As each of us make progress in our careers and lives we learn all kinds of ways to doing things. We learn to apply best practices and processes that often serve to help us avoid risks and do things right.

At the heart of true innovation, however, is the need to continually birth new ideas, and new ways of doing things. That’s accomplished by having a practice of self-reflection and challenging the status quo on an ongoing basis.

Is it enough to adopt best practices in your everyday business processes? Do they always work? What about innovation, how does it get applied if the focus is on best practices? What’s the difference between doing things right and doing things great? Don’t you have to do things right to accomplish great things?

“Doing things right is all about following a process, and procedures that have been well established. Doing things great is what turns ordinary companies into innovative leaders, who shape markets, and sometimes create completely new market opportunities.”

At some point every company that wishes to continue to stand out in the market must ask this simple question: How do I avoid being another dime a dozen company? That question is usually followed by more questions:

How do I shape and own a segment of the market? How do I create new market opportunities? Who do I want participating along with me in those new markets, and why? What kind of culture do I want to create and sustain and why?

Radical Innovation

Innovation is born out of the willingness to discard old ways of thinking and doing things and exploring entirely new ways of seeing and exploring reality.

Innovative leaders use creative problem solving to achieve the new vision of the future. Radical innovation requires creativity, courage, and the ability to synthesize information in novel, bold and unusual ways.

Innovative companies tend to have customers, and employees who appreciate the values the company is putting forward in the market, and the world. They are focused on building communities of like-minded people.

Radically innovative companies are groups of individuals who dare to not only challenge the status quo but are willing to write the new pages of history.

They question everything. They are passionate. They are emotionally charged. They have courage. They are fearless, and they speak their minds. They tap into a stream of consciousness that focus on universal values.

How do you shift your way of thinking to become a radical innovator? Here are eight simple ways that can contribute to shifting your mindset from just doing things right, to doing things great.

Focus on Details

If you are a skimmer you cannot tap into the energy of a market maker because you won’t be able to catch the gaps in thinking others have made. There are incredible opportunities waiting to be discovered in the gaps of the market that have yet to be fulfilled.

Pay attention to the finer details, question the approach to everything — from a place of truly caring about the collective of all involved. Your consciousness must be focused on creating universal values. It’s not about you.

Challenge your peers, your boss, and your company to become better. Not just better for you, but better for the sake of being a great company, a great team of people focused on accomplishing the goal of creating universal values.

If this kind of thinking isn’t welcomed where you are, you might just have to move on to a company that really values innovation or start your own.

Have Certainty

If you are the kind of person who finds faults by nature in others, you might be operating from the framework of being focused on doing things right instead of opening yourself to finding ways to do things great.

“When you stop fault finding you discover a self-power that gives you certainty in all you do.”

Certainty makes you turn the impossible into I am possible. It’s natural to find faults, to complain, to find every reason why something is broken; sadly, it comes from an animalistic consciousness based on survival that assumes you don’t need to take responsibility for anything, if you find fault in something, or someone.”

You want to be sure of where you are heading? Stop blaming things outside of yourself for what is happening around you. Be in control of your fate.

“Be the cause of change, not part of the reason for why change is needed.”

Lead from the Heart

The best innovative leaders first learn how to follow. As a leader you will always be a follower because you will follow a set of principles, beliefs, or a vision.

You can’t lead if you don’t know how to follow. The best followers also make the best leaders worth following.

“If you want to become an innovative leader, a market maker, first practice being a really good follower.”

Expect Greatness

It’s one thing expecting greatness from others because you have the power to, if you are “the boss”, it’s another because you care about the individual’s well-being and growth.

If you don’t care about people’s success deeply, you can’t expect them to care about yours. This also applies with clients.

Helping clients win is a calling, not a job. If you have difficulty caring about anyone but yourself, get some therapy or better yet volunteer.

Volunteering helps you develop the “care about others” muscle and expands your capacity for compassion and understanding, the reward is also increased emotional intelligence.

Make People’s Lives Easier

Make your employee’s life easier, your client’s life easier. If you put people in a place where you got a good deal out of it, but they did not, you can’t become great that way. Being great isn’t about being self-serving, and it isn’t about self-sacrifice either.

Forget operating from a win-win perspective, it’s limiting. You want to operate from a giving state of being, a sharing for the sake of the betterment of humanity’s perspective. It’s bigger than winning, it’s about fulfillment, both yours and that of those receiving from you.

“When others gain value from you, you receive positive energy from the experience that can be applied to accomplishing great things.”

Serve Others

Serving others is simple when all you can think of is how to be a giving leader, however it also means knowing when to let people fall, pushing them along to discover things about themselves they need to see to grow.

Have the courage to call people out when they are being either robotic about following procedures, or they are simply not paying attention to details.

When it comes to clients, this also means at times being able to walk away from those who are not well engaged with you. Every relationship must be cyclical and serve the needs of both parties.

Make Time for Yourself

Stop and smell the roses, the coffee, or whatever works for you. Make time to sit still. Turn off your phone, pc/mac, and think, meditate, and journey within your thoughts and ideas.

Find something that brings you joy, and do it often to recharge your batteries, and to maintain perspective on life.

Your ability to do things great is tied to being in your greatest most optimal frame of mind. Take time for you to do something that is fun for no reason at all, other than your own well-being.

Be Present and Authentic

Be authentic, honest, and caring for others success. Certainty is not a mental exercise — its connected to the heart and it only works when you are present and in a state of authenticity.

How does one become present?

There are books upon books that discuss this — I will share my own experience with you of what has worked for me.

Give back, go do something for a charity where you have nothing at all to gain from it. You’ll discover how that can contribute to developing certainty if you have not done so already. When you are focused on others, you receive energy that empowers you to tap into a stream of consciousness full of ideas, even dare I say magic.

Some things you can’t learn reading about them, some things you must experience. I’ve learned that when I am of service, I am most present. I wish for you to discover what works for you if you have not done so already.

We are All Unique

When you are present you can hear, feel, and see what’s happening around you and you can begin to sense what’s needed to differentiate yourself in the market, but more importantly you’ll see the gaps to provide universal values.

This does not take away the need for market knowledge, analytics, and the standard block and tackle of having a compelling strategy, however being present allows you to quickly swift through the noise and uncover the gems that can make your company great.

Always ask yourself if there is a better way that can leapfrog your company forward vs. just move you along. This isn’t an exercise done annually or quarterly, this is a state of consciousness you want everyone to embody every day.

Dime a dozen companies are always playing catch up with competitors. Market leaders set new standards others emulate.

“Market leaders focus on doing things great and aren’t afraid to be disruptive.”

The key to radical innovation thinking is that you must believe there is a way to leapfrog the competition, the way you serve clients, and the way you go about managing your market. It’s not about discovering it, its’ about stepping into it. That’s the mindset of an innovator.

Finally, if I leave you with nothing else today, it’s this one idea that will serve you for many years to come.

“You will always tap into certainty when your actions are tied to authentically wanting to improve people’s lives.”

Break a process, test if there is a better way, get creative in how you go about solving problems and finding solutions, and get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

“Nothing truly exciting happens in life, until you go beyond your level of comfort. Want to do great things? Embrace living in the grey where the magic happens.”

Does this mean get rid of the black and white processes necessary for order? No. It’s about striking a balance between getting comfortable with the status quo that works, and proactively stepping outside of it to continually evolve and thrive.

People tend to resist change when change means altering or replacing existing norms of doing things. A new system might fail when users do not accept it even though the system might be effective. Adoption, or lack thereof dictates just how effective a new way of doing things is or isn’t. At the same time, an inefficient system might create value among users if users decide to adopt it. I think we can all agree that user adoption is the primary objective for all products.

User adoption is not something that evolves at a particular point of a product development life cycle. Instead, user adoption requires proper planning and implementation strategy when the product is just an idea. Various products around us have provided amazing user experiences that were useful and served customers effectively. However, they could not make the impact they were intended to make, and in the end failed. Companies should always consider the design of user adoption as a primary part of their entire product life cycle.

What Is User Adoption?

User adoption is a process through which new users become accustomed to products or services and become long-term users. In other terms, it is also known as onboarding. In this case, customers tend to leave using products or services and adopt the new products, if they get value out of it. As users become accustomed to new products because they are effective and are best suited to their needs and serve their purpose, that is when you have achieved user adoption.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking assists organizations in creating value for people. It aims to solve concrete problems that impact people and deliver solutions that align with people’s needs.

As designers unveil or identify issues, they can bring about innovative solutions. In addition, it enables designers to tackle problems that people find difficult to define or verbalize. Furthermore, Design Thinking assists organizations to lead with innovation.

For example, a human can’t imagine things that cannot be believed. Therefore, it creates difficulty for the designers to land on a solution that does not exist. Using an iterative approach more often leads to innovative solutions.

It makes any organization run more efficiently and faster because it focuses on creating prototypes and testing to check their effectiveness, after a lot of listening to people and defining the problems.

Design Thinking as a philosophy encourages experimentation before launching products in the market that ensures creating value for people. Multiple methodologies move forward the Design Thinking process. Design Thinking aims to gain a clear understanding of the issues before generating an idea. It involves an action-oriented process to collect data that enables the designers to understand issues deeply. The idea generation phase involves various possible solutions, then the designers start prototyping, gaining feedback, and ongoing iterations. All these step-by-step processes after idea generation eliminate bad design. The product or service design involves user input, thereby increasing the chance of user adoption when products are launched.

A deep and clear understanding helps idea generation and expands the chances of creating multiple solutions, which are then analyzed and selected for prototyping and customer feedback. The outcome is the result of prototype iteration and customer feedback. However, companies need to practice patience during the process to get to a proper solution.

Better Products for Better User Adoption

Design Thinking is a process through which companies can design better products to increase the user adoption rate. Better products bring in and retain customers. Thus, it can lead to better user adoption.

Designers can use the following process to gain better user adoption:

Seek Answers by Questioning

A mindset filled with curiosity is a must have in Design Thinking. It is curiosity that leads to asking more questions, conducting research, and seeking to dig deeper into the issues to find solutions. All these processes enable us to come up with a list of solutions and alternatives that can lead to various possibilities to solve the problem. When you surface a list of solutions, they might have a specific purpose to function and advantages to provide a solution. To apply Design Thinking, you must be patient enough to think critically and break down the problem to get a deeper understanding to find out the root cause of the problem that impacts people at an emotional level. As you learn that the emotional impact is, you can begin to seek to create the solution.

Understand the Customer

Design Thinking focuses on the qualitative process of study and then a quantitative approach. It is because Design Thinking is human-centric and looks forward to creating products and services involving people’s needs. When designers interact with clients, they have a chance to clarify their doubts by asking questions. This enables them to have a deep level of perception about the people’s issues, assumptions, desires, and experiences. You can then include the functions or things that fit the client’s use and check what items or functions can be added to the product. In the next stage, you can view the issue and generate ideas by being in their shoes for a moment.

Never be Satisfied

Iteration and feedback are the main part of Design Thinking. There is constant shift in customer’s problems since their desires and uses for commodities and services keep changing. Therefore, it is better not to assume that your understanding of them is enough. It is better to adopt a flexible and ever-changing mindset since, with Design Thinking, constantly questioning and learning about customers is a lifelong process. Adopting or internalizing this process will not only enable you to break down the issues easily and quickly but also enable you to create connections between various problems.

Know When to Switch Mindsets

Whatever the methodology of Design Thinking, it includes various stages of convergent and divergent thinking. Both processes are beneficial only when applied at the right time; otherwise, they can prove detrimental. For example, divergent thinking occurs when designers research ideas, issues or understanding. At this stage, allow yourselves to explore and note down everything and research various aspects, even if that might not be relevant after this stage. It is essential to keep yourself away from judging things during this phase since it might create a hindrance to your creativity.

In the next stage, converge by analyzing the conclusion of the previous phrase, consider the implication, assess limitations, and transform the ideas into essential concepts you can test after interacting with the customers.

Embrace Experimentation

Experimentation such as testing, prototyping, and iteration with the help of feedback is a big part of Design Thinking. Understanding solutions that works and does not work helps draw a line between a good and a bad design. In addition, involving customers in this phrase also ensures that you are doing everything right. It also ensures user adoption of the final product or services when launched successfully.

Recognizing the Impact Beforehand

It is equally important for designers to recognize the impact of launched products. Investing time to check and amend product and services is the key to launching a user-adopted product. For instance, when you have a major technology rollout, the users feel the impact and might have a major disruption. Likewise, users engaging in that technology will have an impact, and their productivity might decrease temporarily while investing time in learning the system. Therefore, designers must acknowledge and properly plan it as a part of the user adoption process.

Strategies to Gain User Adoption Using Design Thinking

Design thinking is a method to solve problems creatively by addressing the needs of people. However, implementing it is tricky. Mistakes in socializing, onboarding, and implementing can cause issues. Following are the strategies to implement design thinking for better user adoption:

Learn What Draws the Customer to your Product

You can put yourself into the customer’s shoes to learn why they prefer your products over other brands. Your sales team might clearly understand this since they are experts in addressing customer issues. You can discuss with them and conduct surveys with your clients to know your drawbacks and plus points. This way, you can implement Design Thinking into your organization to improve user adoption.

By interacting with your customers, you will know the common trends of your products, how the customers talk about them and how often they use them. This interaction will help you learn about your product’s value among the customers. Then while user adopt, you can introduce the parts that can be advantageous to them . This communication can provide your customers with a better experience with your products since you have created it to address their concerns.

Engage in Trial Periods

Trial periods have various customer benefits. Your users can introduce your interface and check if that fits them. However, free trial periods can be counter intuitive. So, you can introduce low-cost trials to help your customers learn about your products.

Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is essential for user adoption. You should ensure that your customer journey is seamless, leading to value delivery. It is the process that will want them to return to your products.

Conclusion

Implementing Design Thinking into developing an idea and designing a system, services, or products around it enables you to gain better user adoption. It is because Design Thinking focuses on addressing people’s issues and designing solutions around them. Design Thinking can also help designers become critical thinkers who can learn about customers at a deeper level and help know the issues to be addressed by the products. Employing Design Thinking to solve problems is more creative as well as effective than the traditional methods.

No matter the medium of transmission of the news, we know a recession could be imminent. We know that recessions are fearful and can be catastrophic to businesses and people.

Many people agree that there might be a significant economic downturn in trade and activity despite having high corporate profits. Various questions might ponder in the mind of business owners.

What can be done to prepare for a recession? What precautions should be taken to get prepared for it?

No matter what the questions, you can prepare yourselves ahead of time without disrupting the business.

Investing in anti-cyclical methods before times of crisis is key. However, the real question that arises is how can you keep yourself in a scenario where your business is not affected by the recession? Furthermore, how can you turn this major challenge into an opportunity to improve and grow.

In the present economic situation, when your business is surrounded by instability, pandemics, and disruption, planning to innovate business strategies or prepare for recessions is prudent and wise.

With some strategic Design Thinking methodologies, you can protect your business from falling apart and improve it so you can grow. Many companies have leap frogged ahead during down cycles because they planned not only how to survive, but more importantly on how to thrive.

What Is a Recession?

A recession is when less trade, lower business activity and unemployment create a prolonged and widespread economic downturn in the country. A recession occurs when a country has two consecutive quarters of an economic downturn that declines the GDP of a nation. Recessions generally reduce the economic output and demand of customers and increase unemployment. During this upheaval, customers limit their purchases and get limited nonessential services or products. It results in an economic downturn in various businesses.

However, recession-proof businesses are those businesses that are still performing well despite the economic contraction. Some are businesses providing everyday products, such as healthcare product suppliers, food companies and electric and gas utilities. People need these essential services and products during the good and bad times as well. These industries might not grow much faster but can outperform during recession times.

Recession-Proofing Business

As a business leader, big or small, you know when a recession is imminent, and once that happens, there isn’t much you can do but deal with it. You can just wait to mitigate the impact when the other one occurs in the future. You should always take precautions to recession-proof your business since it is crucial for success. You can plan better using Design Thinking methodologies that can assist in uncovering plans that better and more closely align with people’s needs, thus making your recession-proof.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking assists organizations in creating value for people. It aims to solve concrete problems that impact people and deliver solutions that align with people’s needs.

As designers unveil or identify issues, they can bring about innovative solutions. In addition, it enables designers to tackle problems that people find difficult to define or verbalize. Furthermore, Design Thinking assists organizations to lead with innovation.

For example, a human can’t imagine things that cannot be believed. Therefore, it creates difficulty for the designers to land on a solution that does not exist. Using an iterative approach more often leads to innovative solutions.

It makes any organization run more efficiently and faster because it focuses on creating prototypes and testing to check their effectiveness, after a lot of listening to people and defining the problems.

Design Thinking as a philosophy encourages experimentation before launching products in the market that ensures creating value for people. Multiple methodologies move forward the Design Thinking process.

Design Thinking aims to gain a clear understanding of the issues before generating an idea. It involves an action-oriented process to collect data that enables the designers to understand issues deeply.

The idea generation phase involves various possible solutions, then the designers start prototyping, gaining feedback, and ongoing iterations. All these step-by-step processes after idea generation eliminate bad design. The product or service design involves user input, thereby increasing the chance of user adoption when products are launched.

A deep and clear understanding helps idea generation and expands the chances of creating multiple solutions, which are then analyzed and selected for prototyping and customer feedback.

The outcome is the result of prototype iteration and customer feedback. However, companies need to practice patience during the process to get to a proper solution.

Process Of Design Thinking

Design Thinking solves people issues in a customer-centric way. It is deeply rooted in questioning, generating ideas, and developing the creation of innovation. Design Thinking questions the issues, assumptions, and implications before creating any product or service, reducing money and failure risks. Here are the stages of Design Thinking briefly described:

Empathize

Empathy is the first phase to successfully designing solutions. It depends on understanding people’s needs at a deeper level than just the transactional level, but at an emotional level. You focus on what problem you are trying to solve with the active input of customers which will assure your success.

To unveil new solutions, you must understand customer needs, limitations, and aspirations. To do this effectively you must elevate your view of customers, to people. No matter what business you are in, you are in the people-to-people business. By engaging with targeted customers, designers should gather real insights relevant to the problem that needs to be solved and align products and services to best solve them.

Define

This stage focuses on clarifying and defining the solution. You should consider the themes that have come to the surface, the barriers identified, if your team is going in the right direction or if you need to reassess your learnings. This brief created with focus and inspiration is crucial to unearth the best solution. When this step is practice with precision, you can move on to the next phase.

The most important way to recession-proof your business is to not assume you have solved the problem based on your own knowledge of your customer base, it must be informed by the people who will be involved. The customers, and the employees. That alignment is the secret sauce to recession proofing your business.

Ideate and Collaborate

In this stage, with the combined idea from the previous steps, it is time to start creating solutions. To fuel this phase, you can use tools such as landscaping, mind-mapping, brainstorming and post-it notes. Before developing solutions, you should also assess where the solution can land you and the longevity of the changes you see in the landscape. Be sure to spend plenty of time identifying your strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats assessment to be confident about the viability of the solutions you are landing on.

Prototype

In this phase, you need to experiment with the created solutions. Consider iteration and prototyping to infuse life into your creation since it is crucial. In this step, try to highlight the remaining gaps from the lens of the stakeholders (customers, employees, partners) understanding. This step can be improvised, redesigned, or even rejected through a series of critiques and reviews. The key is to not push a fixed narrative, rather you want to take a mutable approach here, and remain flexible to learn, iterate, and adapt. There is no room for egos in this phase.

Test

After the development and prototyping, test it with your customers. Some businesses might have a tight budget, or their clients might be uncomfortable breaking free of traditional methods. Engage with your friendly contacts first. It is also essential to know if your customers are vested in the problems you are trying to solve.

You should ask questions that are solution-oriented like, “What are the problems you care about that can be solved with this solution?”, “How will the solution make a difference in your experience, and why does that matter to you?” or “What more can be included in the package to make it a better solution that best serves your needs?” When answered effectively, these questions can help you come up with more productive and on demand solutions.

Recession-Proof Using Design Thinking

Identification

You can get your team, employees, and customers together to understand the current processes, particularly to identify the jobs that need to be done and the needs and difficulties of customers. This step can assist in finding out different initiatives that can impact your business. It can improve your present operations that can enhance customer experience or bring new value into your line of products or services. The identified issues can be analyzed further to know if they can offer a positive impact, their feasibility, and the complexity of implementation.

Opportunity Mapping

You can use opportunity mapping in various ways while planning for a recession. Here are some examples:

New Models

You can view the recession period as an opportunity since many industries are retreating. So, you can take this time to expand your strategic business plans. Know that if the traditional mode of function ceases to serve people, then new systems or commodities have the chance to become relevant. You and your team can create an opportunity map to identify the needs of the suppliers, clients and customers and assess their area of importance that has emerged. Then, as other industries are retreating, you can find an opportunity to reframe and extend the traditional things into a new one relevant to the circumstance.

Mixed Scenarios

It is likely that when one business faces a recession, another might get an opportunity to soar to new heights. So, these mixed scenarios view it and create recession-prone business units that can be more impactful. Therefore, you can take the opportunity to map your experience and identify strong and weak points that you can act on when the situation emerges.

Cost Management & Efficiency Gains

Whether or not a recession occurs, cost management and efficiency gains are always on top of the business must do list. However, when a recession occurs, businesses would investigate short-term opportunities while keeping costs at a minimum. Therefore, create an opportunity map focused on the books and related cost improvement chances.

Fail to Plan Equates to Plan to Fail

Even though no planning is perfect, still being prepared for the various circumstances can let you have options available at that moment. For example, if you decide to plan when the recession occurs, it will be too late, and your industry might lose the opportunity for growth and expansion. With Design Thinking tools and systems, you can get hold of various directions and create an impact to survive, thrive, and strengthen your business.

Conclusion

Even during a recession, you can meet the needs of your customers and grow your business. Companies should seek to adopt Design Thinking that can increase exposure time with customers listening, talking, and taking feedback from them. Then incorporate customer feedback through the lens of Design Thinking and ingrain them in producing the right products or services. This process will save time and money and decrease recession induced risks since it will ensure that your products resonate with your customer’s needs no matter what’s going on with the economy.