PwC's Tech While You Trek: Design Thinking

Think you need to be a designer to use design thinking methodology? Tune into this episode of Tech While You Trek to hear Lindsay Engelbert, a strategist from our PwC Experience Center, and Joe Lalley, PwC's Your Tomorrow digital experience leader, debunk this myth. Learn about the five phase approach to design thinking to understand your clients’ problems, understand their pain points and then leverage technology to solve them. 

Transcript

PwC Tech While You Trek:  Design Thinking

 
00;00;08;01 [Adam - Speaker 1]: Welcome back to another episode of tech while you 
  track I am your host Adam. And today we are going to be talking about design    thinking and I have with me Joe Lalley and Lindsay Englebert, say hi. 

00;00;18;58 [Lindsey- Speaker 2]: Hello  

00;00;19;00 [Joe - Speaker 3]: Hi Adam 
 

00:00;19;01 So, tell us a little bit about yourselves  how you came to the firm how long  you've been with the firm and how you first got interested in design thinking. 
 
00;00;28;23 [Lindsey - Speaker 2]: I am Lindsay Englebert I'm an experienced strategist 
  out of our experience centers and are based in Chicago and I've been with the 

firm since 2009 through the diamond acquisition and actually took a brief   hiatus to attend graduate school to focus on a   program around human centered design and design thinking which is why I'm  really interested in this topic rejoin the firm around 2014 when they experience center was being established and that really ties into this idea of design thinking and bringing it to life. 

00;00;47;28 [Joe - Speaker 3]: Prior to PwC I worked mostly in the entertainment 
 media field. 

00;00;51;28 [Adam - Speaker 1]: So if you would please for me define design thinking 

00;00;56;28 [Joe - Speaker 3]: So design thinking is a methodology it really is a way of thinking  it isn't a technology but it's a great way that you can understand problems understand people's pain points and then potentially leverage technology to solve them. So it generally goes through a five phase approach.  First you gain empathy for a group of users you understand what their problems are. Then you define a point of view. So based on that information you define what you think the problems might be and then you start generating ideas and those ideas don't have to be right but you're sort of trying to map ideas to those problems you represent those ideas through the form of what's called a prototype which is just a very early version of something of some idea and then you test that prototype with those users to validate does it solve a problem that you thought it might or not. 
 

00;01;42;13 [Lindsey - Speaker 2]: I think it's a way of expanding your thinking to really pushing you really understanding people's needs. I think that's the biggest thing that inspired me about it was just this idea of how do you meet someone's unmet need and what do you actually define that you might think you have a problem. But is that really it when you actually start to watch people and look at their motivations.  It really changes things. You can put all the surveys out in the world and try to start to get to that. 

00;02;45;11 [Speaker 2]: The more that you can do this ethnographic research and really understand people and use them throughout the process is huge and saying hey is this actually going to meet your needs. And is this going to be a solution that helps you in any way whether it's a process, a product, anything. 

00;03;02;23 [Speaker 3]: I think personally it means admitting that you don't have the answers in many cases and being open to using failure as a tool to get you closer to that answer. 
I think that's a big part of design thinking is just changing your approach towards failure or changing your view on it. And instead of it being something that's a negative thing it's actually an approach to try to accelerate that failure do it sooner do it faster so you get to the solution faster. 

00;03;25;02 [Speaker 1]: It's a process for creative problem solving. 

00;03;27;06 [Speaker 2]: I think that's a good description of it so it doesn't have to be creative. Ok. So it's just a process for problem solving. Yeah I think that's one of the misnomers about it that it's like I have to be a designer I have to be you know this creative type to go through this process but it's really how do you get to the right problem. How do you bring people in throughout the process to get to a solution 
with them. 

00;03;47;19 [Speaker 1]: What background or skills do you feel are helpful in design thinking. 
One of the most important skills to have if this is a skill is just empathy the ability to just field what other people feel like in other people's shoes. 

00;04;00;13 [Speaker 1]: That's really critical. And a lot of the activities that you'll do in a design thinking session or workshop are really geared at helping you develop empathy for the people that you're trying to solve for them. 

00;04;11;08 [Speaker 2]: Just being curious and inquisitive and thinking through and being open to new ideas and new solutions. And then also we talked about it before but being willing to kind of accept failure and move through problems. I think there are certain backgrounds that probably lend themselves a little bit closer to it thinking about the designer world. You know engineers that kind of stuff but it's more of a mindset shift of how do you put empathy into things that you're doing like you said and really be open. So what is the coolest thing you've ever seen done with design thinking 
it's less about like hey this is this amazing product that came out of

00;04;44;05 these moments of delight that you get when you're testing different prototypes with people and you see someone actually use something that you've created correctly and you're like what's amazing. But also on the flip side of it I think one of the coolest things to see is when people have these aha moments of like hey we designed it this way and as we tested it the user doesn't get it doing usability thing on one of my 
recent projects and having screens up wire frames for people to look at and asking them to perform a task and something that we thought was super clear 

00;05;13;00 because the button in our mind was right there and people were supposed to be able to do something where the button says highlight and share. 

00;05;19;19 [Speaker 2]: And we're like, "what do you think that means?" And the people had no clue. It might seem so clear to the person who's designed it because you've put 
it out there into the world. 

00;05;28;13 [Speaker 1]: It's all about how as a person who's ingesting it really taking that in it was something I learned where he was helping them redesign the MRI machine at a children's hospital.  Over 80 percent of the children had to be sedated in order to go through the MRI. So he did a bunch of research and observe children going through this he interviewed them and started to generate different ideas that might help reduce that 80 percent number. He designed it almost like an underwater experience where you were boarding 

00;06;00;02 a submarine and you had kind of slid into this really cool fun looking submarine with fish around you. The 80 percent sedation rate went down to less than 10 or maybe close to zero. That was really impactful to me because he looked at the user really really closely understood their problems and then designed a solution to try to address them. So how do you separate the hype versus the reality with design thinking when people here design thinking. One of the challenges is that it has the word design in it which is good and bad. I believe design is really a process not necessarily a thing that comes at the end of a process. 

00;06;31;29 [Speaker 1]: It is the process and I think people will expect that oh we're going into a session where we're going to just be creative and we're just going to create ideas but that's really sort of the middle part of it. There's a lot that has to happen in front of that. There's a lot of just understanding what are we actually trying to solve here. Who has this problem why do they have this problem. And I think that's a common misconception that people have. 

00;06;54;03 [Speaker 2]: I think some of the hype is like oh we can just throw design thinking at this and it's just going to solve things and it's more about how do you create that mindset shift to say how are we going to go through and solve problems differently. 
How are we going to put humans at the center of solving problems. Do things more interactively not just we're going to focus on this for an hour. This is a different way to approach things. 

00;07;14;10 [Speaker 1]: So then where are we as a firm in regards to design thinking. I've focused a lot on some internal U.S. clients as people who have either expressed interest in learning design thinking or just applying for a project they're working on. So I've worked with teams like our talent acquisition teams. We've worked a lot with our learning and development teams and really closely with the overall kind of your tomorrow initiatives around transforming PwC. And there's been a great great interest across all of those groups in using design thinking to ensure that we're really solving the right problems, problems that people really have. 

00;07;47;18 [Speaker 1]: And it's been super exciting so I feel good that we're doing this for clients. 

00;07;51;10 [Speaker 2]: We're also doing this for ourselves for the first time in my career once the Experience Center started I was actually going out and talking to end users and consumers and putting them into the mix and thinking about their needs which I hadn't done previously on some of my customer projects. And I think that comes through especially with things like the BXT accelerators where we're telling people tell a story what's the human element to it where we really hadn't always focused on that before and I think that's something that anyone GWC can think about is how do we make people's lives easier through putting them at the center of a problem. 

00;08;23;17 [Speaker 1]: So Lindsay I've heard you say BXT so for those of us who don't know can you explain a little bit. 

00;08;27;23 [Speaker 2]: Yes so because he really focuses on the firm's approach to design thinking and that methodology that we're bringing in B stands for Business, X stands for experience and T is the technology aspect and how do we bring all of those things together to try to solve problems were better as a firm when we take those three different lenses and not just focusing on just the business problem or just an experience problem or technology but how do you bring those all really together. 

00;08;52;28 [Speaker 1]: How is design thinking relevant to the different lines of service at PwC?

00;08;56;25 [Speaker 2]: You know tax audit advisory in the sense that it is a different mindset shift or a way to solve problems. It's relevant to all of the different lines of services we're all providing a professional service to our clients and they have problems that we're trying to help them solve. 

00;09;11;28 [Speaker 1]: So how can we bring this methodology and thinking to that it might be hard to imagine that you could use Design Thinking to help improve an audit process or tax related project or things like that. But at the center of a lot of these projects there is a human being. There's a human being who is either carrying out a task or responsible for a job and there may be things that are really efficient about that are 
really enjoyable about that or things that are challenging and design thinking is a great way to sort of dig into that and understand it. Well so could you folks share a story about a time when you failed in 

00;09;45;25 trying to sell or implement or work with design thinking the way that I've seen it fail sometimes is when we don't actually go through the process. 
 

00;09;53;07 [Speaker 2]: When you try to skip steps or jump through things and not actually do design thinking the way that it's supposed to be done I think we run into that struggle in working with clients because we're afraid to fail. We are seen as these trusted advisers and we are looking to just provide an answer. 

00;10;09;23 [Speaker 2]: And I think we run into as well this idea of what's the ROI on that and it's really hard to quantify what ROI is on an experience but I don't think you can ever go wrong when you say we've put a human at the center of solving this and we have understood their needs and really gone through the process.  So I think it fails when we sometimes don't understand the value and benefit of what it is and don't go through the process to actually really take the steps to get to that solution. 

00;10;37;00 [Speaker 1]: One instance where I've seen design thinking fail. We were working with a team who about halfway through the workshop we realized that the team actually they weren't very passionate about solving the problem that we were trying to solve. Ultimately when people came out of the workshop and hopefully what happens after a workshop is that people take an idea and then go do something with 
it. The idea is just sort of stagnated and didn't get built. And I think that was because the team just really wasn't passionate about it. So I think that's important to identify upfront. Is this something that people care about solving. So then what if you could boil it down to one thing you would like our  listeners to know about design thinking. 

00;11;11;11 [Speaker 2]: One thing to know is you don't have to be a designer.  I think you really need to be passion about solving people's problems and putting them at the forefront and trying to help them have a better life. 

00;11;21;23 [Speaker 1]: One thing that people should know is that you probably can do this kind of work. We all have the ability to empathize with other people. We do have the ability to be creative. So I've seen people who really believe they cannot do this work come into a session enjoy it and be incredibly productive and work in a very different way.  

00;13;46;19 [Speaker 2]: Well listen Joe, Lindsey thank you guys so much for your time today and thank you very much for stopping by. This has been tech while you track I am your host Adam and we will talk to you next. 

00;14;09;17 [Speaker 3]: This podcast is brought to you by PwC. All rights reserved. 

00;14;13;11 [Speaker 3]: PwC refers to the U.S. member firm or of one of its subsidiaries or affiliates and may sometimes refer to the PwC  network. Each member firm has a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. This podcast is for general information purposes only and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisers.