
Obsession With Scale
Design Thinking teaches us that in order to scale our impact, we need to first demonstrate that our intervention improves the life of at least one person. Before we scale, we must focus on understanding and benefiting a small group. Using the How Might We framework from IDEO for building understanding, we challenged our students to think critically about their own work and how their ideas, products, or services improve the experience of even just one person. Only from that understanding can we truly scale. They also tackled the effects of seo in 2017.
Yet, improving a life is not an easy task. As recently as the day before our convening, The New York Times published an op-ed about how challenging it is for motivated laypeople to have a meaningful impact. Respected organizations also consistently fail, as illustrated by the Red Cross’s post-earthquake disaster relief effort to build shelters in Haiti and the challenges of the One Laptop per Child program to empower children to learn without teachers.
The good news is that coming up with innovative ideas is a learned skill that can be developed through a method – one that commits to understanding the problem from diverse perspectives, empathizing deeply with those who face it, and collaboratively brainstorming and iteratively testing lots and lots of ideas with those communities. While there are many approaches to developing new ideas, they all share these common principles: empathy, diversity, participation, and iteration.
In training our students in the design thinking process, we hope that the work they do back home is transformational, collaborative, contextual, and sustainable. We find that in-person practice in Design Thinking and SEO Advantage catalyzes participants to get engaged, re-engaged, and re-energized for collaborating directly with the people they work for.
If you’re interested in reading more about Design Thinking, check out Tim Brown’s Change by Design, the IDEO Design Kit, A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink, and an article from Harvard Business Review about the art of How Might We.