Embracing Risk to Grow and Innovate

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Storytelling

Crafting and telling simple, emotional, concrete stories is a critical part of the design thinking approach. Focusing on storytelling ensures that the essence of the value proposition is communicated and understood in a way that allows people within an organization to learn and act. This essence is what Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick, calls “command intent” (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/25/07, Taking an Idea, Making It Stick). Telling stories that people can internalize is a way to reduce execution risk—they will execute with a common vision in mind. In the absence of data and direct execution experience, well-told stories might be the only way to inspire action and ensure that all parts of an organization are on the same page.

Recently Len Wolin, a senior director of program management at Ritz-Carlton, was looking for ways to “bring a little something extra out of each hotel that would help to make the experience personal, unique, and memorable.” An IDEO team worked with his organization to create a set of ‘scenography’ workbooks meant to help each individual hotel create localized service experiences, such as a warm, personalized check-in process or a ‘big night in’. These workbooks outlined the key elements of experience scenes using a series of photos that told an evocative story. The key was to communicate the principles driving the Ritz brand experience without prescribing the solution for individual hotels. Storytelling like this created broad corporate alignment and encouraged local creativity all at once, a wonderful formula for effective execution.

Getting started

No matter your context, a design thinking approach can help you deal with risk in a more productive, generative manner. Here are seven ways to get started:

1. Cultivate an unreasonable obsession with desirability

As we mentioned earlier, beginning with real people and what they need and value is the most fundamental way to mitigate risk. Design thinkers look for evidence of human desire and needs via an unreasonable (by business-as-usual standards) obsession with ‘what is desirable’.

Why did the Mini become a best-seller for parent company BMW (financial success) as well as the iconic ‘hot-hatch’ of the 21st century (brand success)? If you look at the competition, it wasn’t the fastest option, nor was it the most reliable. But the Mini cornered the market on desirability on three counts. It’s ‘I’ve-seen-you-before-and-you’re-a-cute-rascal’ styling grabs us viscerally, it’s a hoot to drive, and masterful reflective design in the form of cheeky billboards and interactive magazine ads convinced our brains that we’d be better humans if we owned one. The Mini is the product of an unreasonable obsession with desirability. You can cultivate your own desirability chops by using these three experience elements from Don Norman’s book Emotional Design—visceral, behavioral, and reflective—to analyze the offerings and services in your own life that make you happy.

2. Become more comfortable acting on your informed intuition

In a speech at Harvard, Andy Grove made an important point about the relationship between risk and intuition, saying “I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct your course very quickly.” When faced with a risky decision, and lacking complete data which would only be available at some point in the future, a design thinker decides based on their informed intuition. Design thinkers use their informed intuition and personal evidence to reduce the likelihood that they embark on a journey of solving the wrong problem. Designers know that waiting for perfect data is often the riskiest move of all.