Design Thinking & Coaching Practice by Helen Tse
What is the role of coaches in helping teams and organizations to be more creative?
Jack Ma said at the University of Hong Kong “In the future, it is not a competition of knowledge but a competition of creativity, it is not a competition of learning, but a competition of independent thinking. In the future, it is wisdom-driven, experience-driven and creativity-driven. So this is what we think the world should be focusing on.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxQesDAH2oA)
In my work in team coaching, I was often approached by companies with the question” how can I help my team to be more engaged, more independent thinking and more creative?” In times that are unpredictable, companies may have to use more creativity to face worldwide challenges. What is the role of coaches in helping organizations to go through changes and challenges of creativity and innovation?
Creating a culture that supports Design Thinking within Organization
Senior leadership can lead change by committing to foster design thinking and communicate vision and direction within their organization. In the process of turning creative ideas into innovative products or services, team members go through the five stages include Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. (d.-school Stanford, 2010). Coaches can help in this process by foster a culture of empathy, creative confidence, and radical collaboration. (Glaser J.E, 2014)
Identify and develop innate traits in team members that foster design thinking
Coaches can use assessment tools to identify innate creative traits such as curiosity for recruiting team members. One method is to identify five “discovery skills” that distinguish the most creative executives namely associating, questioning, observing, experimenting and networking. (Innovators’ DNA, Harvard Business Review, Dec 2009).
Coaches can also develop team members’ strengths by cultivating their abilities to observe and question, to find a connection between ideas and associative thinking abilities to create new insights. Encourage creative activities such as storytelling that builds on ideas.
Help team members learn to be more empathetic
Designers “empathize with the end user” (Kelly and Kelly, 2013). Creative team members conduct empathy-based research to observe behavior and use tools such as “consumer journey maps”, “empathy mapping” to gather data on the emotional experience of how clients think and feel their unexpressed needs and to provide solutions.
Help teams to develop design thinking mindsets
One of the design thinking models adopted by the UK Design Council. . is to combine divergent and convergent thinking, to discover insights, define a focus area, develop potential solutions and deliver that work. Coaches help teams to adopt aspects of design thinking models that work best for their own team. This process is similar to a coaching process and can be done by facilitating reflective dialogue. That include helping teams to be open-minded, take multiple perspectives, reframe constraints, ask open-ended questions, set realistic goals, defer judgment, practice brainstorming, and encourage wild ideas. Coaches can help to define success and establish a feedback system to measure its efficiency. This explorative journey, maps closely to coaching in co-creating is reflective, iterative and measurable. This process will lead to a path of unexpected discoveries.
Help Team to Enable Collaboration
Coaches will help teams to facilitate a growth mindset (Dweck C, 2009) and be able to work with interdisciplinary teams. Coaches enable collaboration between the user, technology, and business, thus achieving the three targets of user desirability, technical feasibility, and business viability. (IDEO, 2000)
Cultivate Creative space that is safe to explore, experiment and fail
Coaches help to cultivate trust by providing a safe space to create and learn, to experiment and to fail.
Coaches can help the team in direct communication by increasing psychological safety within the team, to build and rebuild trust. Coaches help team members to deal with limiting beliefs and vulnerabilities. reduce stress by shifting the team from a panic zone of fear of failure to a learning zone, have greater clarity of intentions and hope, visualize success and stay on purpose.
Coaches role is to nurture quality relationships by developing open and deeper level conversations among team members. Studies have shown that a strong coaching culture is correlated with higher employee engagement and stronger performance. Coaches can inspire team members to define their meaningful mission, resolve conflicts quickly and can connect and cooperate to each other in order to maintain high engagement, high positivity and high productivity.
