Trends in the LinkedIn Design Thinking Group

Steven Forth is a Co-Founder of TeamFit. See his Skill Profile.

The LinkedIn Design Thinking Group grew past 100,000 members in 2017. So far in 2018, it has been adding about 50 new members each day! Back in August of 2018, we began to invite new members to take a survey on some of the critical issues on design thinking. We have drawn just over 600 responses. As approximately 9,000 people have joined the group during this period, this represents a response rate of about 7%. Lower than I would like, but not bad in the world of surveys. Many people think they are already over surveyed and, for a variety of reasons, user engagement on LinkedIn Groups is generally low.

Please click on this link or on the above image to take the survey.

So, what are we finding?

Question 1:
Why are you interested in Design Thinking?

Survey Monkey has a simple tag cloud generator built in. This is what it found.OK, so this is not the best tag cloud generator around. But even this gives some insight. There is a focus on Innovation and Learning for Product Development and Business challenges with an interest in building Community and forming Teams.Looking into specific responses, the following resonated with me. 

Question 2:
What role do you play in design thinking?

The group attracts people who play a wide variety of roles. Product design leads Organizational and UX Design by a small margin. I am surprised to see so many people engaged in Organizational Design here, but I think this is a very good thing. It is also good to see Service Design closing the gap with Product Design, as many of today's products are better conceptualized as services, and service design has some very good tools (see Ibbaka post on Customer Journey). Note that the 'Other' response accounts for almost 30% of the total. This also reflects the wide appeal of the design thinking across many types of work. People who answered 'Other' include many educators (from elementary school to the university level), coaches and sales coaches, general business executives and social activists. There are even a few investors.

Question 3
What are the most important skills that you bring to design thinking?

By far the most common response here is "Empathy." The message is getting across. "Openness," "Creativity," and "Curiosity" also came up quite often. The answers that intrigued me were those that combined two quite different skill sets. Examples include "Experience in designing for the process industries and discrete manufacturing industries," "Creative Thinking and Critical Analysis" and "Systems Thinking and UX." We are also seeing an uptrend in more data-centric skills, from "Data Gathering" and "Data Analysis" to "Machine Learning" and "Neural Networks." There we even a few people (OK only three) who identified "Parametric Design" as a design thinking skill. The most common technical skill was some form of "Agile" whether this was "Agile Development" or "Agile Product Management."

My own company, TeamFit, currently has an open survey on skills and skill management, for those interested.

Question 4
What other methods or frameworks do you combine most often with design thinking?

User-centric design continues to lead. This is not a surprise as many people consider "Design Thinking" and "User Centric Design" to be synonyms (I am not one of these people.) I am gratified to see Systems Thinking as a strong second, it is a necessary complement to many design thinking projects as it helps one understand where the best insertion points may be and how all of the pieces fit together. I noticed that Donnella Meadows wonderful book Thinking in Systems is one of the most popular books over on Hacker News!

The most common responses to "Other" were various Agile and Lean methodologies, including Lean UX. There were also specific tools mentioned, including a growing number of Service Design tools such as Customer Journey Mapping. The now classic Business Model Canvas and Mind Mapping were also quite common.

Some people are going deeper: Semiotics (one of my early loves), Cybernetics, Serious Play, Ethnographic Research and Socratic Inquiry were all mentioned by at least one person.

Question 5
What is the most compelling example of design thinking you have seen?

There is a wild diversity of examples here. Airbnb, Apple, Ideo and GE were the companies mentioned most often. A sampling of some of the more interesting responses follows.

"It is not about the outcome but about how people change their workflows and work habits after having done a DT workshop. Hence, my example is a change within the culture of a corporation."

"My first personal experience using design thinking in the workplace was an exciting moment for a group of teachers most of whom were not familiar with the process. We developed a new program for new students as they enter the district and the professional development that would be needed for the school employees to see it through. We are currently evaluating the program to improve the iteration for next year. (a slow process in schools!)"

"OpenIDEO platform - how they are able to connect people from all over the world to solve challenging problems." (Mentioned five times)"GE Healthcare - Reimagining how children experience MRI machines." (Mentioned seven times)

“Recently, an example of a 'See-Saw' (found in children's parks) launched at a school in a rural place which also works as a pump to pump out water."

"An advertising billboard in Perú that produces water from the atmospheric humidity for a lonely village out in the desert."

"Problem existed regarding the cost of defects for a specific area. Traditional methods implemented failed. Finally made time and devoted resources so actual production workers were included. In the end was able to truly find a problem, implement a pilot program and eventually a rollout that actually worked."

"While designing an electro-mechanical surgical device, we carried out dozens of interviews with physicians on their pain points (literally) with existing medical devices. By understanding the exact reason for their discontent, we were able to design an ergonomic surgical stapler that worked for the 5th and 95th percentile hand sizes of surgeons. After initial designs, we field tested prototypes and refined the design of the device and we were able to quickly send drawings for tooling shortly thereafter. Shortening the design cycles made our product better in less time."

Question 6
What are the most important things the design thinking group can do to help you?

This question always causes me stress as it is so difficult to execute on any of the great ideas.

On the theme "Sponsor design thinking challenges and projects" we had a good discussion earlier this year with about twenty credible suggestions. We will have a poll out soon to help us to focus our choices and decide on a possible platform for such work.

I encourage people to participate in local meet-ups and meetings. Building up local communities can be very rewarding, even if it is a lot of work for the organizers.Some of the ideas from the Other section are ...

• Provide free design thinking resources for educators (we have had discussions on this before but I will fire one up again)

• Encourage people to mentor others and to seek mentors (will also start a discussion on this)

• Inject conversations about design thinking into other disciplines, including engineering, education, local government

I plan to do another update on the survey in July when we will have gathered more responses. In that update, I will look to see if there are any trends that are changing over time.If there are other questions you would like us to ask please comment over in the Design Thinking Group itself.

"It is not about the world of design. It is about the design of the world."
~ Bruce Mau