Design Thinking — A way to humanize HR

Design thinking origins from the 1960s participatory design. The way we talk about and understand the concept today goes back to 1990s and 2000s as the awarded design company IDEO started to move from product design towards more service and broader type of design work. They needed a concept to explain the thinking process behind it and thus "design thinking" was introduced to the public as a way to combine business, technology and people.

In it's simplest mode design thinking process can be divided into five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. (D.School: Design thinking process, https://dschool.stanford.edu/redesigningtheater/the-design-thinking-process/) It's a thinking model that can be adapted to all aspects of life, even HR. Design thinking encourages a person to start tackling a challenge from the users side - feeling empathy towards the user, in HR's case the employee. Such a simplistic idea, but so many times ignored or forgotten.

To me design thinking has many similarities to leading company culture - both require creative thinking and are killed by strict processes. This is something that really interests me as a company culture & leadership designer & HR director, since my brain works more on the creative side. I've felt many times that due to this kind of brain activity, I don't belong to the traditional HR mold that is still the dominant way of thinking about this support function.

To my great relief, many companies have realized that both are needed!

The difficult thing about design thinking is that it cannot be stuffed into any locker or process picture. If one wants to really create competitive advantage with creative thinking and design methods, they need to become part of the persons life and way of working. And since design thinking is something that most of us aren't used to due to the way we're still educated in schools and in our lives, we need to practice it a lot.

Even when we know how the design thinking model works, we still need to remind ourselves of the different parts. Especially the beginning - which is the most humane and simple sounding step - feeling empathy towards our peers and users. We are, by nature, selfish and think about the world from our own perspective. Every time we want to design or create something for anyone else, we need to stop and position ourselves in a different way, from other persons point of view. This is what is so fascinating to HR, a business that evolves around helping others and supporting business. How many times is an HR process or tool a great experience to the user - which is the main idea of the whole thing...

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