Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs – November, 2017

Welcome to November, 2017 edition of Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs.

Our topic for November, 2017 is Design Thinking.

We had noticed the subject in our previous episode in an article Apply Design Thinking to Quality Practices.

I have exhaustively drawn excerpts from Prem Ranganath’s article The Art of Quality, which states that Design Thinking is an opportunity to humanize quality and continuous improvement.

As may be seen in the above Visual from IDEO as a reference, traditionally quality and continuous improvement initiatives are largely driven by viability and feasibility considerations. Integrating design thinking with improvement initiatives brings the ‘human’ element into focus, by driving conversation on ‘desirability’ of the solutions being proposed for implementation.

This Visual shows the integration of a Design Thinking flow represented by the steps Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test with the DMAIC approach for continuous improvement. Integration of design thinking methods adopt a humanized approach to characterizing (challenges and opportunities) current state.

Design Thinking was popularized by David M. Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO and Roger Martin of the Rotman School. A very good, short video on the topic was recently published by the Harvard Business Review blog . For a more detailed explanation please read the paper, “Design for Action” written by Brown and Martin.

As stipulated by a paper recently published by Creativity At Work, “Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients. A design mindset is not problem-focused; it is solution focused and action oriented towards creating a preferred future. Design Thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be—and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user (the customer)”.

The three major stages of Design Thinking are:

1. Observe customer behavior; define unarticulated needs
2. Ideate, Prototype, experiment and test
3. Bring the new concept to life; open new markets

What differentiates Design Thinking from traditional Voice of Customer collection approaches is the emphasis placed on observation of behaviors rather than relying on customers’ input to satisfaction surveys.

Michael Sabah has curated several articles on the subject – Design Thinking: Get a Quick Overview of the History; DESIGN THINKING | methods & tools; How Design Thinking will fix Design Thinking; Prototyping in Design Thinking: How to Avoid Six Common Pitfalls

Why is Design a CEO Matter? – Tim Brown – CEO of IDEO – In order to compete today, CEOs need evolutionary skills that will ensure their survival in a fast-changing climate. Business fitness now means learning how to be agile, resilient, and creative. It means adapting to the marketplace in quick generational cycles. That requires a brave new brand of leadership, and from our vantage point, as we work alongside companies young and old from around the globe, it requires being able to think like a designer.

A few videos to better understand the concept:

Design Thinking – Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO

‘What Is Design Thinking?’ gives better understanding of what design thinking is all about.

How It Works: Design Thinking – For more information on IBM Design Thinking, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/design

Stages of Design Thinking

Stanford Webinar – Design Thinking = Method, Not Magic – In this webinar Bill Burnett, consulting assistant professor and master in design thinking at Stanford University, as he shares three barriers organizations face when adopting an innovative culture and how to overcome them.

ABC Nightline – IDEO Shopping Cart – In 1999, ABC’s Nightline tried to describe IDEO’s approach by commissioning us to design a better shopping cart, and filmed the entire process. 17+ years later, the video is still shown in classrooms across the globe as a lesson in design thinking and team collaboration.

We will now turn to our regular sections:

For the present episode we have picked up one article The 4 Dos Of Change Management @ the column Effective Management @ Management Matters Network.

1. Build a business case – Spell out why change is needed.
2. Communicate the changes systematically – share the right things with the right people at the right time, or there is great risk of inadvertently rev up the rumor mill
3. Mobilize your employees from the onset – When employees feel involved, they’re more invested in and supportive of the effort—and less likely to offer resistance.
4. Roll out in phases and celebrate small wins

The reality is that change is happening all around us all the time, leaving us with two choices: embrace it to get ahead of it and manage it proactively, or resist it and let it drag us to our fate.

ASQ CEO, Bill Troy section does not have anything of interest at present.

For the present, we continue with the practice of picking up one article form ASQ.org site: Forward Progress – Looking back at quality’s evolution over the past 50 years and seeing where the movement is headed:

We now watch one of the latest ASQ TV  episodes:

• EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION USING QUALITY TOOLS – Sam Yankelevitch, CEO, Xpress Lingo Solutions, discusses the importance of using quality tools to improve invisible processes like communication to positively impact our physical processes.

Jim L. Smith’s Jim’s Gems for the month of October, 2017:

• Dissatisfaction : It is easy to look for others to blame for our failures, discontent and dissatisfaction. Maybe that’s part of our human frailty. The alternative is to choose to embrace our failures, fully own them and be responsible for our own dissatisfaction. The result is that our willingness to own it will make it go away.
• Quality and Lean Partnership must be linked. The purpose of quality has always been to concentrate on the process and identify sources of variation, control or eradicate them, and provide the customer, as much as is possible, product they are willing to purchase. Lean, Six Sigma, or for that matter any tool, must take this role of quality management into consideration.

I look forward to your active participation in enriching the blog carnival as we pursue our journey in exploring the happenings across quality management blogs…………

Note: The images depicted here above are through courtesy of respective websites who have the copyrights for the respective images.