Design Thinking for Innovation

Assignment

Challenge

My husband and I are currently living at my parent-in-law’s since our house is currently under  construction.  Few months ago, my parents bought the neighboring house to convert it into a bed &  breakfast. My father-in-law being a handyman, he decided to renovate the house by himself. My  husband and I are of course helping him out. However, working with him is not always easy-peasy. The  first thing that stroke me when working with him is that he could never find his tools. He always lost  them. Secondly he would leave all the waste randomly on the ground (rock wool, pieces of  plasterboard, pieces of wood etc.) leading to a happy mess in most of the rooms in which he works. As  a result, he would waste a lot of time looking for the things he needed and we would have a terrible  time trying to follow the reasoning behind his organization.

My challenge is therefore to find a way to keep things more or less ordered and organized while  working in this bed & breakfast in order to gain time and keep calm.

Selection

In the context of this challenge, I chose to use learning launch.

A learning launch is “an experiment conducted in the marketplace quickly and inexpensively” (Design  Thinking for Innovation, p 167). So in my own words, it is a way of testing ideas in the reality and see  how people behave in interaction with that idea/solution.  It also enables to test assumptions and  improve bit by bit the solution instead of imposing a fully designed solution without any guarantee  that it would be adopted by the users.

In the context of my challenge, my goal is simple: I want to make sure that my father-in-law adopts  these improvements and that these improvements really brings added-value to the overall  organization of the construction site.

Application

The overall goals of my learning launch is:

-  The adoption rate of my improvement

-  The time gained

-  The cleanness

-  The overall atmosphere on the construction site

My very first action before starting any learning launch is to observe how my father-in-law behave and  understand where I could bring some improvement. So here are observations that I made in order to  derive assumptions that will be tested during this first learning launch – there are many more but for  the sake of this exercise, I will focus on the following ones.

Observation /patterns  Assumptions

General behavior of my father-in-law in  life

A. UNCONSCOUS  ADOPTION  /  ABSENT-

MINDEDNESS-PROOF - My father-in-law is not  willing to work in a messy environment but is just  too absent-minded to keep it ordered. He works  on intuition and would naturally follow any  processes, order that is unconsciously easy to  follow, that he does not need to think through.

He put his tools on the nearest surface in  the room he would work in, if no table  was nearby, he would put them on the  ground.  The tool he usually lost were the one that  he used the most and that he would use  in every room.  My father-in-law is not detailed-oriented  and likes to be efficient.

B. PROXIMITY: If my father-in-law would have the

same surface/recipient always nearby, he would  put his tools each time back on that surface

C. MOBILITY: My father-in-law would be willing to

carry that surface/recipient with him if it is easy  to do so.

D. FREQUENCY: The most time-consuming loss are

the tools that My father-in-law frequently uses

E. SPEED: my father-in-law will gain time because he

won’t look for his tool anymore

F. PRACTICALITY: My father-in-law needs a solution

that is efficient. It cannot require a neat and time- consuming ordering

The solution I wanted to put in place is very simple. I sorted the tools used by father-in-law according  to their frequency of use for the works planned for one day. The most frequently used tools are put in  an ironed bucket that can be easily carried and brought from one room to another. I conducted this  experience for one day and checked the following metrics:

Untested assumption  Success metric for Learning Launch

UNCONSCIOUS  ADOPTION  /  ABSENT-

MINDEDNESS-PROOF

Only one quick explanation is enough for the  solution to work. No other warning, explanation  must be given during the entire duration of the  experiment

PROXIMITY  As the bucket is near my father-in-law,   90% of the tools inside the bucket at the end of  the day are the same as in the morning

MOBILITY  The solution is brought in each room in which my  father-in-law works

FREQUENCY  90% of the tools inside the bucket at the end of  the day are the same as in the morning

SPEED  #times my father-in-law looks for a tool he lost  #total time spent looking for his tools  Compared to the average day before the  experiment

PRACTICALITY  My father-in-law rates 4/5 how practical this  solution is

Insights

This small learning launch might sound very simple but confirmed key hypothesis that would influence  the next small improvement I would try on my father-in-law as it proves all key assumptions

-  Unconscious adoption/absent-minded proof: the results are very positive and shows that my  father-in-law adopts the solution without any repeating warnings/explanations. It shows  therefore his willingness to improve his organization as long as it is easy, intuitive and practical.

-  The solution would significantly optimize the time he spent working that house and reduce by  90% the time spent looking after his tool.

The only pitfall I see is that he tends to add more tools to his bucket until it becomes too heavy to  carry. This is why I decided for my next learning launch to further sort his tools and try different buckets  based on different frequency, usage and type of tool ( cut, hammers etc.).

But this is another story as the learning launch explained above is the very first of a long list of  improvement I put in place.

Approach

It is interesting to use the learning launch to test unconscious response to improvement and solutions.  However, I think that a better process for organization is the mind-mapping that allows to organize,  and structure items based on labels/functions/frequency etc. In that case, I would have used mind- mapping before starting the construction work in order to organize the site before anything starts.  It  would however require a direct involvement of my father-in-law in that process which he would have  most probably not have agreed upon.

I really recommend learning launch to help absent-minded people to adopt organization system  unconsciously as these mechanisms would be designed specifically for their unconscious needs and  processes.

