How do you use Design Thinking for Learning and Development solutions?

I recently overheard some L&D professionals, talking about Design Thinking and their reservations about its use in the Learning and Development world. As someone who started using Design Thinking in 2015, I understand the reservations people have about it. Change is never easy, but given the world we live and work in today it is inevitable.  

As I explained to my peers, the concepts and practice of Design Thinking are not new. It's origins date back to the late 1960's, and for many of us the process it follows will be very familiar to the models and methods we've been using. In my experience/opinion it's gaining momentum now due to the increasing speed of change in in business and it's use as a transformation mindset and practice at some well known companies.

Before I talk about Design Thinking and how my team and I used it, I want to emphasize that I am not a subject matter expert.  My journey of learning and practice of Design Thinking is about two years old and I'm just starting to get comfortable with it as the journey continues. 

What is Design Thinking? Well the answer depends on whom you are asking but I like this explanation, “a mindset and process to empathize the issues and problems of human-centered/ customer centered needs, then to find ideas and solutions through visualization and prototypes to fulfill their needs."

Empathize. Design Thinking starts and ends with it. You see you never really stop developing solutions, you pause long enough to see how your original solution is utilized and what new opportunities it creates for other solutions. 

A few months back I had the wonderful opportunity to watch a team conduct a Design Thinking experiment with an individual who had some physical impairments that caused her many daily challenges that many of us take for granted.

What was fascinating to me was the work and thought this team put into all the steps to create possible solutions. Each solution prototype and test with this individual would lead to greater empathy as they understood the challenges this individual faced, allowing them to better Define the challenges, Ideate better solutions, and Prototype and Test solutions even faster until the individual felt that the team had truly understood her struggles with the solution they tested and presented.

So how is this similar to what L&D professionals do today? Regardless if you are using ADDIE, SAM, and/or LLAMA, you are probably doing some or most of this process in your work today. For me the main difference is the customer is the focus/center of my work and in order to provide the best solution for the customer, I need to empathize with him or her.

My experience so far is that Design Thinking has been a great practice to prototype your idea into a solution and often it generates new solutions needed/wanted by the customer. But as you will read in my future articles, once the prototype has been tested and accepted, we moved into deeper and/or broader solution development for which other methods, mindsets and practices were used. 

I'd like to hear your experiences of Design Thinking use in Learning/Talent Development work.