OK, we are going to pin our flag to the mast – we are Design Thinkers through and through. We love applying Design Thinking in life&career planning so much so, that it was a must have in our company name – Disegno, the Italian word meaning ‘the ability to make the drawing and intellectual capacity to invent the design’. We are all in!
What is it we love so much Design Thinking? Well, it’s simple and it works. We follow, and have been trained by, the team from Stanford University’s Design Lab and authors of the New York Times bestseller, Design Your life and the more recent edition, Design Your Work Life.
Through our work, we support our clients, using a number of principles of Design Thinking, to take action and build their way forward towards their new business, new career or job redesign.
First a little background on the basic principles and how we apply them…
What does it mean to be a Design Thinker?
As defined by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans of Stanford’s Design Lab, Design Thinking is more of a mindset than a set of predefined processes. It’s a generative approach based on a set of principles (see below), originally used for business innovation which is now being applied to Life Design, including career change and life transition. Life Design can be deftly applied to a range of life’s challenges including launching a business, re-entering the workplace or redesigning your career. (need to “” this)
And so to some of the key principles and framework behind Design Thinking:
Framing your Challenge.
It’s key when you have a challenge in life, whatever that may be, that you really define what it is that is causing you difficulty. For example, for women returners, it may be that you want to return to their original career but the sector has changed significantly, or you may have a great business concept but no idea how to launch it. There are always challenges in creating a new life&career design – the key is distilling it to its core element(s) so you know what it is you are trying to design around. Framing the Challenge is always the starting point for Design Thinkers.
Your Design Team
We are all only as good as the team we have walking beside us. Building your Design Team means building your support structure. Your Design Team can draw on ex-colleagues whom you admire and trust, your social network i.e. your friends and family, your local community (school/community groups/book club). People love to help and more often than not, are delighted to be asked. We encourage our clients to explain what it is they are doing, outline their challenge and then ask for specific help. It may be that you have a Design Team supporting you in choosing your new logo and writing up a copy for your website (we did and they were amazing – thank you to them all!) or you may need to develop tech skills, design a new CV or get connected in a new sector. We recommend thinking about who can help you (not just who will have nice chats with you – that’s for another time!), write them an email or ask for a coffee and explain your challenge (remember as a Design Thinker you will have already framed your challenge). Ask for help, we guarantee people will be honored and will enjoy walking your journey with you.
Creating an Odyssey plan:
If cats have nine lives, then so do we! There are many lives that we could create as we move forward through our various chapters. Think back to when you were in your mid-twenties and how the choices you made then have shaped where you are now. The Design Thinking framework encourages us to envision and map out three future life possibilities:
- a variation on where you are now.
- if the now option was no longer available, what would life two look like.
- the wild card, the out there idea.
From there, we choose based on a clearer understanding of our choice architecture i.e. how is it that we, as individuals choose. Once we have a sense of our destination, then we know what steps to take or which bus to catch. It may be that we get off the bus more times than we had anticipated or it may break down periodically (I lived in London for a long time!) but we still know where our destination is and what detours we may have to take. Life Design accounts for the changes en route and encourages us to refine, reflect and to take account of the changes we encounter as we build our way forward.
Prototyping:
Designers prototype – they create a product or a design, bring it to life, even in the smallest form and then refine. That is what Life Design is also about. Do you want to retrain as a teacher – wonderful, then ask if you can volunteer as an assistant in the classroom or set up a Life Design interview with a teacher from your network (remember you have a Design Team supporting you). Want to launch a food delivery business? Great, put together a list of people and deliver to them/get their feedback and refine your offer. Interested in exploring a new way of working with your team? Design a small experiment, try it out and see what you learn and what useful information the experience gives you. Prototyping is all about making the experience real, learning from it and then refining as you go. It’s about taking ideas out of our heads and into real time – that is where the learning occurs. It also helps to generate energy and support for your ideas.
Building your way forward..
Building your way forward and prototyping go hand in hand. Design Thinkers have a bias to action. It’s about taking steps, moving forward in the process, bringing your ideas to life, refining and maintaining momentum. For those of us building new careers, launching new businesses or redesigning our current career, the focus will be on building our networks, telling our stories, making connections, bringing our new idea to life in the smallest form to begin with and staying on the journey. It’s dynamic. It’s engaging. It’s energetic. When we engage in life in this way we are also, by default, more dynamic, more engaging and energetic
It’s a process.
Life is an ongoing process. The full stop only arrives at the end. We are always learning, always moving forward. A well designed life is constantly changing, productive and evolving – there is always the possibility for new experiences. We encourage you to apply Design Thinking to your emerging life and career plans and when you do, we guarantee you will find life more dynamic, fruitful and fun. What is not to like!