Monday, February 15, 2021

My 4 takeways from Dr. Pavan Soni’s “Design your thinking”

Dr. Pavan Soni is a friend and I have seen his journey from innovation evangelist at Wipro to IIMB Ph.D. program to an accomplished consulting career. I am happy to see Pavan adding yet another feather to his colorful cap with the book “Design your thinking: The mindsets, toolsets and skillsets for creative problem solving”.  The book is packed with inspirational stories – several of them from India and suffused with the optimism that Pavan embodies. The book also helped me question some of my deeply held assumptions. And sometimes the questions are more valuable than the examples. Here are my 4 takeaways.

First two are stories in the book that stood out for me.

Power of metaphors: In the “Inspire” chapter Pavan invokes Aristotle’s quote “To be a master of metaphor is a sign of genius” and cites several examples to illustrate it. One of them is Mahindra XUV500. A market survey of a couple of thousand customers across the world got translated into a design brief – to build a car that offers aggressive styling, muscular looks and a macho stance. And then the team adopted the metaphor of cheetah indicating speed, agility, aggression, and muscle. The design team visited Masai Mara, Kenya to watch the beast in the wild terrain. So much to internalize the metaphor!  The design cycle also involved testing 250 prototypes across half a dozen terrains in the world.

Perils of “just do it”: Pavan is also careful to bring out stories from innovative organizations that highlight leadership admitting to mistakes. For example, he illustrates the principle that “just do it” without an appropriate pilot or prototype can hurt badly with two big decisions from Flipkart that backfired. In the first case, Flipkart went for a Big Billion Day sale in October 2014 without doing any prototyping. The site couldn’t withstand the heavy traffic and became dysfunctional for some time. In the second case, leadership decided to take Flipkart towards app-only mode by forgoing desktop customers without any pilot. They had to revert the decision after backlash from employees and customers.

Now we turn to questions that got raised in my mind that rubbed some of my long-held beliefs. It means I need to explore them further. 

Can empathy be engineered? Pavan suggests in the chapter “Empathy and define” that empathy can be engineered. This section builds on the work of several reputed thinkers like Daniel Goleman (self-awareness), Thich Nhat Hanh, and Dalai Lama (mindfulness). And then suggests that with the tools like mind mapping, stakeholder map, and customer journey mapping, empathy can be engineered. If listening with openness and deferring judgment are important for empathy then it is not clear how using tools will cultivate empathy. “Engineering” carries a sense of control and precision in the design process and I don’t know how empathy can be controlled. But maybe I am seeing engineering and empathy in a narrow sense.

Can biases be overcome? Citing research from Francesca Gino, Pavan mentions that confirmation bias can be overcome through curiosity. The solution is hiring and cultivating curiosity. My limited understanding of biases is that they are deep-rooted and extremely hard to overcome. Daniel Kahneman who has researched biases for fifty years keeps saying in the interviews that it is difficult to overcome biases at an individual level. After writing the bestseller “Thinking, fast and slow” Kahneman feels he hasn’t changed much and he is still overconfident. It is possible that the study of Kahneman’s work has biased me. So I need to study this further.

The book contains a comprehensive collection of toolsets associated with creative problem-solving. Personally, it has helped me learn new examples and raise/revive basic questions related to design thinking. I wish Pavan and the book a great success.

Sources:

Book image: amazon.in

Daniel Kahneman’s quote “I don’t think my intuitions have significantly improved and I am very overconfident,” see his interview with Sam Harris, March 2019 https://samharris.org/podcasts/150-map-misunderstanding/ (18:57-20:25)

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