The Gensyn Client Experience Part 2 – Design Thinking

Gensyn works as a trusted partner to accelerate the ability to adapt, grow, and thrive, no matter how complex the challenges faced by our clients. In part 1 of this series, we introduced the three interconnected approaches Gensyn brings to each engagement:

·       Collaborative Facilitation

·       Design Thinking

·       Systems Thinking

In Part 1 of this series, we shared how Collaborative Facilitation helps surface the wisdom already inside your organization and turn it into action.  Here we’ll share more about Design Thinking, and how we help your people listen deeply to customers and employees, test quickly, and create solutions that work in the real world.

What is Design Thinking?

How do you design solutions that truly meet the needs of your people and customers? That’s where Design Thinking comes in. It’s a problem-solving approach that starts with people, not assumptions. Instead of jumping straight to solutions, it helps teams deeply understand the needs, challenges, and motivations of the people they serve—whether that’s customers, employees, or partners.

Design Thinking is often characterized as a 5-step process.

1.      Empathize (understand the challenge)

2.     Define (narrow down the understanding to the most important elements)

3.     Ideate (create lots of possible solutions)

4.     Prototype (to narrow down and define the most promising solutions)

5.     Test (to put those promising solutions into action and see what happens)

If you ask yourself, “But how exactly do I empathize?” or “How do I define?”, you will understand the need for methods to accomplish each step. And, knowing that no two strategic challenges or group of stakeholders are identical, you will understand why a collection of methods to choose from comes in handy.

For each engagement, we design a process to help clients bridge the gap between where they are, and where they want to be. To do this, we curate various Design Thinking methods specific to the group and challenge we are addressing.

Diverge Then Converge

A closer look into those steps will show you that the process of Design Thinking first encourages wide “divergent” thought about the challenge. Then we “converge” on the most important elements of the challenge. Through collaborative facilitation, we gather a wide variety of viewpoints to understand all the issues, but then we get practical and identify what’s most critical to consider.

You can visualize it like a diamond. From left to right, a diamond opens from a point and goes wide. Then it narrows again to a point.

Then a similar diverge and converge process is repeated in the solution space. We facilitate the creation of open thinking about possible solutions. We want to hear as many possible solutions as we can. But then we want to zero in on the most promising ones.

Visualize both processes together, and you see a pair of diamonds, a “Double Diamond”. If you have trouble visualizing that, just look at Gensyn’s logo!

Some Favorite Methods

We have our favorite Design Thinking methods and tools, which include interviews and observations, customer journey mapping, problem tree analysis, and a variety of ideation activities. Regardless of the exact approach we use, we know that Design Thinking will help us stay focused on finding solutions and strategies that meet the needs of those we serve, whether that is customers, employees, or the community.

Stay tuned for more

Design Thinking, powered by Collaborative Facilitation, works well when bringing people together to enable companies to make great decisions! But it stops somewhat short of building out corporate systems to fully accomplish those ideas. Part 3 of this series covers Systems Thinking to complete the cycle.

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