PM Network - October 2016

(design thinking and user experience), Accenture Digital UK, London, England. (Accenture is also a Council member.)

“In my mind, agile is a product development approach that has helped the
digital world cast off the shackles of waterfall,” she says. “But it has become
rigid, constrained and a burden to those who just want to ship clever stuff.”
Perhaps the most oft-cited example of the perils of rigid thinking is Henry
Ford’s (possibly apocryphal) comment that if he had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said “faster horses.” Design thinking pushes teams
to think bigger—how do we get people to places faster?—rather than working
toward preconceived solutions based on narrow assumptions.

“If you focus too much on the solution, you’re going to get one solu-
tion,” says Mr. Tarne. “If you focus more on the problem, then you get
many more solutions.”
Design thinking also can push teams to rethink the way they study the
problem, he says. As an example, he describes how a project team trying to
improve the way hotel lobbies operate built a complete mock-up of a lobby to
illuminate all of its functions and activities. That gave team members a more
holistic perspective from which to create solutions.

Inspiration can come from unlikely places both inside and outside the organization, adds Ms. Speers, who advocates highly cross-functional teams.

“The team members in a design thinking workshop need to come from disparate backgrounds for maximum creative thinking. Often your most innovative ideas will not come from your sector or professional field,” she says. “For example, an actor, scientist, engineer, academic, schoolteacher and stay-at-home parent can give wider, more unexpected views on the problem at hand. The output likely will be better than what comes out of a purely internal team, even with external consultation or facilitation.”

MARRIAGE OF CONCEPTS

A project using both design thinking and agile almost always will be more heavily weighted toward the former during early phases, when the focus is on defining