Journal Ten

When tasked to check out a webinar in my desired industry, I decided to search ‘design webinar’ in YouTube and filter the results by most viewed. The top link was a Stanford University ‘Design Thinking’ webinar by Bill Burnett, adjunct Mechanical Engineering Professor at Stanford. Bill received his Masters in Product Design and Engineering from Stanford and also has been serving as Executive Director of the Design Impact / Product Design Program since 2006.

The webinar was very insightful from an academic perspective as well as a sociological perspective. Design thinking is something I have been introduced to this academic semester in my ‘Design Studio’ course. The webinar made me realize that design thinking applies to any organization seeking to make a cultural change, from a 3-man start-up team to a fortune500 company.

The webinar starts with a quote by Peter Drucker, Allan Mulally, and Mark Fields stating, “Culture eats Process for Lunch.” Burnett goes on to say that culture has unspoken rules of behavior that cannot be uncovered through some creative process. He goes on to say that children and artists are creative, and that innovation occurs when creativity is applied to a problem. According to Burnett and his experiences, design thinking has four main factors that limit gaining reliable data; misunderstanding of the conceptual framework, fear of failure, lack of process practice and poor team selection/formation.

Burnett claims there is no way to gain reliable user data about a potential product/service because potential users can only tell you what they imagine the future will be. Prototype iterations solve the problem and allow teams to build their way forward, according to Burnett. The 5-step process is to empathize(talk to the people/users), define(figure out the main problem), ideate(conceptualize), prototype(build/create) and test. Burnett claims that iteration design thinking tends to build up ‘failure immunity.’

In Burnett’s experience, high social trust among a team correlates to high performing teams. People that trust each other and speak about things that have nothing to do with the project work better together than those that don’t. I found it interesting that Burnett defined politics as invisible influential infrastructure. I have to agree.

The most interesting and insightful statement i took from Burnett’s webinar was that “Being strategically and culturally aligned with a business will build you influence potential.” Plainly, this tells me to know the in’s and out’s of any business and industry you’re working in not only for your own productivity potential, but influence as well.

stanford intro empathize