5 tips for incorporating 'design thinking' into your stakeholder engagement strategy

Simply put, design thinking is a means of generating innovative solutions to problems. It forces a client-focused approach that results in both more ideas and greater potential for client satisfaction. David Kelley, Dennis Boyle and the d.school at Stanford are good places to start if you're interested to learn more about this 5-step process. In this article I briefly touch on each as it applies to stakeholder engagement.

1. Empathize. Who is your stakeholder? What are they feeling? Use interviews, surveys, one-on-one conversations and other interactive methods to dig deeper into their experience. Listening is a huge part of both design-thinking and engaging stakeholders effectively. If you don't hear them you can't come up with a solution that resonates.
2. Define. Come to consensus about what you've heard. Confirm your findings with your stakeholders to make sure you're on the right track and document, document, document. What needs have you uncovered? Why? How would a solution make them feel? How would it change their behavior? If summarizing information and presenting it back for confirmation is not your strong suit consider engaging a skilled facilitator.
3. Ideate. Go for quantity over quality! That's not a phrase you hear often but it's the truth. When generating ideas, especially with stakeholders, it's important not to limit them right away. All ideas are valid! You can critique later. At this point you want to keep the party going and get as many contributions as possible. This exercise alone can bring stakeholders into alignment - creating a more open dialogue that gets you closer to solving their real problem and engineering a solution that is sustainable.
4. Prototype. After you've listened to feedback, go back to the drawing board and see if any new ideas can be captured. Once you have a clearer picture, begin to articulate and compose what a solution would look like. Turn the idea into something tangible- a program, product, service, etc. The prototype does not have to address the entire problem, it can be focused on one part of the solution.
5. Test (and re-test). Use a sample group to review the proposed solutions and observe how they interact with it. What questions do they ask? How do they feel? It's important to remain client-focused and treasure the feedback you receive without getting defensive. One of the reasons 2017 is the year of the stakeholder is because stakeholders can provide incredible insights which can save you time, money and frustration (check out my short article on the other 2 reasons here).

Design thinking is a complex strategy that can also be quite fun! There are tons of worksheets and materials available for conducting a design thinking workshop for different audiences to solve various problems. If you're interested in hosting a workshop for your municipality or client send me a message and I'll point you in the right direction!


Do you use design thinking for community development? If so, how?