Designing teams to be useful
Being useful is often a better aspiration than being right. Photo by Антон Дмитриев on Unsplash
It's hard to argue that many things in the world are not becoming more uncertain. According to the International Monetary Fund, the World Uncertainty Index (who knew such a thing existed!?) has had a generally upward trend over the past 25 years. They had to change the scale of their graph to accommodate the uncertainty created by COVID-19 last year. Despite a drop off that peak, it's still currently about 50% above the average from 1996-2010.
This uncertainty isn't just at a global scale. Every day teams, leaders and organisations are forced to make decisions and take actions with incomplete or rapidly changing information.
It means that the ability to operate in an uncertain environment is a competitive advantage for teams. As with so many aspects of team performance, that is far easier to say than to do. One of the challenges is that we often have a strong preference for being right. This can have us either moving too slowly as we try to find the complete information or too quickly as we try to solve a problem that we don't understand well enough.
While I am not at all an expert, Design Thinking has been a set of principles and practices that leaders and teams have applied and found applicable when responding to the challenges that they are presented. I'm also not suggesting that this is the only way to be useful! This is just one approach that you could try. Below is a diagram that summarises a common approach to Design Thinking that you may be able to adopt. It's worth noting that the Design Council UK has added more detail around this "double diamond", but this is a good starting point for the conversation.
Image from NN Group - Adapted from Design Council UK
In particular, one thing that leaders and teams have found helpful is the idea of diverging and converging. In uncertain settings, diverging (exploring choices) is a good thing to do in order to gain a deeper understanding of the challenge in front of the team. Diverge enough - create enough options, but only to the point where you have enough information to converge (and move towards a choice). This process places a priority on defining the problem (a common challenge that teams have is solving the wrong problem because they rush into the first idea) and then delivering solutions that are fit for purpose (avoiding what my friend, Sarah, who is Head of Design at a media company beautifully describes as "a problem looking for a solution").
"Should we be diverging or converging here?" is a really helpful shorthand question to align on what your team needs at this point to move it forward.
If you are keen to explore more, IDEO have a range of methods you can try within the context of your team's challenges. It's about more than the methods, though. Adopting some of these principles takes a shift in mindset at least as much as applying a set of skills or processes. In their freely available online starter kit, d.school at Stanford University describe part of the mindset required as including:
Being uncomfortable
Making messes
Starting now
These shifts challenge a lot of the ways that many teams prefer to work - with certainty and based on the (often unspoken) assumption that errors are a sign of incompetence. Despite the discomfort, moving towards this approach can help you and your team operate better when faced with uncertain challenges.
Some questions for you and your teams to reflect on:
If you had the choice, would you rather be useful or right?
Is your team strong at divergent thinking when it needs to explore choices?
How would you describe your team's convergent thinking when you need to make choices?