Innovate or be swept away with the tide

Innovate or be swept away with the tide

Everyone is ready to state the obvious when they talk about change. People will tell you how it is the only thing that is constant, how it is increasing in scope, scale and impact. I, too, have mentioned this many times.

For sure, there are very significant social, environmental, economic, political and technological changes under way. But most leaders, executives and CEOs recognise these as the same changes we have always faced, only now they are happening at a faster pace. What I worry about are the changes that people rarely talk about.

In my opinion, the most significant changes in this era have been in the empowering of customers and the enabling of entrepreneurs. Let’s face it, we live in an age when customers routinely experience the incredible outcomes of outstanding human-centred design, and their expectations have been transformed accordingly. They now hold every business they interact with to the highest standards of convenience, usability and affordability — the standards that they experience through technology-driven products and services.

Consumers demand much more now that they are constantly switched on, always informed, and obsessively sharing everything with their networks. People rarely believe marketing hype anymore. Instead, their demands are highly customised to the point where they can choose what they want, when they want it, how they want it and how much they are willing to pay.

Hence, we should be excited by the possibilities the future offers. At the same time, we should feel terrified by the consequences of not being able to move our business quickly enough. In fact, if we cannot deliver and sustain a new level of customer-centric and human-focused design, sooner rather later, someone else will. This could even be a competitor from outside of our own traditional industry, or the development of a completely new business model that makes the old model instantly obsolete, turning our assets into liabilities and dragging the entire business down. 

Furthermore, given the many disruptions in today’s business landscape, many analysts have been strategising ways of streamlining practically every business, production and economic process imaginable with the goal of extracting the maximum benefit from the least amount of time and resources. This may lead to a certain degree of success in terms of productivity and efficiency, but it might also significantly decrease the level of innovation. 

As a result, I’d say that to meet these new challenges, we require new thinking. The challenge today is to realise that the future is so uncertain and volatile that the past can no longer be relied on to inform us about it. We are unable to see what lies around the next corner.

Therefore, we need a new approach that doesn’t use data, because no data exists about the future. We need a completely new and dynamic approach to innovation and strategic planning. We need something that is less rigid that can quickly and easily adapt to the changing conditions we find ourselves in.

We need an approach 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. After all, if you really want to be sure what the future will be like, you need to create it. This is the power of Design Thinking.

To deliver innovative, customer-centric solutions through design thinking, we must begin with empathy. I mentioned last week that we cannot innovate by asking customers what they want as they don’t understand what is possible; therefore, they can’t tell you that they want something that they can’t even imagine. However, what they can do is show you what they need.

A famous quote — “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” — is often attributed to Henry Ford, although most scholars now agree he never said it. Be that as it may, the expression helps us focus on how customer empathy has always been critical for innovative thinking. 

In a general sense, empathy is our ability to see the world through other people's eyes, to see what they see, feel what they feel, and experience things as they do. It involves spending time with customers, watching as they interact with their world, observing their frustrations, their delights, and the ingenious workarounds they devise to overcome the limitations of the products and services they use. Through this process we begin to surface the unmet, often unrealised, needs that have true value for our customers.

In an era in which companies and organisations are fighting in a battle for attention in order to remain relevant, I believe customer empathy and human-centred design thinking can become the powerful forces that add value to your products and services, and put you firmly on the path to business sustainability.


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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