Come all ye problem solvers

Chances are that if you’re reading this, you feel like the painting sometimes. What frustrates you? Inability to collaborate across silos, people who keep you in check (innovation envy), inadequate budgets?

Well, I have the jobs for you.

Come join our team at EY wavespace™. More than anything we want good humans, good at doing only what humans can do, observing and acting in new ways based on what they learn, then telling the story -- in various ways specified below. If you're not all about digital, don't worry, we do all sorts here.

Creative Digital Designer, Wavespace, Auckland and Wellington

Service Designer, Wavespace, Auckland and Wellington

Technology Innovation Lead, Wavespace, Auckland

P.S. ARE WE ON THE SAME PAGE?

Typically creativity is sold in boxes. It’s what a new course or technology can do for you. It’s what special people can do who have unorthodox powers. But my team believes everyone can be creative (that's why we do co-design), and we want our creatives to be as unboxed as possible (without being unhinged) so we can lead by example.

Everyone at some time has used their imagination to bring something into existence. Creativity comes from the human ability to observe new data, drawing associations with anything else we know in order to make fresh responses. What makes us human is our ability as atoms to contemplate atoms. It is our unique position on this earth and possibly in the universe.

Our go-to processes that help us be human in our work are drawn from design thinking and agile practices. If you are a design thinker already … then just so you know where we stand, here’s our take on it. Of course, we like to change our perspective frequently.

Design thinking is a magpie of shiny methods, some from less familiar fields like anthropology. It asks clients and practitioners alike to go beyond their existing experiences and play with insights and ideas that feel strange. Design thinking is bound by a devotion to the future user (customer and employee) and to action, so ideas can be proven in real situations. Not in a lab. Not in a novel-length report.

This makes design thinking a great business ally, which I might summarise in three points (because single digits are nice):

(1) A client needs a detailed understanding of customer settings and behaviours in order to generate new business value. Design thinking provides deep, contextual understanding of decisions people make.

Example: the market is saturated with similar technologies. How do you create an experience that sets your version apart, or detect customers’ latent values and get a step ahead on competitors?

(2) The problem area is complex – continually evolving, influenced by many unknown factors. Design thinking provides an action-reflection approach with adaptive methods to sense the way ahead.

Example: a health service continually strikes new problems relating to patient understanding, access, and appropriate use. How do you work with patients to remove barriers, increase uptake, and reduce loss or harm?

(3) You want your client to develop a sense of ownership of the problem solving effort, so that they are highly motivated to see the solution through to its best effect. Design thinking is based on collaborative methods that generate buy-in.

Example: an IT solution offers significant efficiencies to workers, but full benefits will only be realised when they share their new practices among themselves. How might employees participate in design so they go on to champion it?

All together, this means design thinking helps create a world where customers have their real needs met, where adaptive solutions keep pace with wicked problems, and where workers get power over their tools so they can do a better job. Lovely.