A friend of mine recently moved. Everything she owned was packed into boxes. Those boxes were then placed in a large truck, which is really just a box on wheels. Eventually, her boxes were placed into her house, which is a box with doors and windows. She drove to her new job in a smaller box with wheels, and after parking it, took the elevator to her new office. Elevators are very small boxes suspended in the air. We live in boxes until we die, which, of course, leads to one last box. It’s tough to escape boxes.

I was thinking about all this when I told a different friend that I like to think outside the box. Their response surprised me: “What box?” Had I limited my thinking by the very fact that I acknowledged a box in the first place? Before I became too philosophical, I admitted that the issue isn’t that there are boxes (life, problems and solutions have boundaries). The trouble I, leaders and teams run into is that in believing we are thinking outside the box, we have fixated on the wrong box.

That’s where Design Thinking comes in.

Design Thinking is an outcome-based mindset driven by a customer-centric posture that is expressed in a feedback loop of ideation. It observes and analyzes customer behaviors in order to better understand their needs, and then implements cross-team collaboration and iteration to provide user-friendly solutions.

And now is the perfect time for it. Design Thinking depends on open workspace, which in our work-from-home migration means virtual workplace. Forced to innovate, we have made it easier to collaborate.

Design Thinking is played out in three fields: Them, Us, and IT.

THEM

Design Thinking starts with living the experience of the end user. It is an immersion into their world as they have tried to bridge into ours. The distinction is key. In the past, a company built its world and invited others into it. Design Thinking understands that a company is trying to bridge into the world of the consumer.

Users have problems. In Design Thinking, a company empathizes with the user. Empathy begins not in trying to anticipate or understand what a user is going through, but in actually knowing what their reality is. As such, data is critical, but data is helpful only as a company makes sense of it.

This is where wrong box fixation kills a company. In traditional problem-solving strategies, a problem emerges. Companies assume that they understand the real problem and provide a solution. Frustration sets in because improvement is lagging. They tried to think outside the box, but it was the wrong box.

Design Thinking looks at the problem from expanded points of view. That is the benefit of different teams and different layers of employees being involved in the process. Some are closer to end users than others; others see more than one end-user. Solutions must work for external and internal customers, for those enjoying the technology and for those who have to make the technology work.

Expanded points of view keep us from defining the problem too narrowly.

A friend of mine moved into a new town. He always finds a local coffee shop to hang out in. He likes to befriend owners, staff and frequent customers. He found a shop that had recently relocated. They were trying to grow their business, and they assumed that the reason they had trouble in the past was due to poor location. They were now in the best location possible. They also tried to increase their name recognition by establishing social media and promoting social justice. My friend said that they did everything right but one thing: They are not likable. They made no attempt to know him; he watched the owner deny cups of water to people (even for their dogs)! They didn’t encourage lingering, and they asked people to leave unless they purchased something right away. They had repeat customers because of the convenience of their location, but they did not have enthusiastic customers who would tell others about them. Needless to say, my friend stopped going, and all because they focused on the wrong box. They tried to figure out how to get repeat business (location and look) instead of enthusiastic customers (loyal).

Design Thinking seeks to understand the real problem, so that it can align the solution with actual need. Design Thinking seeks to answer the question: What job will this design do well? The answer must align with the need.

US

In Design Thinking, companies work hard to put together the right collaboration. Current technology and work-from-home adaptations allow for secure and convenient meetings that are not dependent on physical space and that can include the right people now in the right space.

As a collaboration, the job is to challenge assumptions, redefine the problem and identify possible solutions. It is to ideate.

Ideation requires the right context, which is why challenge and definition is essential. We are not after tech for tech sake, but tech for relationship: client and company interface. Context goes wrong when companies try to solve problems in which participants do not have the same information, do not agree on the same interpretation, or come to the table with competing interests.

Collaboration births creation.

Creation emerges from dialogue about potential solutions generated by carefully selected participants who understood the structure of the conversation they were to work within. Ideas are built upon not compromised. The goal is not to build a product the company can be happy with; it must be a product the consumer is excited about.

IT

In Design Thinking, ideation leads to iteration. Design Thinking is the playground to agile practice. Prototype is carried out on early stage products. It’s about the user’s experience with a work in progress. We learn in action.

Such learning helps alleviate fear of change for both company and customer; it becomes a natural flow from research to rollout to review. Assumptions are examined and tested with rough prototypes that prepare for real-world experiment. In all this, bias is eliminated and buy-in is elevated. Engagement, dialogue and learning is placed as a premium, and workplace politics is kept at a minimum.

In times of crisis, we are forced to think differently. It’s not enough to think outside the box. We have to question the box itself, and then design a better box.