Design Thinking Roles - Design Thinking Innovator
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Roles are central to Ibbaka’s Open Competency Models. We see jobs as being bundles of roles. One can also play a role on a team and then there are all those ad-hoc roles that we play (‘I am doing this off the side of my desk’).
There are currently six roles in the Design Thinking competency model (an additional role for diversity and inclusion is being developed).
You can access the Design Thinking Competency Model here.
The six current roles are as follows:
The Design Thinking Innovator Role
Design thinking is not static. It is a constantly evolving set of ideas, practices, patterns and a dynamic community of practitioners and thought leaders. As I write this, there are already more than 170,000 people in the LinkedIn Group for design thinking.
We have based this competency model on the IDEO Stanford d.school approach to design thinking. This is a good place for people to start, but it is not the only approach to design thinking, nor is it the end of the story.
A more general definition of design thinking is that it is
The application of design processes to a wide range of organizational, social and commercial challenges, and
The development of insights from these applications to develop new design processes and patterns.
In other words, Design Thinking is an example of what Chris Argyris would call ‘double loop learning.’ (For a rich discussion of double loop learning see Teaching Smart People How to Learn by Chris Argyris; for an application in a corporate setting see WORKING IN HIGH-LEVERAGE ZONES WITH THE DOUBLE-LOOP LEARNING MATRIX by Brian Hinken.
The role of the design thinking innovator is to implement the feedback loop between ‘information feedback’ and the ‘mental model’ in double loop learning.
Innovators can work within an organization, or they may span across organizations. In either case, the responsibility is to constantly be testing the assumptions built into existing design processes, including design thinking, and devising new design processes and patterns.
The Design Thinking Innovator will work closely with the Design Thinking Coach, and in many cases the two are one and the same person, to improve design thinking.
One way we can innovate on design thinking is through design research. Design research is also a kind of double loop process. It refers to both research into design processes and the research needed for design thinking. David Botta at Ibbaka is carrying out research into the design of competency models as part of our own contribution to the field.
A recent book on design thinking innovation is GK vanPatter’s Rethinking Design Thinking. This book invites us to think much more widely about the range of challenges to which design thinking can be applied.
Organizations that want to truly embed design thinking into their culture will need to go beyond the conventional roles of design thinking coach and product leader and support design thinking innovation. This is where the design thinking innovator plays an essential role.
MUST HAVE SKILLS for a DESIGN THINKING INNOVATOR
Posts on Roles in the Open Competency Model for Design Thinking
Design Thinking Innovator (this post)
Design Thinking Project Leader
Design Thinking Project Member
Design Thinking Researcher (coming)
Stakeholder Engagement Leader (coming)