We distill some team building lessons from design thinking that can be useful in helping your team think–and achieve–differently.
It can be easy for teams to get stuck doing the same thing over and over again. In this hectic and busy world, it’s natural to not want to rock the boat, and to want to get things done as quickly as possible.
However, it can help teams in the long run to think of new ways of approaching and thinking through problems, which can spur greater creativity and form new and better habits. It can also lead to strengthening team relationships as well. This is what we as a team building company have been doing for years through our activities, workshops and programs.
And another way of illustrating how to do this is design thinking. Design thinking, as we explained in a recent blog post, is a process for creating new ideas that uses UX design concepts as a basis. Its goal is to get teams to think differently–about the creative process and also how they go about achieving goals.
We mentioned in that post that design thinking has a lot of lessons for teams, and team building. For example, using empathy to research how to make things better, and asking questions as a way to guide the team to finding new ideas.
The importance of these team building lessons from design thinking, and their connection to our own work here at Invite Japan can’ be underestimated. And so, we wanted to distill a lot of what we talked about into a few generalized and easily digestible ideas that teams can pick up and use to add a jolt of creativity to how they think and function.
The following list of team building lessons from design thinking is meant to get your teams to be a little more conscious of how they go about achieving goals. By being more aware, they can tweak certain parts of the team’s process in order to create new methods or modify the assumptions the team makes in its thinking. It’s all about how your team decides what to do with these ideas.
So without further ado, here are 8 team building lessons from design thinking…
1) Start with empathy
One of the most central and obvious team building lessons from design thinking is that your team should lead with empathy. In the design thinking process, new ideas start with doing research, which in this case of creating better design means empathizing and understanding the needs of your consumers.
All teams could learn from this attitude of gaining knowledge through empathy (which is a fairly radical proposition and not always practiced in modern workspaces, as we discussed in an article on emotional intelligence). By understanding your team members and listening to what is actually going on with your team, you can better address the problems that your team is having, and improve your team’s overall work culture and environment.
A lot of team efficiency and productivity thinking revolves around being “proactive”, which often gets misinterpreted as jumping into situations (and out of them) as quickly as possible, or being aggressively fast as handling problems before they arise.
But many times the easiest and best way to be proactive is simply to listen to what’s going on, and become attuned to how your team members, customers, business partners, etc. are feeling. That way, you can always be aware of what’s going on and can handle issues easily as they come.
2) It takes a team
One of the other major team building lessons from design thinking is that you can’t really create (or implement that creation) on your own–you need a team there to support you. Sure you can come up with some new ideas on your own, but a team is necessary to brainstorm more related ideas, get that idea formed, prototyped, trialed, and ready to execute.
Teams are wonderful ways of combining skills and talents and perspectives in order to create and do things that no one can do alone. The sum of all this talent and skill is always greater than the sum of its parts. This is one of the fundamental animating principles of team building, and of our company, and the reason why we care so much about strengthening teams and relationships.
3) Reframe problems to ask interesting questions
Next on our list of team building lessons from design thinking has to do with the act of forming and creating new ideas. In design thinking, this in part comes from asking interesting questions. More than that though, it’s about reframing problems in order to come up with questions.
Let’s say you’re dealing with a workflow issue where your team seems overworked or overstressed. Instead of focusing on the interconnected problems underlying this issue, focus on asking questions about individual aspects of the problem.
For example: If we got rid of this procedure, what would happen? If we tried to limit our use of email or the time we take in meetings, what would happen? How could we develop a better process for communicating online, etc.
On your team, reframing problems as questions, and making sure to ask interesting questions to get the team to think, can help ease a lot of tension, and create a better atmosphere for collaboration and innovation.
4) Challenge assumptions
In addition to asking interesting questions, design thinking also stresses the importance of challenging assumptions in order to develop new processes and ways of looking at a problem. In the case of design, this can often mean letting go of previously held assumptions about “what works” and seeking out a different perspective.
This is one of the most powerful and potentially motivating team building lessons from design thinking. As a team, you sometimes have to let go of outdated practices, or ways of working that aren’t working anymore for you. Creating new and better systems or habits requires challenging these assumptions about work and success that you may hold.
But this doesn’t mean that new is always better, or that you should immediately overhaul your assumptions the moment a new concept comes around. When the process of challenging assumptions is anchored by empathy, the process of analyzing the way your team functions will be guided by the needs and dreams of your team, and you will be able to distinguish between your core values and goals, and the assumptions that may be holding you back.
4) More ideas are always better
Another item on our list of team building lessons from design thinking that is related to the creative process of actually forming new ideas is that when it comes to ideas, more is always better. Design thinking stresses the importance of coming up with a “portfolio of options”–just as many ideas as you can possibly think of. The importance of this can be seen when you test these ideas (see below). Things don’t always work out, and so having a big list of ideas gives you a number of reliable backup plans.
Having a list of options helps in other ways too. The more ideas you have, the more your ideas will expand outward. You might make a connection between an idea you had passed over earlier and something you learned through implementing one of your ideas. Or a new situation comes up that makes you think of an idea that you had before.
So having as many ideas as you can is important. Which means getting as many ideas from your team is equally as important. Brainstorm, collaborate, work together and share your opinions and thoughts. In this way, you’ll be ready for anything and always have a plan to fall back on.
6) Imagine your ideas and create prototypes
The team building lessons from design thinking stem not only from the process of idea generation, but also the ways that you test and implement those ideas. A fundamental aspect of design thinking is “prototyping” and actually making an initial design, however rough, of your idea that you can then use as a test in the real world.
The lesson for teams and team building here is the importance of “following through” and actually imagining your idea into reality. Team building deals a lot with abstract goals and concepts–better communication, greater resilience, stronger unity. It’s great to talk about and discuss these concepts as goals to achieve, but there comes a time when teams actually need to bring these ideas down to the ground in order to implement them in a workable way.
That’s where prototyping can come in handy. When teams have an idea for their team that they want to implement, like better communication, a great way to achieve it is to create an outline of steps to achieve this goal, and then try to put it into practice. It will probably be hard at first, and the ideas might not be fully thought out, but it will be a good start at getting your team to put into practice the ideas that you talk about.
7) Learn through experience
This leads directly to the next lesson, which is the importance of learning through experience. In design thinking, the way that you improve ideas and even generate new ones is through the iterative process of experimentation. You try something, tinker it, work out the edges, and try again. Eventually, this leads to greater growth and the ability to come up with more creative ideas, since with each experiment you learn something new.
The same goes for teams, and it is something that we design our team building activities to teach. Which is why we want to emphasize here on our list of team building lessons from design thinking. Sometimes teams are afraid to try new things, absorb new ideas or venture into the unknown. But the only way of truly learning if that course is bad or good is by trying it out.
8) Don’t be afraid of making mistakes
Which brings up to the last lesson on our list of team building lessons from design thinking: Make mistakes. Within the design thinking framework, mistakes are not bad things. Mistakes can always lead to better outcomes (as long as you look at them the right way). You either learn how to make the design or product better than before, or you realize that the path you were on wasn’t the right one, which enables you to reset and explore a better solution.
So mistakes and failures are not something to be afraid of or avoid. In fact, they are the only way that you can really become better. However, on teams there is often a fear of failing, since many people don’t want to be judged by others or criticized. But what this does is create a climate of anxiety and fear, which can end up impeding or even harming creative thought.
Therefore, the lesson for teams is to create environments where team members trust each other and aren’t afraid to make mistakes. Teams need to support each other too, and reach back for that empathy that we talked about in the beginning, making sure that it continues throughout the process, and in everything you do.
Conclusion
We hope you learned a lot from our list of team building lessons from design thinking. As you can see, creating new ideas isn’t just about genius or having a “creative spark”– it is related to a whole range of other systems, habits, and workplace cultures, such as empathy, the ability to question and challenge assumptions, and the freedom to fail.
It can be hard to change workplace cultures or change previous habits overnight, but one thing that might help is team building activities, like the ones at Invite Japan. Our team building games, programs, and workshops teach teams how to think better, create better, and work better together, through mentally stimulating and fun puzzle-based challenges.