Three ways diverse voices help deliver better outcomes
Every decision we make, product we create, and service we develop is better when we work in with a diverse range of people. Bringing together colleagues and stakeholders with varied experience, backgrounds and perspectives can only add value to the work we do.
One of the many benefits of using design thinking is that it teaches you more diverse and inclusive ways of working. In this blog, we share three key benefits of involving diverse stakeholders in your innovation processes and beyond.
1. Involving a broad range of people helps uncover what your customers care about
Design thinking teaches you to look beyond your own biases and viewpoint, and focus on what your customers care about. It’s about identifying new opportunities to meet their needs by involving a broader range of people in your processes, asking different questions, and listening closely to their answers.
Every stage of the process requires you to go beyond your usual sphere, and involve a more diverse range of people with different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.
For example, the first step in a design thinking approach involves building empathy with your customers. You need to involve people from all walks of life to get a deep understanding of the breadth of feelings and responses people have to the problem you’re trying to solve.
Speaking to such a variety of people will give you fantastic insights into what they care about, which you’ll use as a basis for creating new ideas. Going beyond your usual research routes will lead to more inventive ideas, which you may not otherwise have thought of.
And it doesn’t stop there. When it comes to running a brainstorming session or testing out your prototypes, the greater the diversity of voices you can involve and feedback you can get, the more robust your solutions will be.
After going through this process and seeing the benefits a diverse range of perspectives can bring, teams then start working in this way as a matter of course. They automatically seek to increase diversity and inclusion because they know the results will be better.
2. Your team get comfortable stepping outside of their comfort zone
When you’re creating something new, it’s human nature to default to your usual sounding boards for their opinions. It’s also natural to go to people you expect to agree with you, to help get the work moving more quickly.
But that approach won’t lead to new solutions. And it won’t uncover what your customers really want. To get those exciting, unknown insights, you need to look beyond your usual circle.
Accenture found in its Getting to Equal research 2019 that operating with this kind of culture only leads to positive results. They found that employees in the most-equal cultures see fewer barriers to innovating, and are less afraid to fail.
This is one of the most crucial barriers businesses have to overcome when using design thinking, as people often fear putting forward something new in case it doesn’t work out. But this research shows that when a truly inclusive culture is in place, people feel empowered to innovate without fear of failure. And when they do that, truly amazing things can happen.
Using design thinking helps create that culture. It teaches you to look for new inspiration, and demonstrates the value of being jarred out of the status quo. The business sees great results from the new ideas that get put forward, and develops a more positive working culture as diversity and inclusion becomes a natural part of its ways of working.
3. It creates ‘buy in’ with the people you’re trying to solve for
At Treehouse Innovation, we’ve worked with a range of organisations, including tech businesses, professional service firms, and media companies. In our experience, the inclusive approaches we use in design go beyond finding new inspiration for ideas and solutions to actually help create buy-in and consensus from the intended audience. By including diverse voices early in the design process, when your new solution hits, people already feel engaged and invested in it. Giving you a group of early advocates for new solutions, products, services and processes. That advocacy can add real momentum to a project.
So, by including diverse voices in your project or innovation you walk away with a much better solution because you’ll have automatically spoken to diverse groups, gained real empathy about what matters to people, pushed your team to see beyond the obvious solutions to fresh and novel ideas – and, you’ll have built a group of early advocates to help propel your ideas forward. . By walking the walk, you’ll see for yourself. And, more importantly, you’ll be able to demonstrate to the rest of the business, what a great impact true inclusivity can have.
