I recently had the opportunity to interview Nathan Baird, one of the world’s leading Design Thinking practitioners – and one of the few who was doing it before it even had a name.
Nathan spent years as a Partner at KPMG, where he built and led their Human-centred Design practice from the ground up. Since then he’s run hundreds of innovation projects and thousands of workshops across most industries and continents, working with organisations like the Australian Institute of Sport, Commonwealth Bank, Diageo, Siemens and Unilever – as well as startups, SMEs and government.
He’s also the author of Innovators Playbook and a speaker on a mission to democratise innovation while helping teams thrive with human-centred innovation.
Nathan has rare combination of practitioner depth and teaching rigour. Nathan doesn’t just consult on innovation – he has spent hundreds of hours in the room with leaders and teams actually doing it.
Here are 5 insights from our conversation:
Q: What are the most common ways you see teams jump to solutions and what does it actually cost?
“There are three levels. The first is just jumping to a solution – coming up with an idea and going straight to a business case. The next level is having an idea, getting a team to build a business case, and spending six months and half a million dollars – and still not having spoken to a customer. The third level, and obviously the worst, is jumping straight to build. Sometimes the first time the customer sees it is when it’s launched. And that’s too late to prototype and test.”
What to do: “Pause and go – who is the customer or potential customer here? And what problem are we solving for them?” “What do we know and what do we need to learn.”
Q: How do you use the knowledge review to reveal something about how customer-centric organisations actually are? And how do you manage the outcome?
“A leader or anyone in an organisation can say they know their customers until they’re blue in the face. But you get them to do a knowledge review using the Re-sight Tool based off what research they’ve got – and they either don’t have the research to start with, or there’s not much there. And so it tells the true story. It highlights for the culture how customer centric we truly are – either because there’s a lot of research and knowledge there, or there’s not.”
What to do: “Are we going to go and do some research or are we going to brainstorm customer empathy and just make up customer needs and insights? That’s the choice you’re making.”
Q: Before teams go out and do fresh customer research, what’s the one thing they’re consistently skipping?
“You want to make sure you’re not spending money on research when you don’t need to. You may already have some existing research that’s really valuable. You may already have experiences across the people in the organisation that’s really valuable. This is coming from the guy who’s very pro talking to your customers – don’t get me wrong, nothing beats that, but let’s just pause. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There could be some gold in what you’ve already got.”
What to do: “Take all your existing research and identify observations, facts and findings across a simple framework that confirms things we know and are still important, what are gaps in our knowledge, what are new facts and insights, and what are hypotheses and ideas we’d like to explore.”
Q: When leaders say they don’t have time to innovate, how do you respond?
“We throw it back. You can’t afford not to. You don’t have time not to. Because the most expensive stage is the back end of innovation, and the most time-intensive stage is the back end of innovation. And if you don’t have the problem and the solution right before you go in there, you’re going to waste a lot of time going down rabbit holes and rework.
“The last thing we want to do is invent some cool sh*t that nobody wants.”
What to do: “It’s carrot and stick. Show research – like Dr Robert Cooper’s studies – what doing this properly looks like and can do for you. And then show the cost of not doing it. Executives often have a strong numbers background, so you want facts and data in there – but you still have to tell a story as well.”
Q: Once you’ve done the discovery work properly, what changes about idea generation?
“If you come up with really good needs – important unmet needs and the insight behind that for your customers, you almost can’t help but come up with good ideas. Often it’s the emotional or social need that is the real opportunity. The insight should tell you something about the customer and the need that’s not already obvious.”
What to do: “The question that unlocks it is: why is this need so important to the customer? And why is it so hard to solve? By generating answers to those two questions, you can intuitively feel which insight matches the need best. Come up with those based off real customers, either through existing research or fresh research and you’ll come up with good ideas.”
Want more of the conversation?
We also got into creativity, diversity of thought, and how to get genuine leadership buy-in for doing this work properly. Worth an hour of your time.
You can dive deeper here
If you’re wanting growth through innovation, you should follow Nathan.
Thanks and see you next week,
Vaughan