Opportunities to practice

Design thinking is absolutely experiential, and I think the first mistake that we made when we started rolling this out eight years ago was, if you’re going to change the way people work day to day, that’s going to take a long time. You can’t just ask people to do it and expect them to change. You have to give them ample opportunities to practice so that they can then understand it and make it their own.

When we started eight years ago, the first mistake that we made was telling people to please do this. Everyone nodded their head and said, “Yep. We got it.” Then they went away, and then a year later no one was doing it.

So we tried again. The second year we said more forcefully, “Please do this.” from the CEO down. No one did anything.

We brought in inspirational speakers. We had really convincing Power Point slides about why they should do it. Everyone nodded their heads and nothing happened for two years.

It wasn't until we had our first workshop–where we said, “Do it and do it now.”–that things really started to change. Because it went from being in their heads to being in their hearts and in their fingertips. They were starting to practice it themselves. We found that it takes people eight to ten times of practicing it before it finally resonates with them: what it means to them and how to start doing it every day.

Suzanne Pellican talking about introducing the practice of design thinking at Intuit. The whole talk makes a great listen, but there are three things that I want to pull out of from her story.

The first is that telling is not usually the best strategy for getting people to listen to you.

The second is that people change what they do on a day to day basis, not because they've been told to, but because opportunities are created for them to change.

The third is the importance of letting people practice, which means allowing people to get it wrong.