Speaker 1: There are many methods for technical problem solving and creating new products, but in the world of project management, and in particular in the world of agile project management, all the rage at the moment is design thinking. So in this video, I want to answer the question, what is design thinking? Design thinking is a technical problem solving method that learns a lot from the world of industrial product design. Design thinking is characterised by being very much human centred. It focuses on the needs and the behaviours of the people who use the products and solutions that design thinking creates. It's also highly iterative, and therefore it's ideal for dealing with poorly characterised and only partially understood problems. Hence, design thinking is frequently used alongside agile project management. And if you don't know what agile is, take a look at our video that answers the question, what is agile? There are many variants on the design thinking process with three, four, five, six, seven stages. Many of them belong to the organisations which generated them. Some of them are protected by trademark and registration and copyright. Therefore I'm going to offer you a simple four step design thinking process that I've created that captures all the main elements. The four steps are empathy, essence, experiment and evolution. Let's look at them in turn. There are two steps in the empathy phase, and the first is discovery. Here you need to understand the users and their needs. You need to empathise with them and get into their minds, understand how they approach the problem that they've got and how they might want to use the solution. Step two is define. We need to define the problem. We need to challenge any underlying assumptions and redefine the problem from what we thought it was to what we've learned that it really is from our understanding of the users and their needs and their mindsets. In defining the problem, it always helps to state it in terms of the solution that we want and also to frame it in a user centred way because design thinking has this deep focus on people. Phase two is the essence. This is about creating the solution that you're going to start with. So step three is ideate. Come up with ideas for solutions to the problem. Continually challenge assumptions, continually focus on the needs and the desires and the approaches that your users will have to refine a range of possible ideas into the strongest contender for a solution. This will be your initial design. Now we get to the experiment phase and step four is prototype. We need to create a prototype of the solution. We need to follow the design we've got and build something simple that works, that captures the essence of our idea and meets the most important needs of our users. The sole purpose of our prototype is to learn from it. So step five is to test the prototype, to expose it to users, to find out how they use it, how they interact with it, what they like about it, what they don't like about it, what works, how to break it, evaluate its performance, ask questions of the users, observe them and take all of that information and cycle back to step three if necessary to produce a new idea and then a new prototype and then subject it to a test. When you've got something that works, you can put it into production. The final phase is evolution. And step six is to evaluate your production solution. Yes, you've produced something, but don't think you can walk away from it. Design thinking says we need to evaluate what we produced to learn more from it and to consider ways in which it can be improved and the extent to which those improvements justify the marginal cost and investment that would be necessary. And finally, step seven is to iterate at some point in time you need to start treating your production version as a prototype. To start to work on a new version and go back almost to the start, understanding your users responses to it. Learning about reframing the new problems that you found, creating a new idea, building more prototypes, eventually to create production model version two, which you can then evaluate and iterate further. Design thinking is an agile way of building new products and solving problems. It's focused on the needs of users. It's human oriented in its fundamental nature, and it's a great way to produce new solutions to wickedly difficult, poorly characterized problems. Please give us a thumbs up if you like this video. We're going to be producing loads more great project management videos, so please subscribe to our channel for more and hit the bell so you don't miss any of them. And I'll look forward to seeing you in the next video.