Collaborative Discovery is the New Design Thinking
In a recent newsletter, we shared why Design Thinking needs to renamed:
“Design thinking is a platform to help everyone involved - especially non-designers - come together to understand the problem to be solved, share their unique perspectives, show (not tell) their individual ideas, decide based on customer insights, and develop solutions from a shared sense of pride and accountability. What's more, when facilitated well, design thinking is inclusive - empowering the voices and ideas of many, even the quiet and introverted.”
Design Thinking is meant to be a platform to get Product Managers, Engineers, Marketers, and others involved in creating and launching innovative new products—but the terminology can be exclusionary. Designers (mistakenly) feel like it's replacing or democratizing their craft. Engineers (mistakenly) feel frustrated that they're being summoned to work on tasks that designers should handle. And everyone else is (mistakenly) worried that their third grade artistic abilities and chicken scratch writing will be scrutinized within a visually-driven workshop.
Design Thinking has vast potential, but poor naming—particularly the use of the word “design”—makes it hard to build buy-in. Designers are prideful and protective of their craft. Fair.
And other folks (in particular, Engineers) don't understand why they'd be expected to do Design work. Also fair.
Perhaps, then, it’s time for a rebrand. If we use different words to describe the real intention behind design thinking, perhaps we can solicit team-wide excitement to join the creative discovery process. And who better to rename it than our incredible Product Community?
Several weeks ago, we sent out a form asking those who subscribe to our newsletter to share suggestions for new terms to replace “Design Thinking.” Since then, we've received and reviewed an impressive 73 submissions. Our team synthesized these insights, pulling out key trends and aligning on one final option. We’re thrilled to share our thoughts and where we ultimately landed!
Of the submissions, most were 2-word phrases, a few 3-word, and a handful of 4+ words.
The most repeated first word in these phrases, included:
User
Human / Human-centered
Problem
Empathy
Collaborative
The most repeated second / third word, included:
Discovery
Thinking
Solving
Since everyone loves a good word cloud (is that actually true? 🤔), here's one we put together to capture the submissions.
After some internal discussion inside our team, here are a few standout ideas:
2 words is the sweet spot
Empathy Thinking got us talking and feels like a good bridge from Design Thinking
But the Thinking portion of Design Thinking has also been challenged by many (us, included) as feeling like it's inaction
Collaborative may prevent specific roles of people from feeling excluded or that the process is infringing on their turf
Our friends at MURAL have also just put a strong emphasis on a new category they're pushing, Collaborative Intelligence
Discovery is a well-versed (but highly fluid) term that people, both, inside product, UX, engineering, and outside, have come to accept as the thing we should do before building stuff
And so, we settled on...
Collaborative Discovery
Interestingly, our friends at MURAL are currently working to champion Collaborative Intelligence as a new category within the world of new product innovation. Defined as a new systematic approach that connects teams to unlock their genius, we see quite a few parallels between the intention, energy, and team-based outcomes between Collaborative Discovery and Collaborative Intelligence.
More specifically, it’s the collaborative part that serves as the foundation, making discovery possible, successful, and exciting. Just like how innovation is not about the new products, services, and technologies you create, but the way your teams reinvent how they work together to produce those things.
Whereas Design Thinking always left a feeling of exclusion, Collaborative Discovery and Collaborative Intelligence have finally surfaced what mattered all along - a group of people doing really hard, really important work, together.