Entreprise Design Thinking by IBM



A bit of context 

The Entreprise Design Thinking process is the second version of the Design Thinking process used by teams at IBM. One of the key issues was trying to solve with the typical Design Thinking process can be found in this quote from the people involved in the process creation: 
We really blew it when we called this thing Design Thinking. […] It works great when you’re doing it in these small workshops at Stanford, but it starts to break apart and fail at scale.” (Cutler, Spool & McGrane, n.d.)

What I like about it 

Three is a magical number to me. And here it's the case again. This process is made only of three steps: observe, reflect, make. Having only three key steps makes the the process easy to remember and easy to share.

Another thing I particularly like about this process is that it has a good mix between process, principles and internal organization. This process feels to me very mature as it "takes into account multiple areas of reality", as would my college philosophy teacher have said. What do I mean with that? Many processes are just about the doing aspect. Here it's not just about doing, it's also about the mindset that you should have (what they call the principles) and the internal organization elements that make such a process work (what they call the keys). 

Indeed, this last element is something I haven't seen in many processes. So let's take a minute to explore these in more depths, what are the three "keys" from this model:

  1. Hills: Align teams on meaningful user outcomes to achieve.
  2. Playbacks: Stay aligned by regularly exchanging feedback.
  3. Sponsor Users: Invite users into the work to stay true to real world needs.

As you see, these three elements are little organizational elements that help:
  1. Keep the team motivated
  2. Ensure the team speaks together a lot
  3. Create a team that is not only made of insiders but also of people who use the service or product.

A last thing I particularly like about this process is its documentation. There is a "single source of truth" about it as it has been created by one organization that is pretty open to share. IBM has a great website where they share details and explanation about the process. Plus, the team seems to also be working on a book that will go more in depth about this process. So plenty to learn here. This is a quality you'll find in other processes that come from very big organization like the "Design Sprint" that comes originally from Google Ventures.

Go deeper 

I found the images of this process in an article called "How IBM made sense of ‘generic design thinking’ for tens of thousands of people" written by Jan Schmiedgen and Ingo Rauth. This article is an extended content article for the upcoming book “Starting With Design”, which will feature an in-depth case study of IBMs ‘change by design’ transformation program.
You can find in depth information about IBM's design thinking process in their official guide.