A Perspective on Evangelising DT & Customer Obsession
““When you learn, teach. When you get, give.” ”
Evangelising design thinking and helping different teams bring back the focus on their customer over the last couple of years has been a really enriching experience for me. The very act of explaining a concept that’s seemingly become second nature for me, has allowed me to reflect on it, break it down and see what value it brings to the process.
“While we teach, we learn,” said the Roman philosopher Seneca ; coaching teams on design thinking and customer obsession over the years has helped me apply and internalise concepts even more deeply. I believe vulnerability has been an important aspect of teaching and learning; the vulnerability to accept that you may not have answers for every question, that there is scope to learn more and most importantly the vulnerability to allow for failure and to give yourself the time while learning.
To teach is to walk a mile in the learner’s shoes, it has been a very humbling experience to realise that as a coach I need to manifest the very same skills of empathy that we are helping individuals build. I can’t however think of a more gratifying experience! It’s a sum of all those moments when someone you’ve coached is able to teach another, is able to apply the process to a given task or project, or articulate the value of design thinking and being customer obsessed, that makes it all worth it. At Pensaar Design we’ve termed these moments as our ‘proud parent’ moments and we can’t wipe our smiles away!
As I reflect on the entire learning and coaching process I realise how pervasive design thinking really is without really being called out or termed so, nearly everything we do uses some aspect of the process to truly work and be effective. To coach you need to build empathy for the learner, to learn you need to build empathy and understanding for the subject, to perform you need to dig deeper and understand the context and to improve you need to constantly experiment and iterate. It is only right when I get so much value from the mindset and process of design thinking that I help others get that value!