Coursera’s Design Thinking for Innovation course reflection.

Challenge

The last 15 years of my life I’ve been a business intelligence IT professional. From administering and  developing databases, reports and ETL process to developing some windows applications when it was  necessary. Most of the time, the work came to me by people in the business areas with specific needs,  where, by the most part, I knew how to solve the problem or where to look and learn the solution they  required. I had the need to innovate in many times but it was all inside the scope of my profession and  knowledge, like in an eggshell. Inside the egg I was a champion.

In January of this year I was offered a change in my professional career, I was offered to become the  data analyst for the Department of Innovation for the biggest and most important bank in my country. I  wanted a career change and this was a great opportunity to grow professionally, so I took the challenge.  And challenge it has been. You see, by taking this new position I was braking out of my eggshell, leaving  my championship. In the innovation department we need to search for new and better ways to do  processes and technology, very interesting stuff, but it means that I now have to come up with ideas and  solutions to problems that, not only I don’t have, but don’t know if they exist. My boss saw me  struggling trying to see where and how to do this new and different job and suggested me to take a  course in Design Thinking, a peer recommended this one, and here I am outside the egg.

Selection

In this course I have learned many things, but the one that shocked me the most was the visualization  tool. It shocked me because I’ve always draw a lot, not necessarily well, but often you could see more  drawings in the pages of my notebooks than information related to the meetings I used the pages for.  Many times I struggle to visualized their problems or explain to others my suggestions, and after the  course’s introduction of the tool, I started remembering a good friend of mine, to whom I have great  admiration, that always draws his explanation when is given them, helping one understand visually what  he’s saying. So I decided to use the visualization tool more often and—no pun intended—see the results.

Application

Recently I was assigned a proof of concept project in which I have been working a lot to come up with a  design that’s affordable and provides the necessary information for us to learn from it. I have spent  many hours writing and re-writing the concept and the many path it can take trying to find the best  scenario to test. When I decided to start drawing the ideas, no words, just the drawings, I started to see  different options and relations between them. Another big improvement this tool gave me was and  improved ability to communicate to my peers these ideas. I often prepared a report describing the  concept, pros and cons, and notes taken from others in the team so we can better collaborate with each  other. But in the last project I added my drawings which showed the clients journey through the process  and where, in that process was our new concept idea being used. It sounds very simple, I know, but it  did help for others to better understand the problem we wanted to solve and how we proposed to solve  it.

Insight

By using the visualization tool and adding drawings of how I saw the concept I learn a lot about how to  better express my mind and share the knowledge in a very simple way. Now I see the concept of  visualizing as a common language between brains, some kind of communication bridge that I can use to  better communicate and collaborate with others. Thanks to the course of Design Thinking, this simple  tool that in some way I had known for all my life but never used in this way, now became part of my list  of skills. I’m a better professional thanks to adding that tool to my tool belt.

Approach

One thing I’ll try to do the next time is to invite whoever I’m working with to use the tool to explain to  me what they need me to understand. Show them the benefits of the tool so they can better express  their needs and also helping myself in the process. Another important step I need to do is to learn the  other tools taught in the course. There’s so many other ways to accomplish innovation that I didn’t  know about. It shows me the need to develop some kind of plan to analyses which of those tools I could  be using for my next task so I can learn more about them and use them.

