design thinking

Tech skills are not the only type of skill you’ll need in 2021

Peter Cripps comment, education , , ,
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Whilst good technical skills continue to be important these alone will not be enough to enable you to succeed in the modern, post-pandemic workplace. At Digital Innovators, where I am Design and Technology Director, we believe that skills with a human element are equally, if not more, important if you are to survive in the changed working environment of the 2020’s. That’s why, if you attend one of our programmes during 2021, you’ll also learn these, as well as other, people focused, as well as transferable, skills.

1. Adaptability

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world of work not just in the tech industry but across other sectors as well. Those organisations most able to thrive during the crisis were ones that were able to adapt quickly to new ways of working whether that is full-time office work in a new, socially distanced way, a combination of both office and remote working, or a completely remote environment. People have had to adapt to these ways of working whilst continuing to be productive in their roles. This has meant adopting different work patterns, learning to communicate in new ways and dealing with a changed environment where work, home (and for many school) have all merged into one. Having the ability to adapt to these new challenges is a skill which will be more important than ever as we embrace a post-pandemic world.

Adaptability also applies to learning new skills. Technology has undergone exponential growth in even the last 20 years (there were no smartphones in 2000) and has been adopted in new and transformative ways by nearly all industries. In order to keep up with such a rapidly changing world you need to be continuously learning new skills to stay up-to-date and current with industry trends. 

2. Collaboration and Teamwork

Whilst there are still opportunities for the lone maverick, working away in his or her bedroom or garage, to come up with new and transformative ideas, for most of us, working together in teams and collaborating on ideas and new approaches is the way we work best.

In his book Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari makes the observation: “To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can collaborate in very flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. This concrete capability – rather than an eternal soul or some unique kind of consciousness – explains our mastery over planet Earth.”

On our programme we encourage and demand our students to collaborate from the outset. We give them tasks to do (like drawing how to make toast!) early on, then build on these, leading up to a major 8-week projects where students work in teams of four or five to define a solution to a challenge set by one of our industry partners. Students tell us this is one of their favourite aspects of the programme as it allows them to work with new people from a diverse range of backgrounds to come up with new and innovative solutions to problems.

3. Communication

Effective communication skills, whether they be written spoken or aural, as well as the ability to present ideas well, have always been important. In a world where we are increasingly communicating through a vast array of different channels, we need to adapt our core communications skills to thrive in a virtual as well as an offline environment.

Digital Innovators teach their students how to communicate effectively using a range of techniques including a full-day, deep dive into how to create presentations that tell stories and really enable you to get across your ideas.

4. Creativity

Pablo Picasso famously said “Every child is an artist; the problem is staying an artist when you grow up”.

As Hugh MacLeod, author of Ignore Everybody, And 39 Other Keys to Creativity says: “Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back please.’”

At Digital Innovators we don’t believe that it’s only artists who are creative. We believe that everyone can be creative in their own way, they just need to learn how to let go, be a child again and unlock their inner creativity. That’s why on our skills programme we give you the chance to have your crayons back.

5. Design Thinking

Design thinking is an approach to problem solving that puts users at the centre of the solution. It includes proven practices such as building empathy, ideation, storyboarding and extreme prototyping to create new products, processes and systems that really work for the people that have to live with and use them.

For Digital Innovators, Design Thinking is at the core of what we do. As well as spending a day-and-a-half teaching the various techniques (which our students learn by doing) we use Design Thinking at the beginning of, and throughout, our 8-week projects to ensure the students deliver solutions are really what our employers want.

6. Ethics

The ethical aspects on the use of digital technology in today’s world is something that seems to be sadly missing from most courses in digital technology. We may well churn out tens of thousands of developers a year, from UK universities alone, but how many of these people ever give anything more than a passing thought to the ethics of the work they end up doing? Is it right, for example, to build systems of mass surveillance and collect data about citizens that most have no clue about? Having some kind of ethical framework within which we operate is more important today than ever before.

That’s why we include a module on Digital Ethics as part of our programme. In it we introduce a number of real-world, as well as hypothetical case studies that challenge students to think about the various ethical aspects of the technology they already use or are likely to encounter in the not too distant future.

7. Negotiation

Negotiation is a combination of persuasion, influencing and confidence as well as being able to empathise with the person you are negotiating with and understanding their perspective. Being able to negotiate, whether it be to get a pay rise, buy a car or sell the product or service your company makes is one of the key skills you will need in your life and career, but one that is rarely taught in school or even at university.

As Katherine Knapke, the Communications & Operations Manager at the American Negotiation Institute says: “Lacking in confidence can have a huge impact on your negotiation outcomes. It can impact your likelihood of getting what you want and getting the best possible outcomes for both parties involved. Those who show a lack of confidence are more likely to give in or cave too quickly during a negotiation, pursue a less-aggressive ask, and miss out on opportunities by not asking in the first place”. 

On the Digital Innovators skills programme you will work with a skilled negotiator from The Negotiation Club to practice and hone your negotiation skills in a fun way but in a safe environment which allows you to learn from your mistakes and improve your negotiation skills.

On Thinking Architecturally

Peter Cripps architecture , ,

Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO) has written a great book on design thinking called Change by Design. Check out the link to see his mind-map of what the book is about.The basic premise of the book, why its about design thinking rather just design, is that design thinkers take a far more holistic approach to solving design problems. They use an interdisciplinary approach, think around the problem, including viewing the constraints as enablers rather than what should be fought against, and come up with ideas that would otherwise not have been thought of if ‘ordinary’ design had been applied. One of the case studies Tim uses in the book is the setting up of a live laboratory in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota to develop new approaches to patient care which involved designers, health care professionals, business strategists and patients to develop ideas for the “patient-provider experience”. A methodology called SPARC (See-Plan-Refine-Communicate) was adopted (which is I suspect based on the Deming Cycle) to show how design thinking could be applied not only to product design but also service design.

Returning to the mind-map that is on the inside front-cover of Change by Design its two starting points are ‘What’ (is it we are trying to do/solve) and ‘How’ (are we going to approach the design). This fits nicely with my own concept of what we term ‘architectural thinking‘ where we add an additional ‘node’ which is ‘Why’ (are we doing it this way). I prefer to illustrate this as a Venn diagram as shown below. The intersection of the three sets is what we consider when ‘thinking architecturally’.

 
  • What – The requirements we are trying to address. Architectural thinking focuses is on those requirements (functional, qualities and constraints) we think are architecturally significant in some way.
  • Why – Captures the key decisions we are making. Architectural thinking focuses on the architectural aspects which lead to major structuring, placement or procurement decisions. Could be explicit (as a fully documented decision with options looked at and rational for making the decision we did) or implicit in a diagram or model.
  • How – The design and implementation of the system. Architectural thinking focuses on those elements of the design that are significant to the architecture (maybe patterns applied, key principles adopted etc).

The key thing in all this is that the thinking applies to the significant elements not everything. The key skill of the architect is to understand which things are important and which can be left to someone else to fret over.

We Need More Women (IT) Architectural Thinkers (Duh)!

Peter Cripps architecture , , ,

Yes I know, a statement of the blindingly obvious. People of have been bleating on about this for years but nothing much seems to change. My recent and current experiences of teaching IT architecture for a number of different clients rarely has more than 10% of the classes being made up of women (and its usually 0%!). Even more depressingly, from what I’ve seen of university IT courses, there seems to be a similarly small number of female students entering into careers in IT. So why does it matter that 50% of the worlds population only have such a poor showing in this profession?

In his book Change by Design Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO relates the following apocryphal story. Whilst working on a kid’s product for Nike IDEO gathered a group of kids at their Palo Alto design studio to brainstorm ideas. The boys and girls (who were eight to ten year olds) were split into separate groups in different rooms, given some instructions and left to get on with it for an hour. When the results were analysed it was found that the girls had come up with more than two hundred ideas whereas the boys had struggled to come up with fifty. The reason for this? The boys were eager to get their ideas out there and were barely conscious of of the ideas of their fellow brainstormers. The girls on the other hand “conducted a spirited but nonetheless serial conversation in which each idea related to the one that had come before and became a springboard to the one that came next”. According to Tim one of the key rules of brainstorming is to “build on the ideas of others” and it would seem girls have an innate ability to do this whereas boys, possibly due to their more competitive tendencies, want to force the ideas to be the ones that “win”.

Although this story relates to a group of eight to ten year olds my own anecdotal evidence indicates it is equally applicable to all age groups. When observing how team members interact on case studies that we run as part of our architecture classes there is inevitably better and more informed discussion and end results when the teams are mixed (even when females are in the minority) than when they are made up of all males.

My hope is that we are entering a new age of enlightenment when it comes to how we put together project teams that are made up of true versatilists rather than traditional teams of “hard-core” IT techie types. Versatilists by definition have good skills across a range of disciplines whether it be in the arts, humanities or sciences. It is, I believe, only in bringing together both this range of disciplines together with mixed genders that we can hope to address some of life’s harder problems. Problems that not only require new ideas but solutions that build on the ideas of others rather than re-inventing everything from scratch in the usual brute force, testosterone charged way we typically seem to approach problem solving in IT.

Architecture vs. Design

Peter Cripps architecture , , ,

Yes it’s that old knotty problem again! Over at gapingvoid.com Hugh MacLeod is fond of using Venn diagrams to illustrate overlapping concerns so here’s one that I recently used for addressing the eternal architecture versus design debate that was the source of much discussion at a recent Architecture Thinking class I was giving.

As I remember it the discussion went something like this:

  • Student: So what’s the difference between architecture and design? It seems from what you’re saying its just a matter of scale?
  • Me: Whilst its true to say that architecture addresses the major components of the system, rather than the detail, it’s more than that. The architecture is the bridge between the “what” (that is the requirements) and the “how” (that is the design).
  • Student: Yeah but isn’t that we usually call “high-level design”.
  • Me: Not really. Grady Booch says: “All architecture is design but not all design is architecture”. (I cheated and looked up this quote afterwards and found that Booch goes on to say “architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.”). In my experience high-level design is just the the view that allows the complete system to be represented on one page.
  • Student: I still don’t see what the difference really is.
  • Me: Okay, here’s the real difference for me (at this point I draw the above Venn on a flip-chart). As well as defining the structure of the system, architecture must also embrace the “what” and the “how” of that structure.  The “what” in this context is the requirements (functional and non-functional) and so architecture involves reasoning about and resolving these sometimes conflicting requirements. It’s about addressing those architecturally significant requirements (the “what”) that will drive (and constrain) the “how” (the design).

Now, if I was drawing this again (and maybe I’ll do this next time) I would actually draw a third overlapping circle which I’d label the “why”. This is where we’d capture the rationale for why we make the (architectural) decisions we do.

Thanks Hugh, this is a neat way of explaining the way things are!

Design Really Does Matter

Peter Cripps architecture , ,

I’ve just received a new work laptop and what a monstrosity it is! There was a time when ThinkPads were actually quite sexy as far as laptops go but this model (a T400 if you’re interested) is a complete abomination of a thing. It’s not only square and clunky feeling but for some mysterious reason the designers have made the battery stick out of the back like some large cancerous growth. Why, if Apple can design a laptop with a supposed 6 hour battery life where the battery is hidden completely inside the case do Lenovo designers have to create something that has the battery hanging out the back and appear to offer no more life?

What’s all this got do do with the zen of architecture you might ask? I’ve been reading the latest book by Garr Reynolds, Presentationzen Design where Garr suggests we should take inspiration for good design from the products we see around us all day. The ThinkPad would seem to be a good design antipattern to me. Of course, as Hugh MacLeod says “there’s no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership” and “a fancy tool just gives a second-rater one more pillar to hide behind.” That said, I feel sure that using a tool that is both good to look and is well designed makes for an all round better experience that must aid in the flow of the creative juices. If you don’t have the ideas in the first place then the best tool in the world won’t help you create them but if you do have something to say what would you rather write with, the free pen from the hotel room or the Mont Blanc you got for Christmas?

Tim Brown on Design Thinking

Peter Cripps architecture, creativity , , ,

If you don’t watch any other TED podcasts watch this one by Tim Brown. IBM sponsored TED at Oxford last year (no invite for me unfortunately) and Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO) presented on Design Thinking and had these ideas which I think apply equally to architectural thinking (is it different anyway).

  • Big problems need big solutions. Back in the 19th century Isambard Kingdom Brunel imagined an integrated transport system (he thought big). His vision was that of a passenger boarding a train in London and leaving a ship in New York. Big problems (global warming, health care, international security) need big thoughts to provide solutions. Focussing on the small may provide incremental change but will not provide solutions to some of the big, hairy problems we are faced with today. If we could focus less on the object (the individual system in IT terms) and more on design thinking (systems of systems) we might have more of an impact and be able to solve more of the really difficult problems there are out there.
  • Design thinking begins with integration thinking. Design thinking needs to balance a number of fundamental “forces”: what people want (desirability), what technology can provide (feasibility) and what can actually be built given the constraints of cost, resource and time (viability).
  • Design is (or should be) human centred. Although it needs to be both feasible and viable if it is also to be desirable then that needs to start with what people need. Here the needs we are considering are not what we want from the next version of iPod or Porsche but a safer, cleaner, healthier world. Understanding the needs of the multiple stakeholders that there are out there when building big systems is crucial of the systems are to be not only desirable but also useful.
  • Learning by making. Don’t just think what to build but also build in order to think. In todays model-driven world where we architects can often go off into a huddle for months on end we sometimes forget that the important thing is not a very fine model or specification but the thing itself. Prototyping is as important today as it’s ever been but we sometimes forget that getting our hands dirty by and building small-scale throwaway parts of systems is an important way of learning and understanding those systems. As Fred Brookes said, you might as well plan to throw one away because you will anyway.
  • From consumption to participation. Design of participatory systems where everyone is involved will lead to new and innovative solutions which may not have been envisaged initially. This is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and in IT terms is best articulated in Web 2.0 and the whole social networking phenomenon.
  • Design is too important to be left to designers. Often the important innovations come not from the people charged with designing the system but from the people who are using  the system. Don’t forget that the most important stakeholders are the everyday users or the current system.
  • In times of change we need new alternatives and new ideas. We are living in times of great change and our existing systems are no longer fit for purpose. Design thinking needs to explore new and unthought of ideas without being constrained by current systems and ideas. Design thinkers need to be multi-talented, left and right-brain thinkers. Hint: this will also increase dramatically your chances of staying employed in the coming years. Good design thinkers know that the key to a good and better design is asking the right question or at least framing the question in a way that will not constrain the solution. So, rather than asking “how do I build a better benefits system” ask “how do I build a benefits system that will result in more of the benefits reaching the people who need them most and less in paying people to run the system”. Of course this is hard because answers to such questions can sometimes have difficult or unpalatable side-effects such as people losing their jobs. The first step of design thinking is to ask the right question.

There are lots of ideas here and many of them resonate with the practice we in IBM call Architectural Thinking. I will return to some of these ideas in future blogs.