February 2015: Reasonable people shouldn’t use design thinking

Design Thinking is itself contradictory. It is not about designing and not limited to thinking; it is large and contains multitudes. It also won’t solve your big problem because the problem is, we don’t understand the problem.

Design Thinking provides a guided iterative process of addressing problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. The outcome sometimes addresses fundamental needs that your users didn’t know they had, which negates — rather than solves — the original big problem. Design thinkers sometimes are required to change reality to what they need it to be, before a solution can be found. This is not a process for reasonable people, as George Bernard Shaw observed: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

In this discussion, David Loop from SAP Canada tells two stories that illustrate how the problems we try to solve are not generally the right problems — and how Design Thinking can help guide us to success.

About the speaker

David Loop is a Senior Design Thinking coach and facilitator for SAP Canada. He has been assisting informatics, business, and industry teams in finding their insights and advancing to solutions. David brings a wealth of knowledge and varied experience to his talk with his past in knowledge management, software development, consulting, education and theatre

Please RSVP for this free event

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Thursday February 19, 2015
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Atlas/Matrix room
Communitech Hub
Kitchener, Ontario

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