Unleash Your Inner Innovator

Have you ever found yourself constantly overthinking, dissecting problems from every conceivable angle, and yet sometimes feeling stuck, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of your thoughts? What if I told you that this very tendency – your “exhaustive mind” – is actually a potent asset waiting to be leveraged, especially when you learn to “think like a designer”?

Before my studies at Stanford, I hadn’t formally encountered the term “design thinking.” Yet, as I delved into it, I recognized a profound alignment with the intuitive problem-solving approaches I’d always employed. Design thinking, as defined by Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO, is “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people and possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” At its core, it’s about exploring what is desirable (for people), viable (for business), and feasible (with technology). This framework perfectly complements an exhaustive mind, offering a powerful way to guide meandering thoughts toward concrete solutions.

Embracing the Beginner’s Mindset

There’s no rigid blueprint for design thinking; it’s a dynamic mindset. The goal is to approach problem-solving with genuine curiosity, like a beginner. Throughout my career, whether working with startups or established enterprises, I inadvertently adopted this “beginner’s mindset.” This constant feeling of “winging it” actually became a strength, forcing me to remain hyper-logical and minimalistic in my focus on desirability, viability, and feasibility. I learned to truly listen to my partners, understanding their context before attempting to formulate solutions. This process unknowingly guided me through divergent and convergent thinking, transforming broad concepts into actionable strategies.

My collaboration with Jim, a primary executive stakeholder for a private equity publishing company, perfectly illustrates this. Knowing nothing about private equity, my initial “survival tactic” was boundless curiosity and seeking intersections with what I did know. Our informal meetings in Grand Central Terminal, amidst its chaotic energy, inadvertently spurred creativity. We learned to “daydream together,” allowing our surroundings to contribute to our strategies – like observing commuters finding their way to trains influencing ideas for guiding content experiences. This partnership, built on mutual learning and a beginner’s curiosity, aligned perfectly with design thinking principles, leading to Jim’s multiple successful sales of his company.

The Power of Empathy: Understanding Your User

To think like a designer, you must first cultivate deep empathy. This means stepping into the shoes of those you’re designing for – your partners, your team, and especially your end-users or customers. It’s about truly understanding their feelings, thoughts, and attitudes, which in turn reveals the true drivers of the problems you need to solve.

Practical tips for cultivating empathy from the “Empathize & Prototype” course include:

• Encourage storytelling: People reveal much through their narratives.
• Do NOT suggest answers: Avoid leading questions; let them speak freely.
• Do NOT be afraid of silence: Allow space for thought and deeper insights.
• Look for inconsistencies: Pay attention to discrepancies between words and actions.
• Be acutely aware of nonverbal cues: Facial expressions, movements, and surroundings speak volumes.
• Ask “why?”: This simple question uncovers root motivations.

Beyond direct observation and interviews, the easiest way to build empathy for your users is to become one. Subscribe to their newsletters, buy their product, interact with their content. Document your own feelings and areas of resistance. This first-hand experience is invaluable. Remember, the goal isn’t to have perfect answers, but to formulate the right questionsthat lead to impactful solutions.

Defining the Problem: Needs vs. Insights

Once you’ve gathered empathetic understanding, the next critical step is to define the problem. This involves reframing your questions around the user’s needs, supported by genuine user insights. Needs are fundamental physical and emotional necessities, while insights are observations and interpretations that reframe the challenge and offer actionable direction toward novel solutions.

Here, the empathy map becomes an indispensable tool. For each persona affected by the problem, you map out what they might think, feel, do, and say. As you ideate solutions, revisit these maps to see how changes to your proposed solution impact these four quadrants for each user. This distinct examination helps you determine which ideas are truly viable. My own experience with a branding project, where I used an empathy map to spontaneously ideate names, colors, and iconography for a client, demonstrated how powerful this tool can be in defining a problem and finding a lasting solution.

Prototyping as an Action, Not Just an Object

My initial fear of prototyping stemmed from associating it only with building tangible objects. However, “Empathize & Prototype” taught me that prototyping is fundamentally an attitude and an action. It’s about “building to think,” not “thinking to build.” It means initiating action before you feel completely ready, leveraging speed to rapidly learn what works, what doesn’t, and, crucially, which problem truly needs solving.

Why prototype?

• It eliminates risk early: The earlier a failure is identified, the cheaper its impact.
• It educates through failure: Knowing what won’t work is as valuable as knowing what will.
• It fosters growth through experimentation: Rapidly move from talking about ideas to actively testing them.

Success in prototyping isn’t measured by a perfect model, but by the laughter generated, the lessons learned from failures, the new questions that arise, and the sheer volume of ideas produced.

Testing: The Path to Refinement

The final step is rigorous testing. Develop distinct testing strategies for each user group to maximize learning and escape your team’s echo chamber. Define clear criteria before testing, and observe how users interact.

Things TO do during testing:

• Give as little context as possible.
• Let the user interact directly.
• Encourage the user to share their thoughts aloud.
• Ask open-ended questions.
• Recreate potential use cases.
• Be open to discovering unknown use cases.

Things to NOT do during testing:

• Oversell the idea.
• Restrict the user’s interaction.
• Correct the user.
• Set stakes too high.
• Talk about the prototype instead of showing it.

The most critical element of testing is being prepared to be wrong. Embrace failure as a learning opportunity; it systematically eliminates what doesn’t work, leading you closer to successful outcomes.

Embrace Curiosity: Your Superpower

As Bob Sutton emphasizes in “Leading Innovation,” curiosity is paramount. As strategists, the most important thing we can know is that we don’t know. This mindset drives continuous learning and empowers us to effectively solve problems and innovate. Design thinking offers practical tools to operationalize your exhaustive mind, guiding its constant activity toward positive outcomes. It allows you to transform what might feel like a mental burden into a dynamic process for innovation and meaningful impact.