DEEPDIVE: THE ART OF STRATEGIC THINKING

                                                                                          “You have to fail often in order to succeed sooner.”

Robert Cavorsi, Director of Energy Division at CME Wire & Cable Inc, once asked me, “Do you know what Deep Dive is?” 

Deep Dive was coined as a combination of brainstorming, prototyping, and feedback loops merged into an approach that executives use with teams to help develop solutions. Originally it was developed by IDEO for rapid product development. Now Deep Dive is widely and increasingly used for innovation in process improvement and customer service strategies.

1) Process: Understand the market/client/technology constraints (internal and external SWOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and PRIMO-F analysis). Observe real people in real situations. Visualize and implement new concepts for commercialization. Prototype multiple ideas on a small scale to demonstrate, build on something you can see, feel, and experience. This helps learn about the product, service, and/or process. The purpose of market research is to engage users and to immerse yourself in the associated product environment.

2) Organization: Your culture needs to trust in its team members where it is vital and central to this methodology. No type-casting allowed. Don’t always listen to the “boss.” Do the contrary! 

3) Leadership: The team leader facilities, coaches, and oversees the process, not getting involved in ideas. This allows freedom. A strong leader needs access to ideas (creativity) and the ability to deliver results (risk-taking). Creativity is the ability to produce (unconventional) ideas and when we are facing difficult challenges, welcome new ideas. We must take risks for The Art of Innovation.

Strategic thinking is defined as the generation and application of business insights on a continual basis to achieve competitive advantages. This is different from strategic planning. Strategic thinking consists of 3 disciplines: 

• Acumen, which helps you generate key business insights.
• Allocation, which focuses resources through trade-offs.
• Action, which requires executing a strategy to achieve goals.

The scope of the project needs to be defined first when entering into a new market. The best way to do this is by following the IDEO Process. It can be broken down into 5 steps: understand and observe, synthesize, visualize, prototype, and implement. The method used by IDEO was documented by Andy Boynton and Bill Fischer (of International Institute of Management Development (IMD) business school), who latterly further enhanced the process and sold the rights to Deloitte Consulting in 2006.

Step 1: Understand and Observe

Understand the market, the client, the technology, and the perceived constraints on the problem. Inspiration comes from observation. Go to the source (and avoid focus groups)! To do that, observe real people in real-life situations and find out what makes them tick. Take notes on everything they do! Seeing and hearing things with your own eyes and ears is a critical first step in improving or creating a breakthrough product or service. Good insightful observation with the occasional well-chosen “why?” questions are critical in getting to the underlying psychology of a person’s interactions with products and services. Often the most interesting insights come from the gap between what is said and what actually happens.

Step 2: Synthesize

All information from Step 1 is then collected in the project room. This room becomes the key tool for translating information into design opportunities. Photographs, diagrams, and drawings are all mounted on the wall to prompt discussion and illustrate key insights. 

Step 3: Visualize

Being visual is a primary rule of IDEO brainstorming. Visualize new-to-the-world concepts and its customers. Creating visible and tangible experiences are enhanced with computer-based rendering, physical model, or prototypes.

Step 4: Prototype, Evaluate, and Refine

Prototypes innovate and shape your ideas. It’s completely normal to fail early and fail often, but learn from these failures! Failures get the ball moving forward. Use that momentum to work towards your goal. There’s no need to stop. Work up until your deadline if need be and then get it out in the marketplace.

Step 5: Implement

Design changes can be systemic or highly localized. Implementation is the longest phase and most technically challenging. Time to complete the above five steps could range from a few days to six months! Over the years IDEO has identified some important practices:

• Watch customers and non-customers—especially enthusiasts.
• Play with your physical work in a way that sends positive body language to employees and visitors.
• Think “verbs” not “nouns” in your product and service.
• Break rules and “fail forward” so that change is part of the culture, and little setbacks are expected.
• Stay human, scaling your organizational environment so there’s room for groups to emerge and thrive.
• Build bridges between departments, from your organization to your prospective customers, and ultimately from the present to the future.

We hope your understanding of Deep Dive better than you did before. If you’d like to know more, please leave a question below. Or, if you would like to dive deeper, yes pun intended, check out some of these great articles related to the topic on our blog!