Breaking out of the design bubble: The benefits of a building collective intuition
Enabling diverse groups and skills to work in concert by establishing a common point of departure and know, almost by intuition, what direction to go when navigating the unknown.
Written by Adam Walker and kate mcelroy.
This year’s Service Design Days 2021 (SDD21) in Barcelona presented a unique opportunity for Manyone. In our relatively short life span (Manyone was founded 2 years ago), we’ve worked closely with clients to help them respond at speed to a complex world with fast and constantly changing markets. We do this by bringing many different capabilities and inputs together in a project team, that can respond and iterate quickly based on a collective intuition. This collective intuition helps the team remove blind spots and set the direction for how a business can create in an increasingly complex world.
We recently coined the principle for our way of working the Worldview Design Principle, and, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the SDD21 was our first opportunity to present the Worldview Design Principle in person to our peers in the design community and get their feedback.
The theme at this year’s SDD21 was ‘New perspectives — breaking out of the design bubble’. The conference was underscored by many presenters and speakers decrying old ways of doing business and pushing up against frameworks and templates for solving increasingly complex, high stake problems. Simply put: we can’t copy and paste our way to innovation.
This narrative coincides with our perspective, that if clients want to stay relevant today and tomorrow, they need to work in radically different ways, and that’s where strategy intertwined with design can help. We need to embrace contradiction, welcome complexity and approach every project with humility and fresh thinking. This is where our Worldview Design Principle comes into play.
So, what is the Worldview Design Principle?
Think of it as an anti-framework. It’s a set of dynamic elements that adjust and flex to the challenge at hand. It helps teams align on opportunity, determine a common point of departure, and know, almost by intuition, which direction to go when navigating the unknown.
At this year’s SDD21 conference, we hosted a two-hour workshop, where we presented the principle and some of its guiding frameworks to an audience almost exclusive composed of service designers. Due to time constraints, we presented a stripped-down version of the process we normally run with clients. Therefore, our goal for the short session was to demonstrate how to create ‘collective intuition’, a core part of the principle.
At its essence, creating a collective intuition enables diverse groups of people to work in concert, establish a broad understanding of the world around them, align on potentially unseen gaps and opportunities, determine a common point of departure — and know, almost by intuition, what direction to go when navigating the unknown.
So how did we do this?
We began by framing a challenge. The principle itself is suited to address complex and ambitious challenges. As the workshop was taking place in Barcelona, a city that is often seen as a leader in sustainable approaches to urban mobility, we set the following challenge — ‘Making the movement of people in Barcelona more sustainable post-pandemic.’
We then ran through the following 5 steps with the participants:
- Get into character
We divided the participants into small groups of pre-prepared personas: Representing sustainability lobbyists, members of parliament for transportation, CEOs for original equipment manufacturers, private union leaders, small business owners and opposition MPs. Each group had to familiarise themselves with their character’s background, beliefs, secrets, and mindset, and ask themselves: What does a day in the life of “me” look like?
2. Define your point of view
The next step was to spend time reviewing some additional content prompts, what we call ‘worldview drivers’. These are essential global trends from things like market shifts and emerging technologies to social drivers and ethics. Based on their “experience” and the ‘worldview drivers’, each participant had to consider what they would see as the greatest opportunities and challenges when faced with the goal of creating sustainable solutions for urban mobility. The aim was to use the ‘worldview driver’ cards to inform their character’s point of view.
3. Merge into ‘project teams’
We then mixed the groups, so the individual characters were now in ‘project teams’. Here, we asked the participants to weigh their character’s goals and beliefs with their mindset, while also trying to consider the thoughts and needs of the other group members and characters.
4. Develop ‘collective intuition’
Participants then discussed, negotiated and challenged one another to develop a collective intuition to help guide their new ‘project team’ towards the goal of creating sustainable solutions for urban mobility. For this, we supplied a canvas to help team members strike up a discourse. Here, the exercise itself is the key — collective intuition isn’t an end in itself, it’s a process that helps teams transparently acknowledge their biases. It’s the coming together and deciding, as a collective, how to proceed. It’s not group think or design by committee, because it’s inherently about challenging the status quo. It’s bringing designers, strategists, stakeholders, and beneficiaries together — to exchange and understand each other’s point of departure and then establish a common path forward. And doing this, acknowledging the fact that as designers, we don’t know more than our clients, and we don’t know more than the users, but collectively we’ll include a broad horizon of inputs, views and knowledge.
5. Statement of intent
The final task of the workshop was for the ‘project teams’ to capture their collective intuition in the form of a statement of intent. While the broader challenge was framed around sustainable urban mobility: what, who and how their group tackles that opportunity, was completely up to to the groups. Taking into consideration these opportunities and challenges — what is the mandate that their team will agree on to move forward? What will they choose to do? What’s the most relevant opportunity? What’s the central challenge? What will the collective focus on, what will they do first and how?
Outcomes and Learnings
The workshop gave attendees the chance to role play collective intuition and try on the Manyone way of working. What was quickly evident from the statements of intent from workshop attendees, was that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way of solving challenging problems. The output of each group ranged from the high level, to the nuanced and tactical, from the radical to the simple. But we heard three takeaways that we hope serve the participants beyond their experience at SDD21.
Embracing our differences
Using persona role cards forced participants to not only think about a persona but also forced them to think like their persona. It’s easy to acknowledge that we have different interests, and to acknowledge those differences on paper — but it’s another experience entirely to internalise those interests and to advocate for them. The experience of acting out a character placed participants in the shoes of stakeholders, breaking down barriers and driving a deeper sense of empathy for everyone involved.
Pushing for inclusion
The characters included in the exercise came from different backgrounds, with different interests, different values and different definitions of success. This increased the complexity at the front end of the process, but it also helped teams identify gaps and speed bumps early on. We cannot only give lip service to inclusion, and we can’t assume that as designers, strategists and stakeholders that we know more than the users themselves. The inclusion of stakeholders and users with competing interests helps ensure that we consider problems and solutions from different angles.
Outcomes are not easy
The Worldview Design Principle leaves space for creativity. While canvases, templates and frameworks can create structure, outcomes are rarely that straightforward. The outcome or the solution rarely fits neatly inside of a box. In the exercise — as in real life — this feeling of uncertainty helped create hesitation and tension. But working through that experience helped bring the team closer together. There isn’t a roadmap, there are no boxes to check — the collective must decide together how to proceed which commits participants to alignment.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Worldview Design Principle, you can find some details on our website, and we, the authors, would be happy to talk.
Manyone is a strategy-design hybrid. Visit us at Manyone.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram
