Social change by design: The potential of design thinking in the social sector

The design thinking approach facilitates solution development for wicked problems. Image: Shutterstock

Design thinking, a popular approach for innovation in the corporate sector, is yet to find its feet in the social sector. The social sector aims to address wicked problems through innovative, sustainable solutions. Wicked problems are complex, ill-defined, ambiguous, and require systemic, multi-dimensional solutions. These problems impact and are impacted by several interdependent factors and multiple stakeholders who may be located across multiple social systems and organisations. Examples of such problems include universal access to quality education, healthcare for all, economic and environmental sustainability, climate change, and income inequalities. The design thinking approach facilitates solution development for such wicked problems. It is a human-centric approach rooted in empathy. The social sector also operates with high empathy and contextual connectedness with its target community. Given the alignment between the design thinking process and the social sector issues and context, it is quite surprising that there is limited use of design thinking in the social sector. 

Some social sector organisations innovate through trial-and-error method rather than a planned process. This leads to a lot of wastage of resources. Investing in learning design thinking principles will likely show positive results for the social sector and reduce the costs of innovating. Design thinking is a structured approach that provides tools to develop an in-depth contextualised understanding of the target group, followed by ways for developing and testing innovative ideas. It is highly collaborative and brings together multiple stakeholders to understand the problem and identify solutions. It has the following steps: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. Empathising involves going to the field to examine and understand the larger context of the problem. Investigators should focus on understanding the lived experience of their target community and include the perspectives and experiences of all the relevant stakeholders. 

At this point, the investigators must not constrain themselves by sticking to the original problem statement. Instead, they must examine all aspects of the context and then review the problem statement to expand or modify it according to the field reality. This will bring them to the next stage, where they define the problem and identify parameters that good solutions need to meet. They need to combine all the data from the previous stage to develop a comprehensive description of the problem. The third stage, ideation, is a collaborative idea-generation process. It requires all relevant stakeholders to come together to generate ideas freely without criticising the proposed ideas or subjecting them to any evaluation. The objective is to develop as many ideas as possible without any constraints. Once free ideation is over, the group evaluates the ideas based on effectiveness parameters identified earlier. They further critically evaluate ideas for their feasibility and identify a few top ideas. In the next prototyping stage, the group creates prototypes or models that can be used to develop the final product or process. They subject these prototypes to critical evaluation. In the final testing stage, the group develops inexpensive approaches to test the ideas in the field. The ideas that hold ground are finetuned and modified based on feedback from the field and, finally, launched on a larger scale. Design thinking provides several useful templates and tools across the various stages.

Also read: Need for embracing 'wise innovation'

During my research in the social sector, I found that organisations may not recognise and, therefore, fail to incorporate deep contextual realities, resulting in lost opportunities to develop effective solutions. Even good and popular products and services are likely to fail if contextual realities are not accounted for. For instance, self-help groups are very popular in India to encourage saving by women in rural areas and support women-led microenterprises. However, to encourage a community to start creating self-help groups, it is imperative to understand the family and social structure, the role of different family members in decision-making, and the local cultural norms. By understanding and incorporating these aspects in advocacy and self-help group formation processes and involving the relevant community members as stakeholders in developing these processes, organisations are likely to experience greater success. Design thinking can help the social sector carefully understand and analyse these contextual realities and build them into solutions. 

[This article was published with permission from <a href="https://www.imi.edu/" target="_blank">International Management Institute.</a>]