Design Thinking Roles - The Design Thinking Coach
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 (a seventh of diversity and inclusion is being developed).
You can access the Design Thinking Competency Model here.
The six current roles are as follows:
We are starting our exploration of design thinking roles with the Design Thinking Coach. It is at the top of the list, and it also happens to be the role that I play most often.
The best players get the best coaches
What does a design thinking coach do and why do you need one?
In my experience, the most important thing a coach does is to ask people to slow down and to not rush to design or implementation.
Good solutions requires research and exploration. Empathy, the first step in the IDEO Stanford approach to design thinking (the most common approach according to our research), does not come easily. Real empathy is an act of grounded imagination. By that I mean it is an attempt to understand the experiences, beliefs, emotions, thought processes and mental maps of other people. Doing this takes time. Design projects are often under pressure, even extreme pressure, to show progress. A coach starts by slowing things down.
The second task of a design thinking coach is to encourage exploration. Sometimes this is just clearing white space in front of the team.
One reason design projects fail is that the team decides on a solution before generating alternatives. The coach is responsible for encouraging the team to find new directions to explore. One way to do that is through concept blending, where ideas from two or three different domains are brought together to generate new solutions. Coaches can also facilitate brainstorming sessions, help the team document explorations (Mind Maps anyone?) and establish directions (exploration is not a random walk).
Introducing experts can be an important way to help a team.
Exploration often leads the team into unfamiliar ground. That is part of the purpose of exploration. The coach often needs to reach out and bring in people with expertise. This requires its own special set of skills in relationship management as well as access to a broad network of experts.
Facilitating decisions is also part of the coach’s role.
Now for the most difficult part, sometimes the team gets stuck and is unable to make a decision. This can happen for several reasons: the team is at loggerheads, the team is in analysis paralysis, external decision makers are not aligned … the coach needs to play a critical role not in making the decision, but in facilitating the making of a decision.
Skills for design thinking coaches.
It has been difficult to decide on the critical skills for the design thinking coach. Here is our current thinking on these skills, but this is just a starting point. The best solution for your organization may be different, but Open Competency Models are meant for you to customize!
MUST HAVE SKILLS for a DESIGN THINKING COACH
There is a long list of should have skills below this, and the Ibbaka AI is suggesting additional skills for consideration.
As the model comes into wider use we will also see skills bubbling up from the skills seen on design thinking projects and by people in design thinking roles. It will be interesting to follow this and to see how the model evolves with use.
If you are currently a design thinking coach, or would like to be a design thinking coach, please reach out to info@ibbaka.com and we can begin to share ideas.
Posts on Roles in the Open Competency Model for Design Thinking
Design Thinking Coach (this post)
Design Thinking Project Leader
Design Thinking Project Member
Design Thinking Researcher (coming)
Stakeholder Engagement Leader (coming)