To illustrate the design thinking process that we've been talking about I'd like to tell you a story about design thinking in action. As we go through that story I will note different tools and approaches that are being used. Then at the end of the session I'll tell you about some additional resources we have available so that you can learn more about them. Now, you can use design thinking to solve all sorts of problems. Let's walk through one example to illustrate what it looks like in the real world. To do so, we're going to travel to Denmark, a country long recognized for its distinctive attention to design. The Danes, like citizens in most developed countries, recognized that the aging of their population presents many challenges. One of these is serving the more than 125,000 senior citizens who rely on government sponsored meals. Danish municipalities deliver subsidised meals to people who suffer from a reduced ability to function. Whether that is due to illness, age, or other conditions. Many of these seniors have nutritional challenges and a poor quality of life because they simply do not eat enough. An estimated 60% of elders living in assisted living have poor nutrition. An estimated 20% are actually malnourished. In response to this growing social problem, the municipality of Hustobrow decided to dedicate their efforts to improve meal service for seniors. And they invited Danish innovation firm Hatch and Bloom to work with them to figure out how to improve the nutrition of their elderly population. The municipal leadership saw the project initially as straightforward. In order to get seniors to eat more, the current menu just needed improving, and they wanted Hatch & Bloom to ask elderly clients about their menu preferences. This is a great example of how too narrow a definition of the problem to be solved can drive a lot of innovation right out the window before you even get started. The opportunity turned out to be much greater. And what Hatch & Bloom ultimately produced was much more than just a new menu. It was a completely redesigned meal service that offered higher quality, more flexibility and increased choice. This dramatic reframing of the opportunity emerged from the user-centered design approach that Hatch and Bloom brought to the process, in which they discovered that merely fixing the menu wouldn't solve the nutrition problem. Let's look at some specifics about how they did it. They began by exploring what is? Digging deep into seniors behaviors, needs, and wishes. Using observation and interviewing to identify their elderly clients' living situation and try and get at their unarticulated needs. The approach they chose to use was ethnographic. The specific tool they used was Journey Mapping. The Journey Mapping tool follows a customer or stakeholder as they receive a product or service or go through a process. It pays attention to what designers call the job to be done. In some ways, journey mapping is not that different than the kind of flow charts or supply chains we might use in business, but there are some crucial differences. Journey mapping recognizes that most of us are trying to do jobs that are both functional and emotional. A lot of the unarticulated needs turn out to be on the emotional side, making this tool very valuable for uncovering hidden opportunities to create better value for people. Hatch and Bloom used journey mapping to trace the experience of the elderly from beginning to end. They rode with food service employees who delivered the meal. They accompanied them into the homes. They watched as clients prepared the food, added ingredients, set the table, and then finally ate the meal. They also interviewed the supervisor of the food preparation process in her workplace. And what they saw in the kitchen surprised them. Working in a public service kitchen was a low status job in Denmark and kitchen employees seemed demoralized and unmotivated. It was not going to be enough to focus on the needs of the elderly team members realized. They would need to address the problems of the employees producing the meals as well. And so the team decided it was important to broaden the scope of the project beyond just improving the menu and they helped the municipal officials understand why this was necessary. From this dual focus on the people preparing the meals and on the seniors receiving them, a set of interesting insights began to emerge. They discovered that both the seniors and the kitchen workers had important emotional needs that were not being met. They were both experiencing feelings of disconnection and alienation. The social stigma of even having to receive such assistance weighed heavily on the clients. They were embarrassed. Help for cleaning was considered acceptable in Danish culture. But help for more personal needs was much less so. It also mattered who was providing the help. In Denmark, a senior hoped to receive assistance from a relative or friend. If that was not possible perhaps one could hire someone. But it was the last resort to receive assistance from the government. Also painful to seniors was the loss of control over their food choices. We discover that deciding what kind of food they put in their mouths was the second most important thing for the elderly after taking care of their personal hygiene, the head of the Hatch and Bloom team told us. And they hated eating alone, because it reminded them that their families were no longer around. All of these factors contributed directly to the nutrition problem and put it in a broader context. The less they enjoyed their situation, the smaller their appetites. The kitchen workers, Hatch and Bloom learned, were making the same boring, low-cost meals over and over, not because they lack skills or because they just didn't care, but because of the perceived economic and logistical constraints that prevented them from doing something more interesting. The team also found positive things however. They discovered that the generation of seniors they studied was very responsible and capable in the kitchen. And had a key sense of the seasons and positive associations with seasonal food such as apples in the fall and strawberries in the summer. They also often tried to customize their meals by adding spices or using their own potatoes or vegetables. The Hatch & Bloom team also discovered that the kitchen workers really did care and wanted to do a good job. Once team members had finished their ethnographic research, they moved into the what if stage. For this, they wanted to enlist a broader group of stakeholders in understanding the nature of the challenges and participating in creating a new and better meal service. They wanted to co-create with their important stakeholders. To accomplish this, they had a series of workshops that brought together a diverse set of stakeholders. It included public officials, volunteers, experts in elderly issues, kitchen workers, and employees of residential care facilities. Together, they reviewed the ethnographic research and developed insights and design criteria to form idea generation. This kind of co-creation is another important design tool. Inviting stakeholders into the creation process creates ownership and engagement, as well as producing better ideas. The co-creation tool will turn out to be useful in every one of the four questions, as you'll see later. In the second question, Hatch and Bloom used a brainstorming process in which facilitators used analogies as trigger questions to help shift participant's mental models of food service as they generated ideas. The facilitators ask participants to think of the kitchen as a restaurant. Triggering a creative rush. The kitchen workers, they assumed then, must be the chefs. And if they were the chefs, who were the waiters? This began to bring ideas like the condition of the vehicles used for meal delivery into the discussion. They continued to work with the restaurant analogy as they considered the food itself. Until that point, the menus had been minimalist factual descriptions of the food, perhaps detailing how it was prepared. For instance, one item read liver potatoes and sauce. That's not exactly a description that will make your mouth water, is it? But now participants in the workshop started to wonder, maybe we should look at actual restaurant menus. Maybe we should describe our meals in a completely different, more enticing way. The third workshop moved them into the what wows stage, and continued to emphasize the design tool of co-creation. But this time, co-creation was used to test ideas rather than generate them. This third workshop was much more hands on. And involved prototyping at least in a rough way, the solutions coming out of the what if workshops. For example Hatch and Bloom worked with participants on three different versions of the menu. Asking them which they liked and how they felt about various aspects such as the colors they favored and whether they preferred photos or illustrations. They used a design tool called visualization to make these different options feel more real to participants. Visualization is one of the essential design tools. It's not about drawing, a skill that many of us don't have. It's about using imagery to make an abstract idea more public and more concrete, so that it will be more visible, clear, and understandable to others. Hatch and Bloom didn't talk to people about the different options. They showed them the different options. They then moved into what works. Testing prototypes with different combinations and ways of presenting the food with actual customers. The learning from this initial set of experiments, resulted in a second project with some quick packaging design changes that allowed for more modular meals, where components were separated instead of being mixed together. The process also yielded new uniforms for employees and a new name, the Good Kitchen, that reflected everybody's aspirations. It also included new communication channels using newsletters and comment cards to keep clients and the kitchen staff in close touch with each other. And so a process that began with a simple mandate, fix the menu, evolved into something much more significant as it moved through the four questions. Using design tools like journey mapping, co-creation, prototyping and experimentation. That process yielded a host of dramatic changes. A new menu, new uniforms for staff, new feedback mechanisms. But equally important it made everyone involved cognoscente of the real people they were serving or being served by. Today who's to browse seniors know who is shaping their meatballs and preparing the gravy in the kitchen. And this relationship between the kitchen staff and the customers. Which is now both personal and professional, has increased greatly the satisfaction of both. The results speak for themselves. Reorganizing the menu and improving the descriptions of the meals drove a 500% increase in meal orders in the first week alone. But the results were much more about the number of meals served. One of the most important elements of the transformation was this shift in employees' perception of themselves and their work. The kitchen workers are now much more satisfied and motivated. As a result customers are happier with their food. If you have professional pride, you'll also cook good food. Anne Marie Neilson the director of the Good Kitchen told us. Good food has to come from the heart. What we're talking about in a Good Kitchen story is about more than just developing new products or services. We're talking about innovating the entire business model. I'd like you to spend a few minutes now listening to Jeremy Alexis, a professor at the Chicago Institute of Design as he shares his views on the importance of business model innovation.
