Starting a new business during a pandemic by using design thinking

Why I'm starting a business during a global pandemic

One of my favourite books, introduced to me in the late 1990s by a workmate during a 'year in industry' as part of my degree, is The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) by Jimmy Cauty & Bill Drummond (aka. The KLF). It contains some (maybe not the most sensible) advice that has stuck with me (no I haven't made it to #1 yet, but I do play in a band) -

"Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through...
Being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run... having no money sharpens the wits.
Forces you never to make the wrong decision. There is no safety net to catch you when you fall."

I've worked for 21 years, the majority in permanent roles within large organisations. Comfortable jobs where I had a fairly safe income, pension contributions, benefits, a boss telling me what to do, the usual. I was doing OK, and in March 2020 I started my dream job by having a change and working for a small business, really close to home. I was helping to shape digital strategy and working with great people to deliver cool stuff in an interesting market. It lasted 4 weeks.

The Coronavirus hit and as a new starter I couldn't access any of the job retention schemes that were put in place by the Government. 21 years of working in Corporateland gave me no financial safety net (tempted as I may be, I won't discuss politics here!) and I was made redundant in a very wobbly jobs market. I started the usual role applications, got some interest, spoke to some people, but my heart wasn't in it. I couldn't get excited about going back to another 20+ years in Corporateland.

I've always had a long term goal to spend the later years of my career working for myself. I've never been a corporate greasy ladder climber. It's not me. My career goal is to enjoy what I do, help people, have flexibility, travel wherever I want, whenever I want, and work when I want to. Hierarchy, being top of the pile, corporate empire building and power-grabbing? Nah...

Remembering what the book said, suddenly facing redundancy during a crisis, and a realisation that at halfway through my working life I wasn't getting much closer to those goals made me start Abingdon Digital. During the Easter weekend 2020, I figured that if I really wanted what I've just described to you, then the conditions were actually as close to perfect as they were going to get. At least according to The KLF they were!

What is 'design thinking', and why do digital product people love it?

With more time on my hands than expected, I asked myself a question - what should I be doing to make sure I (and my family) survive and then thrive again? What do the experience and skills I've learnt as a digital product manager tell me to do?

• take time to empathise about what's happened, how I'm feeling, and why

• identify & fully understand the needs I have, the problems I'll need to tackle, what I know about them and what I don't know about them

• identify & evaluate ideas for solutions, but whilst challenging everything I think of

• start trying to turn the best ideas into real solutions

• try them out in the real world (hence this website!)

And that is pretty much a very brief summary of design thinking. Seems simple & obvious, yes? You'd be surprised about how many businesses I've worked in dive straight into turning ideas into solutions without doing the other steps first. And then wonder why the decisions they made aren't working.

The truth is that by really focussing on and understanding the human elements first, you can start to break yourself out of any unproductive, repetitive and 'BAU' cycles of thinking and enable yourself to generate new and innovative solutions in your problem solving.

I started to ask myself - if I were a business right now during the pandemic, what would I be thinking, what would my problems be, what are my needs? I noticed that some businesses were still operating online, and had often adapted their use of digital to reach their customers in different ways. I hit upon the idea of trying to help by offering an hour of my time, skills and experience for free to work out better uses of digital and online services to help them adapt, change, support themselves and plan for coming out of these strange times stronger when we return to normal.

I'll explain the bit about why digital product people, like me, love design thinking next week - sorry!

Customers want holes, not drills

As an example before we finish, particularly if design thinking is new to you, there is a regularly used example that brilliantly illustrates the second bullet in the list above. If you have time for a 27 minute video today, this one from Joe Leech (a brilliant product management expert) tells this drill story in the context of design thinking in a much more entertaining way than me! But to summarise what he says:

There is debate over origin, but there is a quote that's most commonly attributed to Theodore Levitt, a Harvard marketing professor -

"People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!"

You could spend your entire working life running your power tools business on the principle that people want to buy power tools. Or, you could challenge yourself to question everything in terms of human problems & needs, and realise that customers want a hole so they can put a picture hook into a wall and hang a picture. So if you wanted to improve your sales, you could either:

A. design a new drill because, well, people always want better drills

or

B. use design thinking to find a better way for people to get pictures onto their walls, and try selling it as well as drills

Which is exactly what 3M did - and I bet they get more repeat purchases than a drill manufacturer; how many times have you bought a drill?

As small business owners, you're likely to be far closer to your customers than many of the businesses I've worked with in the past. Are you continuing to communicate with them at the moment? If so, I'd be really interested to learn about what you're experiencing & how you've adapted to the changes they're going through, and whether there are ways that I can help particularly if it means reviewing or helping change the way you use the internet.

Design thinking, and the related frameworks designed to facilitate it, can make a huge difference in smaller businesses that can often be better placed to change and adapt quickly, particularly at times like this when everything suddenly changes.

Give me a shout if you'd like to have a chat about design thinking and how it might help your business with digital.