Design Thinking links strategy and execution to catalyze innovation. This article identifies an aspect of Design Thinking called Making Thinking Visible: An easy-to-use framework for overcoming the issues that separate people tasked with working in teams so they can think, make decisions, and execute together. It is a strategy for giving and receiving immediate evaluation and feedback.

The article is an update of one presented at the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) FutureHistory Conference, Chicago, 2004. The current version adapts emerging academic research for business.

Introduction

It was on a plane home from a visit to the schools for young children in Reggio Emilia, Italy, that I was struck by the possibility of what might happen if the model documentation I had just witnessed fell into the hands of design students.

This happened when I developed a curriculum, the Teaching and Documentation Project at the California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco. In a nutshell, my students documented their design and teaching of an art/design project at a neighborhood site.

I recently adapted this higher education material for those interested in innovating the communication flow within business. Documentation is a mindset and method that balances strategic thinking with execution and reflects an emerging business environment that values ​​collaborative teamwork at the intersection of creativity/logic, left/right brain, and visual/text methods. Recognizing this link, CCA is launching the first MBA in Design Strategy offered in the United States in September 2008.

Business applications to make thought visible

1. Front-end communication affects customer experience: Test products and services before development budget is spent, get data early while approaches can be changed; Peer review enables innovative marketing experiences to emerge

2. Cohesive teams innovate: introduce design thinking aligned with execution; supports the unique cultures of diverse teams; deepen transparency in cross-functional teams; boosts morale by building and rebuilding trust

3. More immediate customer feedback: Sessions designed for customer engagement

4. Higher Caliber Customer and Customer Relations Creating process-framed case studies demonstrates control over the internal process and reassures customers.

History

Several snowy winters ago, I received a grant to visit Reggio Emilia in Italy, which Newsweek named one of the top 10 learning systems in the world. His students are between 3 months and 6 years old, while my clients are adults, so I was a little worried about the point it would make. But it was Italy, there was no resistance.

The relevance blew my mind and I came back with a burning question about adult participation. How might this collaborative model that provides equivalence to images alongside the spoken word, whether or not we are visually literate or even if our professional context is word/text dominated, impact research on adults in practice? business?

We reward speaking up in education, and pretty much everywhere else. However, children do not resort to speech like adults. In Italy I consistently saw how communication flows when the “tyranny” of the spoken word is balanced by other ways of knowing. Italians call documentation “the second skin” of their schools.

The children’s reflections on their work were visible everywhere. Italians say that children speak 100 languages ​​but adults listen to only one: the spoken word. Again, adapting this material for business, a variant of your question: What are the 100 languages ​​of adulthood?

Masters have taught in Reggio for decades without burning out. What’s going on? A colleague returning to the United States said the hardest part was going back to being a solo practitioner while in a school full of teachers. Communications systems were missing.

Upon returning, I began incorporating documentation into my curriculum and felt instant relief: the shared visual medium provided a powerful way to communicate alongside speech, the dominant mode of communication for teachers and managers. By making the diverse ideas and experiences, as well as the shared goals of the group of students, visible, stress was reduced and personality clashes were calmed or given a new (visual) way to deal with them. I really wanted to come to class.

The introduction of this enhanced discovery session in organizations echoes this: Shared visuals boost morale by providing a framework for recognizing differences, airing them, untangling knots, and implementing more effective strategy design. This method replicates the ecology of a design lab that generates, tests, organizes, clarifies, cooks, and brainstorms before implementation.

What is Documentation?

We usually think of documentation as something conclusive that happens at the end of a project. An emerging definition of higher education, spearheaded in the United States by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, argues that documentation is a powerful tool for making learning visible. Here the documentation is not something dying but alive and sensitive to the social context of the learners. Encourage groupthink by making it visible.

Documentation is the footprint of a query that allows someone who was not there to follow a thought process through “reading” the images presented and review learning, select ideas, connect dots, and lay out next steps more clearly. .

In the student example, on the first day of the semester we brainstormed “documentation” on the whiteboard. The students proposed: research, evidence of progress, non-empirical evidence, to be read, understandable to whoever reads it, knowledge transfer without the presence of the teacher.

It is important to highlight this last distinction when training teams on the approach. The documentation is full of snap decisions based on participants’ knowledge of the inner workings and rhythms of their culture, as no one knows better. The goal is for the teams to eventually develop this method as their own so that it is sustainable in the future.

Several layers of documentation were carried out. My students documented their students at their respective sites in the community, I documented my students and they documented each other. In some cases, students of my students were documenting. We all document the generated objects and artifacts. Documentation took many forms: photographs, videos, drawings, charts, interviews, paper and pencil, audio.

Digital recording technologies allowed us to review the process immediately while the project still had flexibility. We might also come back to a topic later when the data can overwhelm us to remind us of previous ideas. In our case, the subject of the documentation was the didactic projects of the students: making papier-mâché masks, a “blind” taste test of Coca Cola, and one about favorite buildings in the neighborhood.

collaborative intelligence

Although each one of us acts within a social sphere, this is not a sphere in which we are necessarily trained. However, business environments require us to be agile by collaborating in cross-functional teams. My documentation curriculum was shaped by a supporting question: How do you educate the “introvert” who creates and the “extrovert” tasked with collaborating, managing, leading, and teaching teams?

Making Thought Visible facilitates group interaction and may have group interaction as its theme. The 14 seminar students worked individually and as a team. Like a jazz ensemble, it provided something rare: a rhythm of independence and interdependence, the opposite of the usual “report” that passes for group work. Our project was not only about increasing knowledge, but also about transforming our understanding of collaboration. It is a method to accelerate individual learning while providing pathways to work across silos.

Evaluation

Making Thinking Visible is based on a thoughtful conversation among stakeholders (the subjects of the documentation, the creators of the documentation, the observers of the process, and those who were not involved in any of these: peers, managers, clients, and customers) at various tap points to interpret the collection of shared visual media.

Although evaluation is part of any investigation, the documentation makes it explicit. Its deliberate visibility invites scrutiny, comparison, and lively debate. As co-builders of the knowledge base that is being built, the participants unite disciplines and diversity of viewpoints in a more organic way. A manager who knew her team quite well told me later that she was “surprised to see the variety of solutions” they came up with. Involving your “head, heart, and guts,” as author Peter Cairo naturally suggests, builds buy-in and is a competitive advantage today.

Shared visuals melt away resistance so people move through the usual assessment quagmire (stuck) more quickly. As one participant said: “Naturally, it encourages engaged listening.” People get to know each other without forcing themselves, so there is more trust for those outside of our discipline and within the usual ways of thinking and doing.

Making Thinking Visible has an internal raw aspect and a public edited side. In a safe context, it deliberately reveals the backstory of an investigation: the goofs, the mistakes, the “let’s not go back to that” moments, moving beyond cosmetics into learning experiences with substantial meaning. It sounds simple, but there are few structures for making mistakes as a generative act. The idea is to fail fast, often, and with others who are doing the same around a research topic. The team gels and best practices surface. We acclimated ourselves to starting over quickly without making a fuss. Skaters excel at this.

Of the 5 senses, vision provides the greatest distance: a great lens for revisiting moments we wish never happened, abandoned paths or “redoing” with lightness and even humor to collect learning. This activates the flexibility of the evaluation.

FutureHistory

On a plane heading home from documenting the first Making Learning Visible Institute at Harvard, I thought of something I heard while there. One of the participants said that the teachers here in the United States care as much about their students as the teachers in Reggio Emilia do. Education is an overwhelming topic all over the world. I am more familiar with what makes our context like this, regardless of the age or context of the learner.

Documentation is a method and mindset for innovation. While originally designed to address the question of who a child becoming an adult can become, the involvement runs deep for adults in professional business practice as well.

(c) 2008, Linda Yaven. Do you want to use this article in your e-zine or website? Sure, as long as all links are active and include the copyright and signature below.