New innovative thinking for new problems

New innovative thinking for new problems

I want you to ask yourselves this question: How many hours a day do you have to spend in countless and possibly unnecessary meetings? How often have you left these meetings doubting that anything was really going to change?

So many times we get together in a meeting to solve a problem but in the end nothing is accomplished. Sometimes we get together for a brainstorming meeting but the session deteriorates into another round of informing, blaming or even interrogating; people leave feeling uninspired and exhausted. 

The world we’re currently living in is being constantly disrupted. This disruptive era means nothing stays the same anymore. New problems arise all the time and we can’t possibly use the same old solutions or methods to deal with newly created problems, can we?

Here, I believe Albert Einstein was certainly right when he said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” 

Surely, there are many different types of thinking and all have a role to play in building and sustaining a business. In the slower-moving and more predictable business environment of times past, organisations could prosper by using Engineering Thinking or Critical Thinking. They could take the enormous amounts of data available and use it to understand the past and the present. They could even extrapolate historical patterns with some confidence into a future that was more predictable than it is today. 

The challenge today is to realise that the future is so uncertain and incredibly volatile that the past can no longer be relied on to inform us about it. With the rapid changes that come with disruption affecting us in many different ways, the methods we once used to solve many of the problems in the past are no longer effective. This means that we need to develop new ways of thinking in order to design better solutions for our current problems.

What we need is an approach or method that enables us to explore, surface and define the unserved and high-value needs of our customers and then quickly develop and iterate ideas to serve them until we find the solution. In short, if you want to be sure what the future will be like, you can’t just sit and wait but you need to create it instead. And this is the power of design thinking.

I have heard a lot about design thinking in the past few years but I didn’t pay much attention until recently, when I found that it really could be the answer to help us radically change the way we go about exploring problems and creating solutions to those problems. 

The word “design” has traditionally been used to describe the visual aesthetics of certain objects. But more and more, the definition of design has extended to include not just artefacts but also strategic services and systems. 

Before going into detail of what can design thinking do, let’s first try to understand the concept. 

Design thinking can be perceived as an iterative problem-solving process of discovery, ideation and experimentation that utilises various design-related techniques to gather insight and yield innovative solutions for any challenges we might come across. In other words, it is a bold and newly systematised, non-linear, human-centred approach that allows us to adopt a human-centred perspective to develop inventive solutions while integrating logic and groundwork research. 

Now, don’t worry if you can’t seem to visualise exactly what design thinking can do or how it can help us solve new problems. The concept and theory could be a little tricky to comprehend but I will try my best in upcoming articles to articulate the ways to turn theory into practice to help you understand better. 

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Arinya Talerngsri is Chief Capability Officer and Managing Director at SEAC (formerly APMGroup) Southeast Asia's leading executive, leadership and innovation capability development centre. She can be reached by email at arinya_t@seasiacenter.com or www.linkedin.com/in/arinya-talerngsri-53b81aa

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