Chapter 2

Design Thinking Approach

There was a Japanese military officer in our troop who was catholic and could speak Spanish and English. He was well respected by the Filipinos. However, as things went wrong for Japanese army, and the Filipinos started to revolt against Japanese army, he was put in a ­difficult situation due to his own group’s suspicion.

––My father’s words

We have looked at our services in Chapter 1, now we can think about designing our services. “But, what and how?” would be your question. And we will work upon a relatively new approach called design thinking, which is different from design, especially the familiar form of graphic arts design. So, let me first explain what design thinking is.

What is Design Thinking?

To describe what design thinking is a tough job. That is not to say the job of explaining design thinking is very difficult. I can tell you that the approach of design thinking is like the approach of a child who tries to reach out for what it wants—with no prejudice, positive acceptance, an attempt to understand the situation, and working toward the goal all by itself. The difficulty is in the precision of the explanation, the coverage of your intention, and the historical facts.

There are ongoing debates about who first coined the phrase, design thinking. You can check on web search engines with a question like “who coined the phrase design thinking?” as I will not waste your time showing data that can be obtained from the web.

However, design thinking today or the design thinking I am talking about comes from the design consulting company, IDEO.

You can find the following description at IDEO’s web page, http://www.ideo.com/about/

Most people agree on these three elements of design thinking or innovation, and so we can write the formula:

Design thinking = Business + Human aspects + Technology  (2.1)

But the meaning of the Formula 2.1 and the Figure 2.1 may not be clear enough. What does the + mean, for example? IDEO describes the operation as integration. But, how we can integrate these three elements? If we study the business, human, and technology aspects, then can we say we have integrated the three elements? No, I am afraid that would not be enough. I would rather recommend study of business, human, and technology aspects all at the same time, but again, that also would not be enough.

Figure 2.1 The three elements of design thinking or innovation

Source : http://www.ideo.com/about/

There would also be the question whether the design thinking and Innovation are one and the same, or is design thinking an approach to Innovation, or does design thinking have elements other than Innovation.

Bruce Nussbaum, once an advocate for design thinking at BusinessWeek, posted an article entitled “Design Thinking Is a Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?” (Nussbaum 2011) which you can read at http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663558/design-thinking-is-a-failed-experiment-so-whats-next, and is now promoting Creative Intelligence. And his point is that it is creativity that drives innovation, so you can avoid design and directly jump to creativity.

From my understanding, design thinking is a viable and proven approach for innovation; however, it might have other facets such as emotional and aesthetic responses as well, and of course there can be many other approaches to innovation. Moreover, an individual can give a different name to his or her own idea on an approach similar to design thinking.

However, you should be careful. Freek Vermeulen, Professor at the London School of Business says in his book, Business Exposed: The Naked Truth About What Really Goes on in the World of Business, (Vermeulen 2010) that through his own analysis of the data, those companies that tried innovations did not have better performance nor better survival rate compared to those who do not put in a big effort on innovation. He himself commented on this result as an inconvenient truth because he believes personally that innovation is necessary for our society even if it is not profitable for the company; so he does not like to see corporations stop trying to innovate.

The same kind of observation may apply to design thinking. One thing is clear, that design thinking is not the silver bullet to bring you bright new products and services in time. Design thinking is useful to find out new ideas, but other things are also needed to make them useful and dependable, and there have been cases where some ideas that you obtained through the design thinking approach were eventually not useful.

Design Thinking Mindsets

With my experience, design thinking is also an approach for improving mindsets. I have talked about dedication in your service. It is the mindset that you really need to develop and maintain to provide great service. Well, perhaps that would be going too far. You need other things such as technologies, teamwork, and customers as well. Still, your mindset is your greatest asset, and one of the great things in design thinking is that it will enrich your mindset.

First of all, let us look at the formula again.

Design thinking = Business + Human aspects + Technology  (2.1)

will tell you that you must think of business and human aspects and technology for your service. But, this formula does not tell you what kind of mindset is necessary or desirable to take the design thinking approach.

In fact, an appropriate mindset can help to perform any activity most suitably. For example, if you are providing entertainment services, you need the mindset to enjoy your service and your situation with your customers. On the other hand, if you are in the care-taking service either for infants or elderly people, you must be very careful that it does not exclude your enjoying your job, and so the mindset should be appropriately directed.

In an educational institution, for example, students, especially in Japan, have a mindset of following the instructions given by the teacher. The design thinking mindset, however, needs to be different. You need to question what you are told. You need to discover the realities hidden under what you see. You need to understand the deep truth of the problem. Yet you must also make every effort to understand your customer and your colleagues. You need to empathize with the situation.

The design thinking mindset is open to explore any possibilities, any viewpoints, and any objections. There will be quite diverse aspects of the problem from the business, human, and technology angles. Later on, you will focus on, or converse about possible solutions in order to satisfy the business, human, and technology requirements; however, at the phase where you are tackling and inspecting the problem, you should be open to any possibility.

Yes, in a sense, one has to learn to develop this mindset, but it is not following just one set of instructions. You need to learn from almost everything as a baby learns. You should be curious about anything on the table. Any business plan that sounds ridiculous can be picked up. Any human aspect such as a handicap, age, or disability can be considered. Any technology that sounds crazy can be tried.

Why is this kind of mindset not discussed much in the context of design thinking? In a way, when you take the design thinking approach, your mindset is ready for this open and exploratory approach with the well-planned introductory system. You are given very concrete problems and you are told that you have complete freedom to take any approach you like.

Yet, sometimes, people may tend to stick to some standardized approach even toward so-called design thinking. For example, some university courses for design thinking need both a syllabus and evaluation criteria, which, in a way, do not match the design thinking approach because the participants should be innovative to overcome any pre-­determined approach and the evaluation has also to be diverse and so cannot be prescribed in detail.

Design Thinking Toolsets

Our mindset is important, but we need toolsets as well to support the activities and mindsets. Now, what kind of tools will be used for design thinking? If you check the web for toolset or toolkit for design thinking, you will find many documents including books entitled Tools, Toolset, and Toolkit.

In some areas, tools are simply instructions to learn and study, and then, hopefully, you try to do as instructed or suggested. If you are making a desk by yourself, the toolset should be measures, saws, planes, and hammers. You may need a diagram or a handbook for home carpentry, but they are usually not called tools.

This type of usage of the word tools might be specific to one kind of thinking, as these instructions can be the only tools for thinking aside from the theories and experiments to support the instructions. And if you regard design thinking as a special style of thinking, these instructions, guidelines, and books provide enough tools to acquire the style. However, even though I have advocated a design thinking mindset in the preceding section, design thinking is not just a mindset but acting, or more precisely put, a trying and reviewing.

Experience is another aspect of design thinking, so some people dislike the phrase design thinking, and use other words such as innovation and creativity. Yet, the essential approach in design thinking is the same, and I like this phrase partly because I have liked thinking from my boyhood, and partly because the word design has clearer and more colorful images than innovation or creativity.

Now, back to the design thinking toolsets. Among the many available both on online and offline, I recommend the following two toolsets (it is just a coincidence that both are not called a toolset):

1. IDEO’s Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit, available at http://www.ld-grid.org/resources/methods-and-methodologies/ideo-toolkit.
2. Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation published from Innovation Leadership Board, available at www.innovation.io/playbook.

The first one is made by IDEO in collaboration with Riverdale Country School in New York City. It is targeted at teachers and school managers of elementary schools, K-12 kids’ educators. Actually, this contains very good cases for service design in the area of K-12 education. However, the process part can be applied in any area, so the toolkit eventually addresses the process for design thinking in general.

The design thinking process part is summarized by the following five phases as shown in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2 Design thinking process

Source : IDEO’s Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit, page 16

The great thing with this process toolkit is that it is also divided into a few steps with very detailed instruction, degrees of difficulty, time to be spent, how you team up and so on. I can summarize these steps as given in Table 2.1.

So, there are totally 41 steps grouped into six processes from the before process to evolution or from preparation to evolution of your activity to meet the challenge. IDEO’s book is 81 pages long and contains lots of cases. When you read the book, you can understand how the design thinking approach is taken and adopted to solve various problems in educational services.

One of the important things with these processes and steps is that they are not one-way or linearly developed. You need to go forward and backward, or you need to jump to other steps to see if the current step is in a good state or not. For example, to pick up a precise, approachable, and valuable problem in the very initial step of “define a challenge” is very difficult, and you learn in the middle of the process or sometimes during the feedback phase, that the problem you picked is a wrong one and there is another better problem to tackle. And this is entirely okay, as this is the learning process in discovery.

Also, if you sum up the number of hours needed to process all these steps, you will realize that you need at least 17 to 32 hours, but this number is just for the work at each step. And if you consider the need for about a week of field study, you surely need several weeks’ time to complete your project.

You must have noticed that the design thinking approach also uses lots of existing techniques such as interviewing and brainstorming. The prototyping step would be most suitable for the traditional meaning of the word design; however, the spirit of the designer is spread through all these processes. Even before starting work, we need to work upon the definition of the challenge, and after the work is completed, we need to go further to pass it to the community. These kinds of lifelong activities are also very special for design thinking, and also very useful and important for the service design.

Table 2.1 Design thinking process steps

Source: IDEO’s Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit

Now, we can move on to our second toolset: Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation (2013).

The style of this book is quite different from the preceding IDEO book. This playbook does not have information on how to hold a group session, how many minutes you may need to allocate, nor how hard the task would be. It says this playbook can be used either by an individual or by a group of people. There are some examples from the workshops, though.

The contents of the Playbook are the following:

Chapter 1. The Foresight Framework

We introduce a comprehensive framework that offers a structured approach to find the big idea.

Chapter 2. How to Start

Discover the different types of innovation paths, people, and industry contexts to help you start in the right place with the right mindset.

Chapter 3. Perspective

The Context Maps, Progression Curves, and Janus Cones methods broaden your view of the problem space, helping you to better anticipate the future.

Chapter 4. Opportunity

The Generational Arcs, Future User, and Futuretelling methods identify your future customers in terms of macro, micro, and narrative views.

Chapter 5. Solution

The White Spots, Paper Mockups, and Change Path methods turn your idea into a tangible artifact and plan.

Chapter 6. Team

The Buddy Checks, VOICE Stars, and Crowd Clovers methods help you find and keep the right people engaged in your pursuit of radical innovation.

Chapter 7. Vision

The Vision Statement, DARPA Hard Test, and Pathfinders methods set the right organizational vision to direct your team’s efforts.

Appendix

Supporting material includes a list of readings, suggested data sources, and other related items.

The italicized 15 methods are the tools (called methods) that this playbook introduces and they have icons (called shortcuts) shown in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3 Icons for the methods

Source: Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation

This idea of iconizing the methods is a good one, and it is easy to memorize. Some of the methods are similar to the steps described in IDEO toolsets such as Paper Mockups for Create a Prototype.

As Figure 2.3 indicates, the playbook guides the five phases: perspective, opportunity, solution, team, and vision. As in IDEO, these phases can be mixed and one can proceed forward and backward.

Also, note that the objective of the Playbook is a little different from the Toolset of IDEO. IDEO focuses on the solution of the problem, and the Playbook is aimed at forecasting the future innovation.

Perspective

Context Maps

Now, let us look at each method presented in the playbook. The first one is Context Maps. Context Maps help to capture emerging themes when you are pursuing an entirely new area of research, find group agreement on the important aspects of a problem, and gain factual background for a particular topic.

One of the defects in the playbook is that the descriptions are dispersed among various chapters of the playbook. For example, the related tools and techniques of the Context Maps are described in the chapter on underlying theories. I will provide this information into my explanation in the following sections.

Tools and techniques of Context Maps are brainstorming and mind mapping, and the unique benefit is the complexity of topic is retained, while beginning to converge on priority areas.

Context Maps themselves are conversions from the diverse ideas obtained by brainstorming and mind-mapping. There are eight places where you can place the converged ideas. And, if possible, you can give a name for each of these ideas and write them in the center of the context maps.

Progression Curves

Progression Curves represent the evolution of changes in terms of technological, social, and other aspects. The S curve for learning and technological adoption is a famous example for this kind of evolution. Also, this relates to historical timelines.

This is also another kind of conversion along the timeline. Its benefit is to connect multiple related events and highlight precedents, what has happened after those events, and what will happen after these events.

In this method, you are advised to draw multiple curves so that you have multiple viewpoints on timeline evolution.

Janus Cones

Janus, as a Roman guardian, has the two faces, one for the front and one for the back. The Janus Cones are used to identify indirect influences from the past, and to see what kind of influences we can create for the future.

This also makes a quick summary of the topic you are tackling from a historical perspective. Each circle indicates specific timeline, such as 1880s, 1900s, 1920s, … , 2000s, 2020s, or around today. You can put related topics that may have some relation to or influence on the current topic.

In the preceding case of Progressive Curves, the focus was on the line of technology or phenomena where you have been watching how some properties have evolved or changed. In these Janus Cones, you will place diverse phenomena with respect to the timeline. You may find some unexpected relationship between two events which may seem to be almost foreign to each other.

Now, let us move to the opportunity phase where you will shift from the past to the future and also from problems to people. To find the opportunity is to find users for your services and goods in a very broad sense. In a way, you will take user-centric approach instead of facts and technologies as in the preceding phase.

Opportunity

Generational Arcs

This is a familiar method for marketing people—discussing the demographic trend, which is one of the more stable predictions of happenings in the future. Population distribution does not change much, even though it may be affected by immigrants and some big events such as war. A large generation will grow year by year, and each generation will have some peculiar traits such as baby-boomers, who are now in their late 60s.

Generation arcs describe the age distribution in your part of population, either in the country or in the industry or in any segment you would like to choose. You will also expect that this curve will move forward year by year. So you can make some good guesses about how your target customer will act and how many possible customers you will have in the future.

Future User

This method, Future User, relates to demography, but it focuses on how the future users of your product and service will be and will behave with your product and service. The approach is extrapolation from the current user in a specific age group. They have special needs and special responses in some market segments. This kind of abstracted user specialties is called persona, and each persona can tell you a story.

First, you will pick a persona of some age, for example 32, and then you study what this persona was in the past, say 10 years earlier at age 22. You will also pick another persona at age 22 now, connect this persona with the first persona, 10 years ago at the same age 22.

You can extrapolate this second persona to 10 years in the future, at age 32. The forecasting will be based on the differentiation you have seen in the first one from age 22 to age 32, and the difference between the original persona and this persona, both at age 22. You can connect these four personas to see what will change, what will remain the same, what is the main motif of differentiation, and so on. With this method, and checking with the stories each persona can tell, you will have some clear images on the personas of future users.

You should give some name to these personas, with some interesting stories for your customers. You can put some energy into your imagined customers and you can check how real they are with your colleagues.

Futuretelling

This is a live demonstration or a short drama, a skit to show how the future will be. This is done typically when you have some ideas about your future products and services. You can identify the future users and present the audience an idea of how your product and services will appeal to future users.

In a way, this is a live version of your business proposal for your products and services. Instead of using financial forecasts with a long list of numbers, you will have your team members to present a future situation with the proposed products and services.

This has a double-sided effect. Clearly the audience will have a more intuitive understanding of what your product and services will bring to the future customers. They will understand the problems you are trying to solve and the values you are trying to convey. On the other hand, you and your team will learn how your future user will act, and hopefully you and your team will understand how the future user will feel with your products and services.

Using a drama will result in a lively situation so that you may find some insights by trying to foretell the future. It is also worth recording the responses, questions, comments, and their faces during your performance. The response of the audience will suggest how persuasive your postulated situation will be, and also let you know the outsider point-of-view about your future products, services, and users.

The preceding two phases, perspectives and opportunities give you good candidates for your future products and services. Some of these methods, such as Futuretelling, have given you a preliminary feedback for your plan of these products and services.

Solution

The next phase is the solution phase where we have three methods: White Spots, Paper Mockups, and Change Path.

In this solution phase, you can work more on your ideas trying to find out how to realize them in the real marketplace.

White Spots

This is a popular strategic method to find the opportunity space within the defined two dimensional space or a 2 × 2 matrix. First, on the white paper or canvas, you draw two intersecting lines with the x-axis and y-axis. Pick up two orthogonal dimensions. The Context Map may be helpful to identify these dimensions.

Put as many examples as possible in these four quadrants. It would be good to pick up four extreme cases to indicate these dimensions clearly and also to indicate some sense of distance from the extreme to neutral.

The most popular example of the dimensions will be growth-share matrix developed by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in the 1970s. In the BCG case, as shown in Figure 2.4, the objective is to make a better portfolio of your products and services so that they have configured each quadrant, as question marks (little share large growth), dogs (little share small growth), cash cow (large share small growth), and stars (large share large growth). The product is born in the quadrant named question marks, and if successful will come to stars and then to cash cow, and later may fall into dogs. If the new product is a failure, it will come into dogs, and you need to do something to move them into stars, if possible.

Figure 2.4 BCG’s growth-share matrix

In the case of White Spots, we are interested in finding the opportunity, so the dimensions will be military use versus home use, and high price versus low price, or professional use versus casual use and so on. This White Spots approach is similar to the Blue Ocean Strategy at the Blue Ocean Strategy Institute at INSEAD (Kim and Mauborgne 2005). This advocates the breaking of existing market boundaries and creating a new and untouched marketplace called a Blue Ocean. In White Spots, we will just use the dimensions and distribution of existing (existed as well) examples of products and services to see where the opportunity exists.

Our exploration to find the appropriate dimensions will be by breaking and creating new market boundaries in the Blue Ocean Strategies. The dimensions can be higher than three, four, and so on, yet two dimensions will be much simpler and easier to understand. So you had better stick to two dimensional schema.

Paper Mockups

This method is also called quick and dirty prototype. This appeals to the audience as well as your team to have a tangible picture for your products and services. You have had a similar situation at the Futuretelling method in the opportunities phase where you have presented a live drama to present the situation where your products and services will be used to solve your customers’ problems. In the skit, you may have shown a mockup of a ­product-to-be so that the audience can sense what kind of product it will be.

This mock-up is similar to the one used in Futuretelling but will be more complete. The Paper Mockup can be not only a product but a whole environment and setup for the products and services that you are planning to deliver.

The entire setup is very important for the service design because it will bring together all the elements that are needed to realize your service. For example, if you are working on an innovative drinking water supply system, you will think of all the elements such as getting the water from some source, a system to clean-up the water, and the delivery of the water to the home and customer area. You may also need a monitoring system as well as a metering system.

In the Futuretelling, you can pick up some situations, but you cannot fully depict the entire system or how to maintain the system. The paper mockup is more suitable to help describe the whole set of system elements and to check that you have installed all the elements for the complete operation.

Yet, this is only a mockup utilizing available cheap materials so that you can communicate with your audience who may be potential customers, and you cannot show them how it really works. This is the limitation of the Paper Mockups, but it has an advantage of showing what you and your team are thinking of, and inviting audiences to add to and modify your ideas.

This advice can also be obtained by inviting others to inject their ideas. “Do not make your mockup to be complete, better let them to be incomplete.” People will be more than happy when they can help you with your ideas. They can share their ideas by offering some suggestions. If you make a prototype that is so complete that nobody can add suggestions, then the audience can say either “yes, I will use it,” or “no, I do not like it.” Instead, if you invite them to modify, or suggest they revise or modify, then they can say, “look, it became better with my suggestion. Can I make more suggestion to make it better?”

Dark Horse Prototype

An important variation of paper mockup is the dark horse prototype which brings a new perspective to the ideas you have abandoned in the preceding earlier phases.

There are instances where after a series of iterations and working toward the realization of your ideas, you may come to understand the problem and situation much better than in the beginning. At this stage, some of your discarded ideas can become an attractive alternative.

This is like a dark horse in horse racing, the least promising candidate that has come to top will bring the greatest rewards to you. The method is to try a mockup for the abandoned ideas to give you a new perspective to the old ideas.

My friend, Stephen Kwan at San Jose State University, California, once told me that this method is one of the best and most effective in the playbook.

Change Paths

This method can be used for analysis but is presented for planning your path for innovation. This is a series of ways to connect milestones or decision points as you approach your final goal.

The process proceeds in the following manner:

1. First, you draw a circle on the right hand side to indicate your goal in the future with your new products and services.
2. Second, you put an X on the left hand side to indicate where you are at the present time-frame.
3. Finally, you can discuss with your colleagues what kind of paths you can take to achieve the right side goal.

There will be multiple approaches to achieve the goal. Please also pick up a few milestones where you need to check the status, responses from future customers, and see how competitors are working. Put X on the milestones and draw a line from this milestone to the goal.

This is a kind of exercise to prepare for the plausible future events. You must also prepare for the possibility that the real future might be quite different from what you expect now. Yet, it is better to describe events in the future and prepare for these events, even if they do not occur.

Team

In the next phase, the team has a flavor different from the preceding phases, where focus was on ideas and approaches to bring some innovations. Here, the focus is on people who work with you, and you must recognize that those colleagues and supporters are indispensable for your future products and services. You cannot simply deliver the solution alone by yourself. You need a team and you need to develop the ability of your team to pursue success.

Buddy Checks

This is a test for candidates to see whether they fit your team or not. The result of the test is described in the seven levels depicted in Figure 2.5.

Figure 2.5 The seven levels of Buddy Checks

Note that these levels are decided based upon the candidate’s response to the presentation of your ideas. You must be careful in the way you present your ideas. The playbook instructs preparing several exercises before you eventually check the people who are tested by your presentation and response.

Also, you need to listen very carefully to the people’s response. For example, the playbook lists typical responses such as “Why are you doing this?” “Baffled, don’t get idea” as level 1. However, sometimes the person, who has a good motivation to cooperate with you, may ask the very same question “why are you doing this?” You must read their faces to see what is behind their saying that, whether from a keen interest or just because he or she cannot understand what you are saying. To judge the level, you should have your colleagues and other people with you at the time of questioning, so that they can give a second opinion with the subject. Yet, the playbook also advises you to rely on your intuition, which might be reasonable.

Please also note that the Buddy Checks is a special kind of decision tree, or flow diagram, in the sense that it is a yes or no decision process.

VOICE Stars

VOICE Stars is a method to measure the leadership aptitude for radical innovation through a talent diagnosis. VOICE stands for voracious, open, instigates, curious, and earnest, the characteristics of leadership capability.

You will write a five point star as in Figure 2.6. For each person, you will write down his or her activities and measure the trait and plot the point on the axis of each trait.

Figure 2.6 VOICE Stars

Note that the measures to gauge these five traits can be set with the specific environment and team. Do not rely on the universal measure for everyone; that may mislead you about the value of the real attribute that you require to come up with the innovation.

The VOICE method is also useful for understanding the characteristic differences among your team members. So this diagram which can be made when you connect the dots on the VOICE star, will show some characteristic pattern for each team member. With these stars, you can talk with your team mates about what can be the best distribution of the workload in your team.

Crowd Clovers

Crowd Clovers is a different method from the preceding two methods, Buddy Checks and VOICE Stars in that this is not to check the candidate or team mate but to check what your personal network for innovation looks like.

You recognize the importance of your personal network to pursue your goal of innovative products and services. The Crowd Clovers give you a chance to check what your personal network is, and suggest how you can grow your personal network.

There are other approaches to check your personal network such as open innovation network and community of practice. The former focuses on sourcing ideas from outsiders by using some formal status or some formal organization such as crowd sourcing. The latter focuses on shared interests among people networked together. In the case of Crowd Clovers, we do not distinguish formal network from informal network, although we mark some annotation indicating whether the person has formal status or not. Crowd Clovers also put more emphasis on pushing new ideas forward rather than sharing.

In the Crowd Clovers, you will have four leaves, catalysts for inspiring ideas, connectors who give resources to you, enablers who execute things and push things forward, and promoters who outreach through the network for a wider audience. This is depicted in Figure 2.7.

Figure 2.7 Crowd Clovers

You place names of people who give you new viewpoints and ideas, or those who inspire and provoke you into the catalysts and those people who will introduce new people, or new groups or places, where you can find another opportunity, into the connectors leaf. For enablers, you can list people who encourage you to move forward, and people who appraise you or promote you and your ideas are put into promoters area.

Vision

The last phase is the vision. This might sound strange because normally you have been driven by some vision to explore new products and services or innovation. There must be some vision that has been motivating you to work hard to make your dream a reality.

However, the playbook put the vision phase as a final stage for exploring your innovation. The vision is your crystallized idea, which excites more people, mobilizes them to further action, and will secure funding and support for your endeavor.

That said, it is not an easy task to crystallize your vision and deliver it precisely to a wider audience. The Playbook provides three methods: Vision Statement, DARPA Hard Test, and Pathfinders. Let us look each method in turn.

Vision Statement

A vision statement is a popular term for most organizations; however, a really good vision statement is rare. It should define your new idea and innovation and convey it to the business opportunity with a one-minute story and remind your team and partners what you and your team are trying to make.

The vision statement creates a simple and memorable framework for all your strategic planning, and explains where you want to go and why. Your team can use the vision statement as an internal compass informing you where to focus, what to do, and what not to do. For your investors, partners, and customers, it will deliver what you are innovating and help them to determine how best to support you and your team.

The playbook also extends how you put the words and sentences together to make a vision statement, which is, I believe, very helpful because the instructions are quite concrete and easy to follow. Here is the copy of playbook’s instruction to make a vision statement:

1. Start by describing what you want to achieve in very simple terms: “Our vision is to ____” The Paper Mockups and Futuretelling methods will help you find and express your idea. Use the White Spots and Dark Horse methods to specify the unique value in your idea relative to competing solutions.
2. Next explain why your vision is truly visionary by stating: “It is almost impossible to achieve because _____.” The Context Maps and White Spots methods will offer hints on your team’s view of the existing challenge and state of the field. The Dark Horse method will also help to identify existing preconceptions.
3. Explain why your vision should be pursued now by stating: “The timing is right today due to _____.” The Progression Curves and Janus Cones will help you justify the next step in the idea’s timeline.
4. Briefly explain the background or precursors for your idea by stating: “Precedents for this idea include _______.” The Progression Curves and Janus Cones methods can help you uncover any relevant history.
5. Make your vision active and collaborative by mentioning 2–4 partners or supporters: “By working with , and _________.” The Future Users and Change Path methods can help determine who could be involved in building your idea.
6. Show commitment and set a timeline by stating: “we will make this vision real in __ years.” The Progression Curves method will help you gauge past time frames to estimate a future planning horizon.
7. Lastly, explain how you will make your idea happen by stating “by _____.” The Change Path method will let you name two big milestones that extend directly from today.

DARPA Hard Test

DARPA Hard Test comes from DARPA, their method for the selection of the projects to be funded. This is a good filter if your products and services are good enough both in terms of challenge and outcome.

The vision dimension, properties for measuring how the product or service is good in terms of the DARPA Hard Test, are the following four: far-reaching, technically challenging, multidisciplinary, and actionable. For each dimension, the value is checked with seven scales.

The definition of the vision dimensions and the high and low scales of each dimension are summarized in Figure 2.8.

Figure 2.8 DARPA Hard Test vision dimensions, definitions and scales.

From this definition and the scales, you will note that the far-­reaching dimension tests how big a stretch your innovation your product or service will be. So, the challenge in terms of innovation is measured here.

The next dimension, technically challenging, is focused on the ­challenge in terms of technology.

The multidisciplinary dimension is a support for innovational characteristics. One common approach for innovation is to combine multiple elements that have been considered to be alien to each other. So, again, this dimension may support the degree of innovation.

The last dimension, actionable, is, in a sense, quite contrary to the degree of challenge. It measures the extent to which the product and service you are proposing is really achievable.

It is not an easy task to be both actionable and innovative, even at the level of proposal, but this is what DARPA Hard Test wants to find out. It is always actionable when you are trying to do a little modification to the existing product and service. And the hard challenge both in terms of innovation and technology will not be easy to execute; that is one reason your innovation is challenging.

Yet, this DARPA Hard Test gives you a sense of impact and opens up the exploration on how to do it. In the case of DARPA, money is not a big problem, if it is actionable in terms of money, they will just do it. In the case of your own program, money may be a problem.

Pathfinders

Pathfinders is a method within an organization to secure the process to execute your innovative product and service to be funded and executed. It proceeds with the following steps:

1. You will draw a straight line with reasonable milestones for your organization’s standard process for approval and execution of new projects.
2. Pick multiple cases where new ideas have been proposed, adopted, and executed and some ideas, which had been proposed but were stalled or rejected. Draw their paths over the standard process, showing positive or accelerated event over the standard line, and negative or hindered event under the line.
3. Review these cases and check what events were useful to accelerate the process and what events hindered or stalled the adoption process. Usually the mixture of formal and informal events would be helpful for early adoption.
4. Plan your path for effective adoption of your proposal in your organization.

Now we have reviewed a design thinking process based on the IDEO’s Toolkits and also the Foresight Framework™ methods available from Innovation Leadership Board and taught in Stanford’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program, to address “how to design your services?”

Try to Design Your Service

Now, it is time for you to design your own service. In my class, this is the time for do-it-yourself, or group workshop, where you will work with your classmates to design your service with your team members.

You have learned lots of techniques and ideas to proceed to design your service earlier in this book, and now is the time for you to try your own ideas. However, this is a book not a class room or a workshop studio, so I must leave the designing work to you, dear reader, though there are some things I can tell you before you jump into the design.

In the college course for service design, we give you the big picture: the trend in the service industry, the history of the research in the area of service design, an overview of related areas such as SSME (Service Science, Management and Engineering), and list of references in service design. That is the changing role of the service provider and service recipients or your customer. It should be noted that this trend is a branch of a much bigger movement in our modern society. Barbara Kellerman named it as The End of Leadership (2012). Her book focuses on political leaders and corporate leaders. But this phenomenon is also seen in the service industry, and that is the major reason behind the need for service design thinking.

Once upon a time, say just after the World War II, the classical view for leadership was still strong, and the service recipients were very obedient and lined up for getting the service. In that era, the important thing was to provide enough service for the customers who want it; be it car, gas, or educational services.

Now it is quite a different era. Customers can choose the service provider who will make them happiest. And if your service is worse than expected, you will be criticized openly in any form of available media, be it Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. A Japanese proverb goes like “Treat the customer as the King or God,” which sometimes results in the uncomfortable situation where you just obey the customers whether they are right or not.

I would like to talk of two important points before you start designing your service. They relate to the customer and time.

The Customer

As you learn the design thinking approach, you understand the user or the customer plays the central role in your design. Sometimes it is called a user-centered (Stickdorn and Schneider 2012) design.

You have been told that you need to think and feel as a customer. To make this happen, many approaches are developed such as ethnographic observation and role-playing with some prototype to play the customer role.

One of the pitfalls in all these approaches is that the user is a human being, and there is so much variety among your users that nobody can tell what he or she really feels. Even the customer himself or herself cannot express exactly how he or she feels with your service. It might happen that after the customers experiences others’ services they will begin to understand the real value of your service.

It is important to design your service in the user-centered framework. Yet, you cannot be sure if your design of the service is a success or not until enough number of customers receive your service. In other words, even a very good service may not get the proper response from some customers initially. This situation is quite different from that of product development, where the quality of the product can be measured properly whether the user’s response is good or bad.

Also, human judgment is affected by many things, such as how the day begins, which are quite irrelevant to your service. On the other hand, if the customer is quite happy, he or she may regard your service is also good not so much because of your service itself but because of his or her psychological status.

Again, some time is necessary to properly evaluate your service to your customers, and you need to sustain your service to your customers. If you give up too early, you may simply miss your success, and this kind of story has been told so many times in particular in the case of writers, who unfortunately abandoned their literary efforts, but later, very often after the death of the writer, the work has received high acclaim.

The Time or Timing

One of the basic properties of service is the importance of the timing when the service is provided.

Needless to say a timely response is very important. One of the properties of service is characterized as time-based (Lovelock and Wirtz 2007) or time-perishable (Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons 2003). Compared with normal products, which are tangible (except for some time-dependent products such as fresh food) and can be stocked for some time to be used or consumed later, service is available only for the time being, or in other words, service can be appreciated only at the time it is needed. For ­example, medical service is valuable when the recipient needs some medical treatment. If nothing is wrong with his or her body, medical treatment is not valuable at all.

In the design thinking approaches discussed earlier, the time aspect has been included in many methods and stages, but it is not the focus anywhere and the importance of timing may not have caught your attention. In the case of service design, time is so critical and important. If your service is not delivered in time and in a proper manner to the customer, you will lose the entire value of your service and all the effort and preparation you have put into it so far will be in vain.

Now, what would be the good approach to incorporate these time aspects into your service or how can you promote your service with this timing property. One approach would be to make your service itself depend on the time. One typical example is the timely delivery service with the declaration that if we are late by more than 10 min we will give our service free!

Another approach would be to declare the time openly so that the customer can check how prompt you are. However, this might be a risky approach as we have seen with the airline and train industry. In some countries such as Japan, customers are so accustomed with timely service in minutes so even a small delay of a few minutes may make the customers unhappy.

Pricing is one of the big problems with time dependent service. As we have seen, the entire value will be lost if we miss the time-limit. Then, how does one set the price for a service that can be delivered on time? It must be of enormous value to the customer. That is one of the reasons why we pay so much money for information. In war, if you can get to know when the enemy will move, that will help you to win. Again, what we know from history is that precious information even when received on time may be just put away for whatever reason. The value of timing as well as the value of information simply cannot be properly appreciated by some people.

If you are just an outsider, you can say that the value of the timely service may depend on the recipient’s condition before receiving the service, and that, in general, the service provider cannot know how much it will be worth to the recipient until the service is finally delivered. Still, as a service provider, what you need to understand is that the recipient will pay the high cost of your service if it is on time, and that fact will boost the value of your service.

We can summarize the principles that govern the time property of your service as follows:

1. You need to write down the timeline of your service so that you are aware that the service should be delivered promptly to your ­customers.
2. You need to estimate the cost and value of your service depending on the delivery time. With your business scheme, you must adjust these time dependent cost and value, and make your pricing accordingly to the maximal satisfaction of your customers.
3. You need to calculate the risk of missing the time-frame. In the worst case, it will damage your brand so the outcome might be negative rather than zero.
4. You must construct a system so that if your service has an advantage on the time property, it will boost your service in many ways. You must find the secondary effects on the timely service so that not only timing but other aspects and other qualities can take the time advantage to make the difference.

Now, once again, I would like to urge you to try to design your service, even a rough sketch will do, just like the simple diagram that Mr. Jeff Bezos wrote on the napkin. It is very important to write down your ideas in order to visualize how it works. We will discuss in the next section the very important thing with your service. That is the delivery of your service to your customer.

How to Deliver Your Service

Most textbooks and instructions about service design focus on creating or inventing services. Sometimes this invention is called service innovation. Creating a new service is, of course, important, but delivery of service is also important.

Just like the most stories about the war, battles have been talked about a lot, but even though military logistics is highly important, it is not talked about as much. Service delivery is like military logistics. Without the delivery, your service cannot reach the customer, and compared with tangible products, all the effort for the service before the delivery will be simply lost.

When you think of delivering your service, you will check again on all aspects of your service or your service supply chain management system. You must check the sourcing of your service, customer identification and customer contact, and then follow-up the customer on his or her service experience, and if possible, revise your service according to your customer’s responses.

Customer Identification

Talking of service delivery, the most important aspect is to identify and address possible customers. In my own experience, the introduction of new services is not so difficult compared to identifying and addressing delivery to your customers.

If you have enough money, you can make a country-wide advertisement over TV, newspaper, or the Internet; yet, still there will be no guarantee that you will reach all your target audiences. In my experience on the informal educational service for kids, we have quite a good idea about who the customers are: K-12 kids who are highly curious and willing to meet new people and try new toys. However, it has been so difficult to reach these kids that we have targeted. One of the reasons is that the formal educational system will not accept any offering from our side. Thus, the word-of-mouth communication has been the most effective one, and the next is through Internet-based social networking services (SNS).

Sometimes, sourcing your service might be a problem. Again, with our informal educational service, we have had problems such as the sudden absence of the scheduled instructor due to illness or some other reasons. Since we have designed that the expert in some area will give a talk and review the kids’ works, it is not easy to find another expert and ask him or her to prepare to give a talk. Instead, we need to develop another course with a provision for the scheduled instructor to miss a session.

Service delivery to the customer implies contact with the customer of your service. Even if it is self-service, which the customer will operate by himself or herself such as the e-commerce, it is the place, virtual or physical (sometimes, it is both physical and virtual), where your customer consumes your service. The touch point may mean the initiation of the service consumption, such as a contract with the mobile phone service.

Continuous Service Delivery

The continuous service delivery such as communication services and civil services, throws up another kind of difficulty on the service delivery. The critical point is that the recipients become accustomed to those services, however good it is. Any service of this kind will be taken for granted.

People will complain about these services when not available; however, they tend to forget how much effort has to be put in place to maintain the service level as it is and to make it available in the future as well. This loss of appreciation in time when the service excited a lot of appreciation initially also happens in family affairs. A long-time husband and wife would take the other’s support and service for granted, even though when they got married, they thought highly of these services between them.

Thus, there needs to be some approach to make continuous service as fresh as ever to remind both the service providers and recipients just how important and valuable these services are, because it is eventually a hard job to keep its quality as high as ever, and make it available 24 hours and 7 days.

Customer Base Management

For service delivery, critical work should be put on your customer base. This actually raises the question on how your customer base can be managed. The important thing is the development of new customers.

Service, as with other products, needs to reach the customers to whom the service is to be delivered. Different from normal products which have an established supply chain, services, especially new services, may need the creation of a new channel of information to access the customer base for the new service.

For example, in our unorthodox education program called Kids, Their Future & Design, we wanted to reach K-12 children and their parents, that the easiest place for information dissemination is the local schools, and that a major problem with these elementary schools in Japan is that schools do not accept this kind of information from outside of the official government-related organization.

We need to develop other approaches for accessing parents and children for our service, so we relied on mouth-to-mouth advertising and Internet-based information utilizing SNS (such as Facebook).

A more difficult situation occurs when we cannot identify the customer group for the service, or we misunderstand the customer group for some reason. In this case, we will miss potential customers and there are several problems that we must handle. The first one is, of course, the loss of the revenue and the dampened rate of business growth.

The second one is the loss of innovation that the missing customers may have brought in through some complaints with the current service. This is important in the sense that because of this lack of possible complaints with the current service, we may be content with the known customer set and the service we are providing now resulting in no further improvement in the service. The third problem is the loss of curiosity or inspiration. We learn from our customers. New customers always tell us new aspects on our service and also others’ services that may relate to our services.

Governmental service has the tendency to miss this aspect of innovation through new customer complaints. The government, if separated from the grass-roots of people, takes it for granted that they are the elite group who control the people who are really their customers and that the people are paying for the living cost of government officers through their tax payment. So, government employees tend to think that the people do not understand the system, laws, and rules, properly, and so that they make a fuss about the current system.

Timing of the Service Delivery

Nowadays, supply chain management (SCM) handles just-in-time (JIT) delivery. Delivery in our era also means the managing the timing to deliver the service as well as goods. So, timing is now critical for the service delivery.

Good service is delivered to the customer just in time, not later, nor earlier. It is not easy to determine this timing for delivery. You might think that it is simple enough to make the delivery of the solution as soon as possible, or at least, no later than the competitor’s delivery timing, yet, things may work in other directions so that you may be better off delaying your service until it is the right time for delivery. Partnoy (2012) explains general business perspectives on waiting for better timing. In service design also, this is true, and one of the good examples is the case of Apple which brought out the digital music device called iPod. You must have noticed that the introduction of the iPod was late but when it came, it came with the splendid service called iTunes.

The time management of your service is thus very critical for your success. It is also important that you handle both your time and the customer’s time gracefully in a way that the time is good not only for the customer but also good for you. If you are in a good condition, the quality of your service will be much better than when you are in a bad situation. The experience of the service is the sharing between you and your customer.

We have learned in this chapter how to design your service, from the mindset to the delivery with design thinking toolsets. The principle you have learned here can be applied in other areas such as manufacturing. However, we also need to review our service in other aspects, that is, from a social viewpoint. We will see how the social approach can add other types of values to your service.