Embracing Risk to Grow and Innovate

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Which brings us to our next insight.

Insight #2: Designers take risks to learn.

All of this might sound scary to someone who practices ‘business-as-usual’. Are designers all about the adrenaline rush? A clue can be found in what we heard from Madison Mount, who co-leads IDEO’s work in the food and beverage arena: “I’m slightly addicted to risk. If I’m not taking risks, I feel uncomfortable, because I’m not learning.” Designers aren’t hooked on adrenaline: they are hooked on learning, and embracing and amplifying risk is a way to learn. The more you try, the more you learn; and the more you learn, the greater the likelihood that you can design a new and better experience for a user. Designers want to have a meaningful, positive impact in the world, and they recognize that taking risks is the way to get there.

So if you were to poke your head inside the door of a ‘business-by-design’ organization, would it look like a scene out of Mission Impossible? Would designers be riding motorcycles with scissors in their hands or setting things on fire to see what happens in the name of positive impact? Not exactly. There’s something keeping the paramedics and firetrucks away. That force is an approach to innovation that regular readers of this magazine know well: design thinking.

Insight #3: Designers embrace risk, but their process of thinking mitigates it.

Design thinking uniquely combines conscious risk taking with structured risk mitigation. This is a fascinating paradox: designers embrace risk, but the way they think mitigates it. Each of the three behavioral building blocks of design thinking—empathy, prototyping, and storytelling—serves to simultaneously embrace and mitigate risk.

Empathy

Design thinking starts with people and looks for evidence of desire. This is one of the most fundamental ways to mitigate risk. Why? Because marketing things that people don’t want increases one’s risk of failure substantially. Ask yourself, what is the bigger risk: placing a bet on a value proposition that customers are asking for either latently or directly, or investing in an idea that springs from the cloistered assumptions of a conference room deep within your company?

In a recent innovation project, design thinkers from both IDEO and a bicycle-manufacturing client listened deeply to what potential customers said and felt. The conclusion they arrived at was not at all what they expected: instead of a desire for more technical ‘extreme’ biking experiences, what non-consumers of modern bicycles truly desired was a simpler, more joyful biking experience. And so they designed a much simpler experience, at the root of which is a bike that eschews complex, over-serving product features in favor of a simple foot-operated brake and an automatic gearbox. Risky? Yes, but only relative to the ingrained bias of the bicycling industry.

Prototyping

Design thinking encourages you to gather feedback long before an idea, concept, or story is ‘finished’. A prototype, in the hands of a design thinker, is finished when it can teach them something. The goal of prototyping is to accelerate feedback and failure. Failing indicates that you haven’t quite yet nailed the experience, and suggests what you might try next. Prototyping lets you find problems, but it also teaches you to ‘let go’ of ideas that aren’t fruitful. Failure due to sins of commission (as opposed to those of omission) is not a personal indictment, but an incitement to go out and create another prototype.

Imagine what could have been if the creators of Iridium, a global mobile phone service, had approached their challenge of orbiting 77 geo-stationary communications satellites from a prototyping mindset. In addition to the service being expensive, a severe drawback of Iridium was a lack of user satisfaction with the phone handsets, which were bulky and didn’t work well inside of buildings—both fundamental value-proposition flaws. In the end, Iridium’s $6-billion-dollar system was not viable, resulting in a fire sale for $25 million. Could the Iridium team have used prototyping to uncover these and other system flaws while they were still actionable? We’re not technical experts in satellite deployment, but with the optimism that comes with a design thinking approach, anything can be prototyped. The real risk lies in not doing so.