring effective solutions to real problems. And that is what leaders do…especially in the church.
If you have not had a chance, I encourage you to check out the new site DesignThinkingBlog and see what you can learn.
And for those of you who are looking for direct help, use the contact page and let’s talk.
Design Thinking
For several months now I have been on a quest to pull the best information together on the topic of Design Thinking. I was first introduced to the concept through a Nightline story on IDEO, an Industrial Design and Engineering company in California. As I watched to story almost 10 years ago, I was fascinated with the ability that this company had to create very cool and effective products. They were on to something that could change the way companies developed products.
Over the years, I have followed IDEO as they have moved from creating products to teaching other companies how to create. The success they have had has opened the doors to an international audience that is hungry to find new ways to do things. Eventually, the big focus was on HOW they did things, not WHAT they did. The IDEO process became known as Design Thinking and is now hitting the business world as a new way of getting results.
So is Design Thinking just another business fad…the lasted “flavor of the month”? Maybe. But it is also one of the most legitimate shifts in thinking over the past 20 years.
We as humans seem to have this odd desire to look for extreme solutions to the problems that we face. For a generation, the solutions came from our ability to dream and create. Then for a generation, it was our ability to analyze and engineer. For a new generation, it is about personal experience. So which of these extremes is correct? D. All of the above.
Over the next several posts we will explore this new concept and how it can have a positive impact for the church.
Tim Brown from IDEO
IDEO has long been considered the “founder” of the Design Thinking movement. Tim Brown is one of the thought leaders on this topic. In this interview with Business Week, he speaks to several questions about how design thinking can help businesses. The first question “What are the steps” is a very basic steps in the Design Thinking process. Tim explains these in detail.
1. Approach problems as if they were projects
2. Look outside your organization for possible solutions
3. Create “tangible” solutions early
4. Wrap a story around your solutions
Change in the Church
I spend the majority of my time working with leaders of local churches. Talk about a group that struggles with change!! One of the most significant ongoing “challenges” that these leaders face is that they have experienced success with something in the past, and are having trouble adjusting to the currently reality.
Churches have a great deal of trouble distinguishing between their “methods” and their “work”. No product or service delivery “method” is effective forever, but the “work” of the church never changes. When it is being effective, suffering is being relieved, people are finding hope, and lives are being changed for the better. It is vital that the church finds ways to be effective.
21 Rules of Innovation… numbers 15-21
15. A good team is always an active learning team.
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16. Be aware of the balance and flow of polarities that exist for your team. Remember that too much team can be just as bad as not enough. Allow for individual self-expression within the team. Teams are not problems to solve, they are a mass of polarities to manage (see Bruce Johnson’s “Polarity Management”)
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17. Your team is a strong as its weakest link. A good team makes efforts to cover, improve, or strengthen its deficiencies. Read “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt to understand more about the “theory of constraints.”
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18. Effective teams engage in constructive disagreement around content with a ‘yes and not a ‘yes but’ attitude.
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19. Listening is key.
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20. Know thyself – what you can contribute to the team and what others can contribute that doesn’t come naturally to you.
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21. In teams, seek to ‘pull in’ the outliers, the mavericks, those who we tend to exclude. Everyone has something important to offer the team – find it.
21 Rules for Innovation..1-7
Greg Fraley wrote this list, with the assistance of Kim Greene, for the 2009 CPSI Team Building participants. They had made the request for a bit of “real world” content (imagine!).
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1. A strong bold initiative and vision inspires teams. It has the right people wanting to be involved.
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2. If you are the organizer/leader know that Who is on the team may have more impact then any other choice you make. As they say in golf, all bets are made on the first tee.
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3. If you can’t choose who is on your team, clarity of roles and task fit, are very important choices.
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4. When a team member leaves or a new member comes on board, don’t forget you have work to do in reforming the team. Really, it’s a whole new team.
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5. Don’t forget the fun element… “if it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right” (JFK). Try to integrate an element of fun in all the team does.
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6. Regardless of who is on your team, overt appreciation of strengths and diversity is a good place to start. Starting with positives is always a good idea.
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7. Build trust all the time. Make deposits to the “savings account” you have with each team member. You can, and will need to, “withdraw” from that account in difficult times (thanks Stephen Covey). A key to building trust is rigorous integrity around your word. Do what you say you will do. If you don’t, or have a problem, come clean on it ASAP.
Design Thinking in the Church
If you are a student of “innovation” you’re probably familiar with the term Design Thinking. If you’re not familiar with the term here’s a link that can give you broad overview.
The actual process of design thinking is often attributed to IDEO, a product design company located in California. To make the story short, IDEO was doing a lot of business in designing products they were getting a lot of attention (the mouse for the first Mac computer among others). Nightline the news program did a very cool story on them and the unique process by which they designed their products. Many people we interested, and looked for ways to adapt IDEO’s product design process to tackling other non-design problems.
Over time, Tom Kelley and IDEO began to refer to it as Design Thinking instead of simply “design”. They realized that it has more to do with the way that you think about the problem and its solution than about the actual product. They also began to consult with many different companies on how to integrate this thought process into the common challenge of being innovative.
There are several books worth reading on the topic including The Art of Innovation, Ten Faces of Innovation, The Rise of the Creative Class, and A Whole New Mind.
In general the concept is that our society has moved to very left brain thinking. Left brain thinking is characterized by analysis, logical, and linear thought processes. Right brain thinking is more creative, adaptable, and innovative. The goal is to use both the right and left brain thinking abilities.
For the church, this makes great sense. For hundreds of years the message of the gospel and the story of Christianity was represented through art, creativity and the narrative. It is a recent trend that we have focused so much on the logical and scientific aspects of the faith. In denying our creativity we have denied a large part of who God created us to be. At the same time - simply being creative, without understanding the rational and logical truths of the faith- is also denying a large part of who we are. It is when those two parts are brought together that we can most resemble the functioning body of Christ.
Over the next few posts I’ll be going into more detail about Design Thinking as a process and how it can benefit the church. It is one of the core processes that we use at 218Consulting when we help churches overcome the obstacles they face.
