HR as Design Thinking experience architects

50 years in the making?

Design thinking appears to have gotten its start in the late 60s/70s traced back to Herbert A. Simon’s “The Sciences of the Artificial” (1969) and  Robert Kim’s “Experiences in Visual Thinking” (1973).  And Rolf Faste taught courses on design thinking as a method of creative thinking at Stanford in the 80s and 90s – then IDEO formed in 1991 to provide services to  identify new market opportunities, add value, and solve meaningful problems using human centered, experimental/experiential techniques in iterative and active learning processes.

Fast forward to present.

Complexity, information deluge, constant change are the new normal and are significant obstacles to productivity.  To offset, Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 suggests that HR migrate its competency from “process developer” to “experience architect” and “reimage every aspect of work, physical environment; how people meet and interact; how managers spend their time; and how companies select, train, engage, and evaluate people” using Design Thinking.

The image below from  illustrates the importance of design thinking globally.

ER_3021_Fig-1_DesignthinkingheatMap

Focusing on employee experience, engagement and simplicity, HR organizations will need new skills and capabilities and learn to move quickly and with agility and not be afraid of failing while prototyping, piloting, testing and learning experiences accumulated from the Design Thinking journey.

DT fit with other methodologies

Reviewing an online course on Design thinking found in the SAP Learning Hub….consists of 7 phases – a little different from the Hasso Plattner d school @ Stanford….but that’s certainly ok….

DT - 7 phase methodology

Interesting to see also fit with other methodologies.

DT & other methodologies

Words (and their meaning) matter. Etymology and semantics in action.

Rise of the digital worker

In his “Landmarks of Tomorrow” published in 1957, republished in 1996, Peter Drucker introduced the seminal definition of knowledge workers where post-war (yes, World War II) organizations would form around the power of highly skilled workers and information to achieve organizational shared goals through increased performance.  No longer the whole is equal to the sum of its parts (e.g., 1+1 = 2), Drucker suggested a non Descartian equation where the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts (e.g.., 1+1 > 2) because Drucker came to see that information flows and computing advances, even as far back as the late 50s and 60s, would dramatically affect and reshape the role of work, the resources needed to perform the work and how management would need to change to be effective as leaders and enablers.  The knowledge worker definition has been one my key concepts and grounding principles as to how work can be organized for over 20 years.

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The Neuroscience of Learning

A very concise and easily consumable & accessible online course available through Lynda.com is “The Neuroscience of Learning” by Andreatta Britt, PhD where she introduces her three phase cycle (Learn, Remember, Do).

In the Learn phase, aligns the cycle with Bloom and Kolb models and then introduces discoveries from neuroscience how the areas of the brain including the hippocampus, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex participate in to retaining new information and learning new skills.

Neuroscience of Learning_A.Britta_PhD

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