Design Thinking Roles - Project Member
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 Project Member Role
Design thinking is applied in diverse domains making it difficult to define the skills needed on project teams.
Generally, the teams should include people who can speak for the different stakeholders. There should also be more than one design and technical discipline represented. This is important as successful design thinking projects take into account multiple perspectives and are often successful when they blend ideas and solutions from more than one discipline. Mark Turner’s work on Concept Blending is a powerful way to do this.
When participating on a design thinking team, think of how you can contribute to each of the following:
Bring in and represent the perspective of a user or stakeholder
Understand the origins, history and root causes of the challenge
Represent a design or technical discipline (there should be more than one)
Apply generative thinking to generate new ideas
Come up with simple ways to prototype and create ideas
Apply critical thinking to evaluate ideas
Think through to how the ideas can realistically be implemented and scaled
MUST HAVE SKILLS for a DESIGN THINKING PROJECT MEMBER
Note that two of these skills are at the Newbie or Learner level, they are respectively Concept Blending and Design Thinking. Hopefully the skills of project members will grow over the course of the project. If the team is on the Ibbaka Platform and using Skill Profiles you can see the growth in skill levels over time.
Concept Blending (Newbie is fine)
Design Thinking (Learner is fine)
This role also has many Should Have skills identified. This is a reflection of its pivotal importance. No one will have all of these should have skills, and the specific mix required will depend on the project and the culture of the organization.
Posts on Roles in the Open Competency Model for Design Thinking
Design Thinking Project Leader
Design Thinking Project Member (this post)
Design Thinking Researcher (coming)
Stakeholder Engagement Leader (coming)