Design Thinking for Aviation Safety Continued from page 17 to branch out into problems like organizational restructuring or ana- lyzing customer needs, they focused on experiences instead of product development. Experiences are inher- ently human, and so design thinking uses a system of overlapping spaces to provide a creative, human-centered process and human-centered outputs. Design thinking is defined in part by its protocol for identifying better ways of finding and understanding a prob- lem and then moving quickly to test a variety of solutions. Often, the prob- lems design thinking is best at helping solve are what designers call “wicked problems;” the kinds of issues that are tough to tackle because informa- tion is incomplete or contradictory, or because the requirements change. Thomas Lockwood, former president of the Design Management Institute, a non-profit whose mission is to demonstrate the strategic role design plays in business, offers a comprehen- sive definition of the concept as: “a human-centered innovation process that emphasizes observation, collabo- ration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping, and concurrent business analysis.” Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO (widely considered to be the nexus of design thinking) describes the idea as “…a system that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is techno- logically feasible and what a viable business can convert into consumer value and market opportunity.” Sound too ‘out there’ to have any application to aviation operations? Fair enough. Managing safety and risk purely based on intuition and cre- ative impulses probably isn’t a terrific Aviation Business Journal | 4th Quarter 2016 idea. Over-reliance on analytical, rational metrics can be just as danger- ous. Safety is not a singular outcome; it is a process. Human behavior, emo- tion, interaction with environment, and performance all figure promi- nently into any attempt to create safer, more resilient organizations. Here’s where thinking like a designer can turn ordinary safety tools on their heads to achieve better outcomes. How to think like a designer In practice, it is useful to imag- ine design thinking as a three-step process, referring to the elements as steps is a bit misleading, given that users might move freely from one phase to another. On paper, design thinking involves inspira- tion, ideation, and implementation. Although the steps to thinking like a designer aren’t fixed in stone, in- spiration is a natural beginning. Inspiration Inspiration in the context of design thinking is less about a flash of bril- liance, and more about the hard work of gaining empathy for the stakehold- ers for whom the process is intended. Empathy is the user-centered engine that makes design thinking work, and the kind of deep understanding required to gain empathy for an end user means that we have to break down barriers that separate work as it is intended, and work as it is actually performed. In a traditional design role, this means connecting with customers, but in the context of safety systems, it is more likely to indicate a need to focus introspectively by connecting with employees at every level. The inspiration phase is deeply collaborative, and while issues of organizational design are often con- veniently approached from a singular perspective (think management), co-creating solutions according to user needs can help avoid the struggle of trying to make a one-dimensional solution fit where it doesn’t. Often, we tend toward assumptions about the beliefs and values of the people we work with, and we don’t question in depth the motivations and emotions that people bring to work. Empathy, the intended outcome of this phase of the design thinking process, provides us a pathway to understanding those deep insights, but it requires that we participate directly with people in meaningful observation and engage- ment. This phase directly affects safety and communication by reduc- ing the gap in understanding how work is actually done, as opposed to how we imagine it gets done. Doing that successfully means there is less likelihood that policies and proce- dures—as a result of unintended design conflicts—create the need for users to invent a work-around or circumvent a rule altogether. Ideation In product design, ideation involves rapid, free-form prototyp- ing, and volume is key. In an orga- nizational sense, prototypes take on a different meaning, but the central ideas remain similar. Ideation is our opportunity to transition from un- derstanding the problem from a user perspective to identifying potential solutions. Experienced design think- ers sometimes describe the process as Continued on page 21 19
