Design thinking proves its okay to fail | Mumbrella360 video
In this session from the Mumbrella360 conference, thought leaders from Coca-Cola, Landor and NorthandSouth discuss how design thinking can be the perfect solution to a myriad of business challenges.
Giles Day, head of innovation at Landor NorthandSouth kicks off the session by asking the audience: “Who here is a design thinker?”
Day goes on to explain the definition of design thinking, in which the most important factor is iteration: otherwise known as your “first fail”.
“It’s really important to me that you do stuff. We can talk, but it’s really important that you do stuff as well.”
Day points to Grayson Perry, who made the point that failure is “letting go of being right all the time”.
He points to those people you probably already know who feel they have to be right all the time: “They’re usually about my age and about my gender,” and explains how these people aren’t natural design thinkers.
Ashley Stapleton, strategist at Landor, then explains how many businesses admit they’re “like the Queen Mary – it takes forever to turn us around”.
However, unless businesses can learn how to pivot faster, they face a choice: “Adapt or die”.
Ian Swanson, design lead at Coca-Cola admits: “Opinions are shit”.
“The idea that ‘my opinion needs to be right, I need to be right, I need to impress my boss, the boss’s boss said something and now we’ve got to change this project’. It kind of goes back to the idea that most opinions are actually useless, but with design thinking and that kind of approach you can actually remove your own needs, so my opinion doesn’t actually matter.”
With design thinking, he adds, “the only opinion that matters is the consumer”.
