Idea in Brief
The Challenge
Design-thinking methods—such as empathizing with users and conducting experiments knowing many will fail—often seem subjective and personal to employees accustomed to being told to be rational and objective.
The Fallout
Employees can be shocked and dismayed by findings, feel like they are spinning their wheels, or find it difficult to shed preconceptions about the product or service they’ve been providing. Their anxieties may derail the project.
The Remedy
Leaders—without being heavy-handed—need to help teams make the space and time for new ideas to emerge and maintain an overall sense of direction and purpose.
Anne Lind, the head of the national agency in Denmark that evaluates the insurance claims of injured workers and decides on their compensation, had a crisis on her hands. Oddly, it emerged from a project that had seemed to be on a path to success. The project employed design thinking in an effort to improve the services delivered by her organization. The members of her project team immersed themselves in the experiences of clients, establishing rapport and empathizing with them in a bid to see the world through their eyes. The team interviewed and unobtrusively video-recorded clients as they described their situations and their experiences with the agency’s case management. The approach led to a surprising revelation: The agency’s processes were designed largely to serve its own wants and needs (to be efficient and to make claims assessment easy for the staff) rather than those of clients, who typically had gone through a traumatic event and were trying to return to a productive normal life.
