Valuing terrible ideas doesn’t mean
all ideas are of equal value
Steph Beath
CEO Comsen

I love arguments for and against anything to provide nuance and
to help refine thinking.
So having seen huge benefits flow from well facilitated design
thinking practices, I was interested to explore A critical piece
suggesting that some of the fundamental principles are flawed.

Only three lines in I ran straight into this statement -
“The people who speak the language of design thinking are
the cool kids. Not just the people with the awesome
glasses and the black clothing. These are the people who
have those awesome jobs with “innovation” or “disruption”
on their business cards.”

It’s wrong to position design thinking as a
fashion.

I wish I’d taken photos of workshops in the early days,
before I carried a smartphone with a camera, the record
would show a 16-year stream of walls or tables covered in
post it notes, index cards, coloured paper and groups of
people standing around them pointing at things, making sense
of things and creating their own futures together.

The market may have updated the
language and repackaged the
methodology for ‘innovators’ or
‘forward thinkers’ but the reality is
that it’s been around since the
sixties.

The author’s other key assertions; that design thinking
assumes no prior work and that not all arguments are of
equal value, suggest that he must have had a poor
experience with low level facilitation and little
external input.

Unfortunately, the poor practice of any
methodology creates a problem for
practitioners who know how to use it.
The watered down, all froth and no beer
versions leave clients with a bitter taste
associated with the practice rather than
the provider.

Let me break it down

He says - “The great thing about participating in a design
thinking inspired workshop is that you don’t have to come to
the session having done any work. Everything starts from the
work created in the room. This approach lets the participants
off the hook. There is no need to spend hours preparing a talk
or a paper to discuss, as the work happens within the session.”
Design thinking assumes no prior or ongoing work
Criticism

If you are doing work that benefits only you and your immediate workmates
then it’s true that you only need empathy amongst yourselves, but it also
means you are not in business.
Design thinking is not a step by step process you follow without ‘thinking’.
You must test if your assumptions and instincts are pointing in the right
direction. This requires self-awareness and an ability to be wrong. It also
means working through multiple ‘if this, then that’ branches, far too complex
for a script, which means that a facilitator who works to a ‘script' can be
painful for participants.
Design thinking runs on
the premise that the
best answers to a
problem are shaped by
the people you are
designing for.
Reality

Facilitators don’t run a process,
they help make the process
easier for those designing
solutions by enabling plenty of
discussion grounded in actual
rather than imagined needs.

Criticism
You don’t need to spend time if you already
know each other
He says – “The problem with this approach is
that much of our work is ongoing. We don’t
need to spend time defining our problems because
we have already been working together. We
don’t need to develop empathy because we already
know the people that we’re working with.”

When is something ‘complete’, ‘high
quality’, ‘innovative’?
What does it look like when you
have ‘trust’, ‘integrity’, ‘empathy?
How about being ‘bold’,
‘unique’, ‘professional’?
Reality
The variation is huge.
Unless you nut it out, people agree to something with different expectations of what that means with respect to behaviour.
No matter how well you know one another, I
have yet to be with a single team where
people had clarity about language without
first directly addressing it in a workshop.
Take any word and ask people what it
translates to in terms of activity – what it
looks like when you see it in life.
1
2
3

Criticism
That design thinking means all ideas are equally
good?
He says - “The vibe of design thinking inspired meetings is
relentlessly positive. All ideas are welcome. We are told to say “yes,
and” - following the principles of improv…. How did we get this idea
that all ideas are equally good? That every perspective must be
understood as valid?”

Reality
One stupid idea may lead
to another brilliant one,
but only if it sees the light
of day and is treated as a
valuable part of the
creation process.
When it comes to getting
ideas on the table, there is
a time for building and
tearing down arguments
and during the building
phase it’s critical to say
‘yes, and…’.
Laugh about poor ideas
later, but in the medley
of terrible ideas is a
concept that’s trying to
surface and is found
through the patterns in
language describing the
terrible ideas.
This makes terrible ideas
‘valid’ in a way that author
and/or facilitators he’s
experienced have either
not understood or
explained well.

Clear understanding
When you start to tear down and offer arguments against ideas you must do it with the clear
understanding. Once you hit on a great idea, it’s amazing how quickly the method for delivering it
can appear.
Being inclusive
Not everyone likes arguing, but many who like it least also hold the best ideas. We want to hear
them. We need to hear them.

Design thinking is
about

Design thinking is not about you, your product or
service or idea or talent.
It’s about helping. That means dropping our
assumptions, that we ‘already know’ the answers and
creating space to be wrong, space for ‘bad’ ideas to
lead to great ones, and space for new answers to
flourish through old conversations approached in new
ways.

Steph Beath – www.comsen.co.nz @stephbeath