Bringing teams together around human-centred design with Adam Billing

Innovation is a team sport and design thinking is a team activity. A great team involves multiple disciplines, diversity of perspectives, and a culture of permission to help guide each other towards good behaviours.

Adam Billing is the founder of Treehouse Innovation and Sprintbase, and an expert in how design thinking can be used to fuel innovation. In his conversation with Dan and Pia, he explains the principles of design thinking, which involves deeply understanding what the customer cares about, inviting diverse perspectives to generate ideas, and rapidly moving those ideas towards solutions that are grounded in customer insights.

Adam also talks about the importance of team dynamics and how a diverse team with individuals who have self-awareness, collaboration skills, and humility can make design thinking work effectively.

Takeaways from Dan and Pia

• Design thinking is a team sport and meeds diverse perspectives to generate ideas.
• It protects from leading with assumptions and quickly getting attached to ideas.
• Design thinking is a slow process that requires psychological safety and co-creation.
• Innovation requires letting go of expertise and dealing with your own internal workings to be open.
• Curiosity is fundamental to design thinking and can be applied to life.
• Don't spend too much time polishing the perfect thing before launching it.

Links

• Connect with Adam via LinkedIn
• Treehouse Innovation
• Why “culture fit” may not be what you want – Episode 55 of We Not Me, with Marsha Ramroop
• Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers, by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie
• Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey, by Jeanne Liedtka and Karen Hold
• DesignKit by Ideo
• Leave us a voice note