Applying Design Thinking and Agile Strategies to increase Revenue – Ask The Expert Series 1-1

Design Thinking and Agile Strategies

In the Industrial economy, our focus is to deliver products with rich features to our customers. In the Service economy, we package our product and deliver them to our customers as a form of service as added value. In the Experience economy, besides providing services as a value-add to customers, we are delivering Experiences, Experiences of acquiring, consuming the services.

This is the first article in our Ask The Expert series on the CorporateTrainerConnect.com platform.  In this article, we interviewed Mr. Choong Sin Fatt, a Design Thinking and Agile strategist and practitioner.  He has over 20 years of experience in the area of IT development, pre-sales, consulting and training. His innovative approach to redesigning Agile learning has helped organisations to improve the way product teams deliver products that customers love.

Q1. How do we apply Design Thinking and Agile Strategies to increase our business revenue?

Being Agile is a company’s ability to sense the market change and response to the change fast, with confidence.  Being fast is not good enough in this service and experience orientate economy, thus Agile alone is no guarantee that your team will consistently deliver truly engaging, impactful products.

Companies have to get closer to the customers, putting customers at the centre of everything they do. Design Thinking which is a Human-Centric problem-solving framework is here to bridge the gap between product and customer experiences. When you take good care of your customers, the rest will follow, including revenue.

Q2. What is Design Thinking using LEGO© Serious Play? How do you use this methodology to handle the ever-changing industry landscape?

There are many tools available in the Design Thinking process that are used to research and uncover users (customers) needs, LEGO© Serious Play is one of the new methods that can be effectively adopted as a facilitation tool to engage users to co-design their experiences with the designers and developers.

To do these, we give our participants a tool (LEGO© bricks) to create a model that represents the “perfect world” scenario while also asking them to explain why they built their perfect model in that particular way. This process is called the LEGO© Serious Play© method. In this process we invite participants to actively participate in the Experiences research – co-discover and co-design their experiences together using the LEGO© bricks.

In another Design Thinking approach- the Empathic Design Thinking approach, researchers and developers move into the world of the end-users.  In this user-centered design, approach attention is paid to the user’s feelings toward a product.

In the LEGO© Serious Play Experiences Design Thinking approach, participants are relocated into the world of research and development.  In this design approach, our customers and end-users are the Participants. A participant then plays an active and engaged role in the Experiences Design process, to co-discover their Current Experiences (fear, happy moment), and co-design their Future Experiences (dreams, desires) together with all relevant stakeholders.

Q3. Are creativity and innovation inborn traits? How can I be more creative and innovative in solving my day-to-day problems?

Not at all, as long you trust the process, the Design Thinking process, and stay close to your users, everyone can be creative and innovate.  This is something that customers love.

Connect with Mr. Choong Sin Fatt and explore his newly launched FREE online course, introducing LEGO Serious Play with Design Thinking.

CORPORATETRAINERCONNECT.COM PLATFORM

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. This article is part of the series from our newly launched CorporateConnectTrainer platform where we help connect corporations to trainers in the region. You can now search, qualify and connect directly with your best-fit trainer on one single platform, saving you time and hassle. We aim to share the subject matter expertise of our qualified trainers on the CorporateConnectTrainer platform through these articles.

Written by Janet Yung, founder of Trilogy People Performance Consultancy. We enable learning for businesses and individuals by bringing you programs, learning, and design delivery services, and technologies cum platforms, that will aid you and your team to build skills and be ready for current and future business needs.