A few weeks ago I was at Michigan State University, teaching an all-day workshop about Design Thinking. It was the beginning of the day, and the MBA students were filing into the classroom by twos and threes. But it was strange: they were all coming in the wrong way.
The main entrance doors to the room were in the front, yet all the students were entering the room from the back. Wondering about the completely backward traffic flow, I went to check it out.
In a connected classroom, I found many more small groups of students looking lost, with that universally recognized, “I don’t know if I’m in the right place,” look on their face. I told them to keep going into the next room, and continued on to find out what was causing the confusion.
The problem was clear: The wrong room had its doors open, while the correct room had its doors shut. Closed doors were literally deterring the students from the best course.
I immediately saw a chance to bring the concept of Design Thinking to life for these students in a very real way. I simply closed the doors to the wrong room and opened the doors to the correct room, and then sat on a bench down the hall to see how my experiment would turn out.
It worked perfectly. All the remaining students walked past the closed doors and went into the correct room.
At its core, it was a very simple Design Thinking challenge:
1) Identify a problem (Students entering the wrong way)
2) Observe users’ natural activities around this problem (Watch what the students were doing)
3) Create a prototype solution (Close the wrong doors, open the correct doors)
4) Test the prototype (Watch students to see if they move correctly through the new solution)
The payoff came when I told the MBA students, “What if I said to you that I used Design Thinking to get you to do exactly what I wanted this morning, without ever meeting you or talking to you?” It was absolutely priceless to see them looking at me, looking at each other, looking around the room, wondering what magic trick I had pulled and how they could have been fooled by it!
When I finally revealed the details of my experiment, it really drove home the concept of Design Thinking in a memorable, personal way they won’t soon forget.
The problem was just a minor irritation in this case, but by thinking differently about the situation, I was able to create a strong, teachable moment. I turned something I may have just dealt with into a key lesson of the day.
What about you? What challenges or roadblocks seem to be standing in your way? Change the way you’re thinking about them and get ready to learn something new.
-Kacha
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