Human Centred Design

Human-centred design is a fantastic methodology, but it encounters its limitations in approaching challenges in complex social systems, like organisations. With human-centred design, you can develop a strong understanding of the individual user, which leads to powerful and valuable solutions. Add in elements from systems thinking, and you learn how the interdependent parts of the organisation interact and the effect this has on your area of focus.

We want to avoid spending effort on solutions that don’t meet the need of the user. We want to enable teams to get jobs done, remove pains and make gains. We also want to avoid unintended consequences emerging or the dynamics of the system overpowering our intended improvements.

What are we talking about here?

Human-centred design, sometimes called user-centred design or customer-centred design, is an approach to generating new solutions that look to mitigate as much risk as possible around a proposed solution failing to hit its target.

It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are purpose built to suit their needs. The process usually starts with building a strong understanding of the people you’re designing for; generating ideas; building prototypes of solutions and testing these with your users; and, eventually, putting your new solution out in the form of a scalable pilot.

It is a process of divergence and convergence. The divergent steps orient the team towards generating a wealth of possibilities, either through research or ideas generation. The convergent steps aim to facilitate selecting and prioritising those possibilities.

Human-centred design relies on multiple iterative cycles or ‘sprints’ to accomplish each cycle quickly and prioritise learning over perfection. Doing so reduces the risks to try new ideas by incorporating the learning from the previous iteration.

IDEO’s Tim Brown adds a further nuance. He explains that successful innovations rely on some element of human-centred design while balancing other aspects. Design thinking, he believes, helps achieve that balance by introducing the ideas of feasibility, viability to user-desirability and finding the sweet spot of all three.

Roger Martin, professor and renowned business writer in the field of integrative thinking, adds another dimension describing design thinkers as “willing to use all kinds of logic to understand their world”. He reasons that neither analytic nor intuitive thinking alone is enough because each, while providing tremendous strength, also creates systemic weakness if applied in isolation.

Seeing the organisation as a complex social system

Now let’s think about the organisation as a group of interdependent people (‘agents’ in systems thinking terminology). Agents have agency. They are capable of acting independently and making their own choices, based on their hypotheses about what will make them more successful – assumptions about why doing things should work.

Let’s think about how as these people interact within the system with a shared purpose or goal and where experimentation and cross-fertilisation create new patterns and behaviours – known as emergence. The system is self-organising, self-learning and continually changing, even inside artificially imposed constraints such as organisational structures and processes.

These dynamics are what we see in all complex social systems.

By focusing on inter-relationships and connections, the tools for systems thinking allow the team to identify causal reactions and feedback loops. This knowledge is key to navigating complexity and identifying the most effective ‘leverage points’, where a small force produces a substantial change.

The power of blending the two methodologies

You can intentionally integrate systems thinking elements with design thinking to enhance the chances of creating the right responses to improve the performance of the organisation system.

For example, a valuable principle that systems thinking can add to human-centred design is the need to bring the whole system into view from the beginning. If problem formulation is the first step in the design process, then adopting a systems mindset can help with framing or reframing the problem.

The two approaches complement each other, so we end up with an approach that explicitly incorporates the strengths of both, thereby addressing the gaps and increasing the chance of creating sustainable solutions to the wicked problems facing organisations and society today.