Future Work/Life is my newsletter in which I explore ideas focused on the future of work and how to lead energised, entrepreneurial and productive teams. If you find it interesting, please share it! And if you’d like to hear more from me, book me to speak with your team.
Building a performance culture requires ambitious, measurable objectives and accountability.
But don’t underestimate the power of rest and reflection.
The human-centric approach to design thinking
Sarah Stein Greenberg is Executive Director of Stanford University’s Design School – known as ‘the d.school’.
She and her colleagues teach the principles of design thinking, a process which now informs how some of the most brilliant businesses and organisations in the world innovate. They approach problems with a ‘human-centric’ view, making them more likely to develop realistic, actionable solutions.
Their methodology focuses on five stages:
Empathise: Empathy allows you to set aside your assumptions and preconceptions to gain insight into the problem you’re solving and for whom you’re solving it.
Define: After gathering your research, you define the problem from the user’s point of view, e.g., ‘We need to design a new model that empowers people to thrive and grow in work and life.’
Ideate: When you’re clear about the problem, you need to develop as many solutions as possible and start thinking about how you can test whether they’ll be effective or not.
Prototype: During this experimental phase, designers test their hypotheses in the real world. This may involve creating a physical prototype for a product, but it could equally apply to a new schedule, an approach to networking, or developing a content flywheel.
Test: Although this is the final stage of the model, designers take an iterative approach, which requires testing, measuring results and then redefining the problem to start once again.
Design thinking is not a linear process. For example, some insights from the test phase may mean learning something new about the user, allowing you to ‘re-empathize’. Or something may immediately inspire a new idea, taking you right back to the ideate phase.
The point is that you consciously design a new way of thinking that provides a platform to build something better.
From action to inaction
You may be asking yourself What the design thinking process has to do with high-performance cultures.
Well, Sarah Stein Greenberg is very clear that alongside the importance of action, there’s also a need for a certain amount of inaction, as she shared on Christopher Lochhead’s Follow Your Different podcast:
I think reflection is kind of the underappreciated partner of action. In a lot of cases, when people think about creativity, they think about brainstorming and exuberance and that spark of inspiration. But… it’s like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, those two things are inextricably linked: action and reflection.
She recommends a form of journaling to help inspire breakthroughs, using another framework created at the d.school, called ‘What?/So What?/Now What?’
Here’s how you might use it following a collaborative and creative session with your team:
What? Write down everything that happened before reflecting on what it means.
So what? Why is it important, and why did it feel like something you wanted to capture?
Now what? What do you want to do about it? Is it something you can test, practise or improve upon?
Most leaders would rightly consider innovation a critical component of a performance culture. Not the innovation we associate with maverick inventors or boffins in lab coats. The kind that optimises the working environment for creativity and productivity.
Whether you’re leading a team of elite sportspeople, creatives, techies, or anything in between, high performance requires energy to push mentally and physically, counterbalanced with the proper levels of rest and reflection.
Design the right conditions for focused work and flow.
Give your team the tools and support to learn and grow.
Empower them to incorporate time for rest and reflection.
Have a lovely weekend,
Ollie