PREFACE I’ve been reading a lot of books. In recent years, when I was involved in the translation and publishing of books, I read even more books. Recently, I read about 2-3 books per month (mostly English books), which means 30 books per year. Along with that, I and my team have also compiled/released more than 20 books (as of 2021). The topic that I choose to read are innovation, new technology, new business models, digital transformation… and a thing that makes these books special is practicality. The theoretical part is also introduced in these books, but not too hard to understand. The main part of the book is interesting real stories or case stories, which are demonstrated in a very understandable way. During that process of reading/translation and publishing, I realized that “it doesn’t matter how many books we have read, things that we can apply matters”. It reminds me of a beautifully Confucius’s quote: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” The book The Design Thinking Playbook (Vietnamese version was released in early 2021) is my cup of tea. This is the book that
I and the WeTransform team have translated. These playbooks like this will guide us from the very first step in order to obtain great success. The desire to write a book inside me arose. But then I start self-questioning: Am I a decent person? What makes me outstanding? What is my biggest achievement? That selfquestioning process thrown cold water on me. It made me want to withdraw from writting a new book. However, I am reminded of a quote that I summed up like this: you share not because you know more than others, it's just that you learn a few good lessons to share with others. That its. Writing a book is also a sharing activity, I write a book to share what I have learned as well as what I experience through my work, the work of the people I advise, mentor and guide... It just that simple! And when the ideology was clear, I began to sit down and write the first chapters of the book. (Speaking of the word sharing, it reminds me of the coffee shop that a friend and I built in 2015. The name of that Cafe is Sharing Coffee. Who knows, maybe someone used to visit my coffee shop was reading this book, as well.)
So besides the reasons above, what other reasons made me start writing this book? And here is the list of answers: 1. Adding a pure Vietnamese book to the foreign book series that I and the WeTransform team have translated, edited and published. 2. The book serves as a practical example for the application of Design Thinking in Vietnam. 3. The book is also a real-life example of turning ideas into reality. I hope that “domestic” stories, as well as stories in Vietnam, will partially fill the gap when there are differences in environment, context, ecosystem... in foreign books for Vietnamese readers. That is one of the “pain points” that readers respond me through online surveys such as Facebook, Linked In, my website wetransform.vn as well as throughout any face to face meetings. The remaining “pain points” of Vietnamese readers towards foreign books translated into Vietnamese, I will introduce in turn in the latter part of this book. The word “pain point” will appear many times in this book. The more people can overcome the
“pain points”, the more I find this book useful. It's a value measure for this book. What prevents us from applying something new to our lives? If you are the one who can apply all new knowledge to your life without any difficulty, then congratulations. You don’t need to read this book, send it to someone else otherwise. (Considering this as a joke). And if you still find it difficult to apply new knowledge to your life and work, we should continue to find the solution. I would like to introduce you to a model called “Pulse of Growth” that I learned from the book Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress. Assume we are progressives who are continually learning and absorbing new information. It's a different story when we put that information into practice. We can observe that we are “torn” between the old and the new, as indicated above. Demand generation is the synergy above (pull + repulsion), whereas demand decrease is the synergy below (anxiety + habit). These
two forces are opposing each other. If demand-creation synergies outnumber demand-reduction synergies, the new will win out, and we will adopt this new way of life. In the other instance, we will be “loyal” to the previous system since the inertia is too enormous. Because our lives are made up of so many choices and decisions, this pattern will stick with us for a long time. In short, to make something new happen, we need to increase the demand-generation synergies and reduce the demand-reduction synergies. To get a better understanding of this model, let's take an example of applying the design thinking process to our life and work. Every time we intend to turn an idea into reality, we bring this model to use. Don't be too busy to change yourself for the better. It is you who make the decision to choose which character as shown in the caricature below.
Figure: Are you too busy to innovate?
Let’s maintain this “Keep moving forward” spirit because we will have many more experiments waiting for you later in this book. And as I wrote these lines, I overcame myself, overcame my inertia to do something very new to me: write a book.
Who is this book for? 1. Those who want to create new products and services from their great ideas with a quick approach, saving resources, and being well received and loved by customers. 2. Those who want to bring lean startup methodology, design thinking into their work and life. 3. Those who want to integrate innovative execution methods with current methods in the business to improve work efficiency and create new breakthroughs.
What is outside the scale of this book? 1. This book does not explain the theory in detail, so readers should refer to the relevant theory from the reference section noted at the bottom of the page or use keywords to learn more on
the
Internet.
2. This book does not mentions any detail business models (Business Model Canvas), you should refer to and select the right business model to develop your business. Ho Chi Minh City, July 2021, social
distancing
days
according to directive 16 of the Government.
Table of content Preface Glossary Chapter 1 IDEAS - FROM HERE WE STARTED CHAPTER 2 DEFINING PROBLEM – WHAT COMES FIRST, SOLUTION OR PROBLEM? CHAPTER 3 SOLUTION - POWER FROM INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAM CHAPTER 4 MATERIALIZES – SHOW YOUR WORK CHAPTER 5 EXPERIMENT - THE HUGE ROLE OF USERS CHAPTER 6 CASE STUDY – FULL REALISTIC STORIES EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 1 IDEAS - FROM HERE WE STARTED The value of an idea lies in the using of it. Thomas Edison First of all, let me elaborate on the concept of ideas mentioned in this book. It is an idea for a new product, an idea for a new service, and an idea for a new business or organization. In addition, it is also a new idea based on existing products and services. Depending on the situation, the context that we understand in the sense of the idea.
The idea: cheap or expensive, is that too important? As we all know that, without ideas, we can not do anything. Even bad ideas, decent ideas, costly or cheap, the idea is still the input of any process. From my point of view, only if you let people see the true shape of the idea, will you receive an objective and conscious assessment. In addition, they also contribute constructive comments, advice and also help you to improve
your products/services. During the same period of time, the role of the execution process is extremely large. Well, we don't consider an idea as it stands alone, we look at an idea when it has been turned into a product/service (probably in prototype form) and delivers value to real users. At this point, the idea is no longer “raw” but it has acquired a certain “mature”. The user/customer will be eager to receive a prototype more than a pure idea. Because people can feel the prototype with senses, or as the folkway, the ancients often say: “A picture is worth a thousand words”. And as you probably remember the saying “easier said than done”. When we get to work, we already increase our chances of success. And the more we dig into a big idea, the more we will touch on the concept of “business model”. In this book, we don't just talk about ideas as mere ideas, but we talk about ideas in the context of a life cycle from idea to product/service. We will also discuss this concept later in the book. I would like to tell you about my memories of the book Platform Revolution. When I finished reading its English version, I was so
excited about the new business model that this book offered, so I started translating the first chapter of the book. After compiling, I emailed Mr. Binh (founder of Alphabooks) to check my work as well as asked him to translate the entire book (I found his email on his personal Facebook account). I was surprised when I found out that he had just bought the Vietnamese translation rights for this book. So I started translating the whole book. That's how my first book was translated. Now, I and the WeTransform team have translated, edited, and released nearly 20 books, including 6 books in cooperation with Alphabooks. Thanks to the demo translation of the first book, everything went so smoothly, although, before that, I had no experience in the field of book translation and editing.
The story of a Overseas Vietnamese businessman: the market solutions or the tech solution. Nowadays, many people know about the MoMo e-wallet when this application has just reached 20 million users in 2020. But
when it comes to Mobivi e-wallet, few people know it. There's one thing in common that both Fintech apps are founded in 2007. By 2012, Mobivi has transformed its operating model, Mobivi has shifted to a niche market, combining e-commerce and traditional business to exploit a segment that has never been considered: the Employee Benefits Program, with the new brand name of iCare Benefits. Interestingly, Mobivi's founder, Dung Tan Trung, has quite a remarkable track record in the US startup world. He successfully IPOed his own company OnDisplay for $1.7 billion in the US market. At the end of 2017, I attended one of his events on Saturday's Coffee Talks. He shared that one of the reasons for him to switch from Mobivi to the iCare Benefits model is because Mobivi offers a technology solution, not a market solution. The technology solution that Mobivi is providing is fintech (financial technology), which the market does not really need at that time (before 2012). The market solutions are to deal with the problems, the needs, the client's desires. And iCare Benefits did it when he developed a good benefit programs for the factory worker, offered them the opportunity to buy any
product, the essential goods, and help them improve their lives. When I wrote these lines, I went to the company website to research then find out that this company was bought by a foreign business. Although this is the second time he started a new business, it took him 5 years to realize which one is a technology solution and which one is a market solution in order to adjust accordingly. So, this is a useful lesson for all of us to reflect on about giving customers what they want or providing what we have but they don't need. And we will also be ready to “adjust” when needed, unable to stick to the original idea that is not suitable, does not bring value to businesses and society. Adaptation is utterly essential. We only realize this when we bring ideas to life and let them reached as many people as they could as well as having a better positive impact on society.
How do we bring our readers a great deal of value from books in modern technology?
From the very fisrt day of translating books, I always thought that I should add more value to the books I translated. But what to add specifically and how to do it was a mystery to me. Whatever that values are, I must first upgrade myself in terms of the knowledge surrounding those books. I have chosen to upgrade myself with courses, and my learning style is also quite diverse. For the “Blue Ocean Shift”, I attended a 3-day workshop held in Singapore. The organizer of this workshop is BOGN (Blue Ocean Global Network), founded by the two authors of this book, professors Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. When it comes to the blue ocean strategy, these two professors are the two monuments that we have to mention first. In this workshop, groups will be guided to find their own blue ocean. This is the time when we apply the knowledge from the book to the reality of our work and life. After three days, we learned that this application is not too difficult, as long as we take the very first steps as well as have a team to discuss and exchange, and especially someone who has the experience that comparts for guidance. That is also what I applied to Vietnamese enterprises
when I had the opportunity to train them about the blue ocean strategy. For “The Design Thinking Playbook”, I supplemented my knowledge with courses from Coursera, a world-leading quality online learning platform. Here are 2 of the courses that I have completed. For the “Inbound Marketing”, I supplemented my knowledge through courses from Hubspot Academy. Those are the practices of training, the renovation I have made. Now, it's time for me to bring this knowledge into reality, to bring up more values as I planned from the beginning. The first activity was Platform Talks with the theme “Building a successful digital platform: Easy or difficult?” held at the end of 2017. My guests at this sharing session are real CEOs and practical founders. The first guest is Mr. Nguyen Trong Tho, founder of the online learning platform Unica. The second guest is Pham Lan Khanh, founder of the freelancerViet platform. The third guest is Le Mai Tung,
founder
of
the
car-media
advertising
platform
ShareCarforAds. Through this sharing session, I want to give readers any pure Vietnamese stories in building digital platforms in Vietnam, so that people can better understand the theories of the platform economy (mentioned in the book Platform Revolution that I translated), has a more multi-dimensional view of platform businesses, from global scale such as Google, Facebook, Amazon… as in the book, to domestic scale enterprises such as just mentioned above. Following this sharing session, I continued to share at some other events, such as Vietnam Mobile Day and Vietnam Web Summit organized by TopDev. For start-up organizations, I also had sharing sessions at the Startup and Innovation Centers of Can Tho, Da Nang, Lam Dong… For universities, I have shared with students at International University (IU), University of Finance-Marketing (UFM), IPL Scholarship program under PACE Business School… So what role does “design thinking” play in the activities I just mentioned? The answer is that “design thinking” plays a huge role. Specifically, I actively surveyed readers about the difficulties
they encountered when applying knowledge from books into practice. From there, I’ve learned what their “pain points” is so that I can offer appropriate solutions. This is the empathize step, the first step in the design thinking process. In addition to the survey as I just mentioned, we can also interview and observe customers to gain empathy for them. We were born with two ears and one mouth. Logically we should listen more than we talk, but in reality we have done the whole thing wrong: talk more than listen! I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of founders/CEOs of startups thank to participating in the work of translating and publishing books. When sitting down and counting the number of those meetings that I recorded on Google Calendar, I was a bit surprised because of the large number: 100 meetings. While their stories are quite interesting, I am in a very active listening state as well as did not forget to ask questions to learn more about their entrepreneurial journey. That interaction helped them share with enthusiasm. After all, I gained sympathy from them. The next activity that I do to bring added value to my readers is to participate in mentoring young people and startups. These
young people are creative people who love to do something new and willing to do it at all costs. They care about the books that I compile and desire to apply new knowledge to the project, the startup. I've become a mentor to some organizations like FUNIX online university (a member of FPT education), Give It Back, and some other programs. I'll share the details of my journey as a mentor at the back of the book. Most recently, I have also embarked on the production of a podcast for startups, a program called Startup Stories, an intimate conversation between me and a guest who is CEO, founder, or co-founder of a start-up. I conduct this program with the aim of giving readers stories of startups with both success and failure so that everyone can learn their own lessons for the next entrepreneurial journey. In the situation of social distancing because of Covid-19, it is almost difficult to organize offline sharing events. Therefore, webinar–sharing online is an alternative form. Therefore, a webinar on the topic “Design Thinking - From theory to practice” was born in June 2021. And this is my monthly activity, the
webinar took place 2 sessions last June and July. The journey to brings added values to my readers is still ahead. I still have to go on looking for the “pain points” of the readers, so that I can feel more empathy and make more appropriate as well as innovative solutions.
How to get so many ideas? A two-time Nobel laureate in two different fields, Linus Carl Pauling, once said: “- The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” So how do we get a lot of ideas? If you search it on Google, you will get a lot of different methods. One of the methods that I often use is brainstorming. I use it for the WeTransform team as well as for the organizations and businesses I've trained with. This brainstorming method is also mentioned a lot in the books that I compiled, which are the books Blue Ocean Shift and The Design Thinking Playbook. If you've read these books, you're no stranger to brainstorming for ideas. I have a few things to keep in mind when brainstorming:
1. First, we should focus on the number of ideas (divergent thinking stage), then we focus on the quality of the ideas (convergent thinking stage). In the divergent thinking stage, our main task is to generate lots of ideas, not to judge or criticize any idea, no matter how crazy they seem to be. What we need to do now is to create a relaxed, open, and happy atmosphere so that everyone can feel respect for each other, so that they can confidently share all their ideas. 2. At the divergent thinking stage, we need to let everyone work independently. The best way for everyone is to write down their own ideas and not telling their ideas to others, so as not to influence/direct the flow of other people's thoughts, and avoid crowd psychology. This also ensures that both introverts and extroverts contribute their ideas to the fullest extent. Studies also show that, at this stage, when working independently, the number of ideas will be generated more than working in groups. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at the University of Washington, summed up that: “Decades of research have consistently shown that
brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.” 3. At the convergent thinking stage, we filter out ideas. Some ideas will be used, some ideas will be merged with others, and some ideas will be discarded. We should conduct a poll to show off the objectivity and transparency in choosing ideas. 4. It is advisable to invite participants with different skills, backgrounds, from different departments (if possible) to get ideas from a multi-dimensional, interdisciplinary perspective (e.g., perspectives from groups of product development, marketing, sales…). 5. Showing ideas in the most visual form for people to observe, understandable. 6. A facilitator can be invited to assist in better organizing the brainstorming session. Based on my observation, at the beginning of brainstorming, people have a lot of surprises, but after completing a
brainstorming
session,
people
are
more
comprehend,
understand each other better, and more willing to cooperate on upcoming projects. And when looking back at the number of ideas the team has generated, people will realize that generating many ideas is not as difficult as people initially thought. Everyone should apply to their team to have their own experiences when done properly, it will promote its benefit. And who knows, you might discover other interesting things in the process of doing brainstorming sessions like these because our ideas and creativity are limitless. We not only apply this brainstorming technique once but also can apply it many times, creating a brainstorming culture in your team or business. Well, since this book is about execution, we have to take action. If you need a lot of innovative ideas to solve any problem, get your team together for a brainstorming session. Unexpected positive things are waiting for you. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many companies have allowed their employees to work from home (WFH). Therefore, businesses have also started to apply the online brainstorming
method. You can also learn how to apply it to your team and business. And here's a picture of the brainstorming session that I've been facilitating during my training sessions.
ACTION – The Framework that helps us to bring ideas into reality If we want the results, we have to take action. The word ACTION in Vietnamese and the word ACTION in English share the same strong tone. When I sat down and analyzed every letter of the ACTION, I saw it with the context of this book arrived strangely. So, I decided to introduce to you the ACTION framework in this book. Ask – to inquire, ask a question. Oldman saying that “Better to ask the way than go astray”. In English, there is also the sentence “If you don't ask, you don't get”. So asking questions is extremely important skill. When we put design thinking into practice, we will ask many questions during the interview process, survey
customers at the empathize stage to understand their pain, needs, and desires. After that, we will also ask many questions for customers to feedback, comment, and rate our prototypes in the testing stage. Collaboration - to collaborate. This is an important skill in this modern day. According to a study by LinkedIn in 2020, collaboration is one of the 5 soft skills that businesses are in shortage of. Collaboration gives us a multi-dimensional, interdisciplinary perspective from participants, with different specialties, possibly from different departments, Test – Trial. Every assumption, idea, and prototype must be tested with the customers. During this process, we get feedback, comments, reviews from customers about our prototype. Based on our customers' feedback, we can improve our prototype. The early the test was, the more completion our product can get. Integrate – Single components will be integrated together to get a complete system, become more useful. We integrate simple prototypes into a complete product as well as a fully done
solution. Integrate our internal ideas with insights gathered from reports of market research units, insights from partners... to come up with the best solutions. Option – to offer multiple options, solutions for each problem. As we mentioned above, in order to have a good idea, we need to have many ideas. The same thing happens when we say that in order to have a good solution, we need many solutions. Encourage people to create multiple solutions from which to choose the best solution to implement. Non-stop – Never stop, continue this process. Once the flywheel has turned we should not stop. Continue this process to create habits and culture in your team and business, thereby achieving better and greater results. We will use this framework throughout this book along with reallife examples and stories. The capstone goal is to help you confidently turn your ideas into reality.
What is the innovative way to write books by best-selling authors in the world? Two of the most famous authors in the world that I want to mention here are Peter Thiel, author of Zero to One, and Reid Hoffman, author of Blitzscaling. These two best-selling authors have the same approach when producing these two works. However, me-myself as the translator of the book Blitzscaling, have thoroughly researched this book. So I will share the very innovative approach of Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) and his team for this book project. The book was officially launched on Amazon in October 2018. However, 3 years before (2015), Reid Hoffman and his team organized some sharing sessions at Stanford University with a course called CS183C: Technology-enabled Blitzscaling. The course has not only theory but also examples, real stories from guests of the course. These guests are founders, CEOs and also have achieved certain achievements. Some of them were Reed Hastings - CEO of Netflix, Eric Schmit - former CEO of Google, Brian Chesky - CEO of Airbnb... From these conversations, the
author gained more insights and lessons as well as interesting stories to add to his book. When readers want to read books with many real stories, this is a wise way to do it, to suit the psychology and needs of readers. During these sessions, Stanford students asked a lot of questions for the lecturer and guests, so the author and his team had a better understanding of their readers. These students can be considered early adopters of the author's book. This is a way to test the idea of the book in a small group of real users, specifically the students in the CS183C class of Stanford University before finalizing and making this book available to a wide audience. Do you remember the story of the birth of Facebook? When it was first born, the social network Facebook also only served the students of Harvard University, a rather small scale. After that, the scale of activities was expanded to other universities, other localities, other countries, and finally global. During the live activities at Stanford University that I mentioned above, the author's team recorded the class and uploaded it to
their Youtube channel for everyone to watch, along with the collected articles. Lesson recaps, student essays are posted on Medium. Since then, the author has also received a lot of comments, suggestions, and feedback from everyone. Based on that feedback, the author can make reasonable adjustments to the content of his book. The author constantly interacts with readers in both face-to-face and online environments to gain empathy for his readers. So when the book came out, readers received it very warmly. Bill Gates himself also wrote the foreword for this book and recommended that everyone read it. To my knowledge, Reid Hoffman is also coming out with a book Masters of Scale after having enjoyed success with the podcast of the same name. We welcome this valuable book with many interesting insights and real-life stories from the “genuine” guests who have participated in his podcast. That's it. When we have ideas, let's implement them step by step, let them interact, “bump” with our potential customers, always be open to receiving feedback from everyone so that we can
improving our products/services more and more. Having early adopters is also extremely important during this period. I close this chapter with a report on 20 reasons why startups fail, conducted by CB Insight in 2019. With 5 out of 20 failure reasons as shown below, the first reason accounted for 42%. It is “no market demand”, which means that startups have launched products/services that the market does not need. We are still working diligently, still trying to study and research to come up with new products and services, but we have not had enough investment in an important piece of the puzzle, that is, we do not have the understanding about the market, about the needs of customers. Maybe some of us think that the failure cases are from the “newbies”, inexperience, incompetence... But the reality is that many “big players” also fail badly. We can cite here the failures from Google with projects: Google Glass, Google Answers, Google Wave... You can also easily look for more failure stories from those big guys to learn valuable lessons to avoid having to go down the same path.
#To conclude: 1. We need ideas to begin, and most importantly, be realistic as well as get to work when we have that idea. 2. Ideas should always be associated with the pain points, the need, and desire of customers and users. We discover these
things
by
powerful
“weapons”:
interviewing,
surveying, observing customers. 3. It takes action to have results, so remember the framework called ACTION. Its reminds us to take action and act more aggressively to get what we want.
CHAPTER 2 DETERMINATION OF PROBLEM – WHAT COMES FIRST, SOLUTION OR PROBLEM? If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution. Steve Jobs In February 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, former US President, Donald Trump, remarked that “Let's deal with this disease as you would deal with the flu”. It is this misconception that the Trump administration has missed the “golden period” to fight the epidemic. As a result, just a few months later, the United States led the world in the number of Covid-19 infections, thereby leading to a lot of heavy losses in human, economic, social security... As we can see, when we misidentify the problem, our solution doesn't work. As in the case above, it has terrible consequences, causing other problems for the United States to deal with. Fortunately, they have seriously reassessed the problem, understood the great impact of the pandemic, and gradually overcome and control the epidemic
situation. In November 2020, the US company Pfizer was one of the first companies to successfully research and produce a vaccine against Covid-19. It’s a great signal during this pandemic. That is the hope for us to push back the epidemic and return to a normal life. Incorrectly defining the problem will lead to solving the wrong problem, from which a new problem arises, and then we continue to solve that problem. Sometimes it creates an endless loop, costing us a lot of time, effort, and money. That is an example, a lesson in defining problems at the macro, the world level. Now let's go to a smaller problem, which is the “slow elevator” problem that I quote from the book What's your problem? by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg (this example is also cited in many other books). The author is one of 30 nominees shortlisted of THINKERS50 RADAR 2021 (we are also translating this book into Vietnamese). The story is, in a certain building, people often complained that the elevator was too slow, the people taking the elevator had to wait a long time. And here's how
they identified the problem and came up with the corresponding solution. If the building owner/manager sees the problem as a slow elevator, they will come up with solutions to make the elevator faster with some solutions such as upgrading the elevator's motor, improving the elevator's algorithm, or install a new elevator as shown below. However, if they see the problem as the discomfort of elevator riders having to wait too long, the solution to this problem is to place a mirror where everyone waits for the elevator. They can look at themselves in the mirror, adjust their clothes, adjust their hair… while waiting for the elevator. This is a very effective way to “kill some time”. Another way to solve this problem is we can put a hand sanitizer dispenser for everyone to wash their hands with sanitizer as we often see during the Covid-19 pandemic, both to ensure everyone's health as well as to make people forget about waiting time. Or we can play music for everyone to enjoy in the meantime. It is the reframing technique applied to this problem as shown in the figure below.
With this “slow elevator” story, we can see two different perspectives on the same problem as we proceed to define the problem. Therefore, we will have solutions that correspond to our way of defining the problem. Remember the letter O (Option) in the ACTION framework in chapter 1? No matter which solution you choose, we should have at least two perspectives as mentioned. Now we understand how important it is to define the problem. As the genius scientist Albert Einstein once said, “If I had one hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would spend first 55 minutes defining the problem and spend the remaining 5 minutes to deal with it.” Here, we also notice the mistakes we often make: we jump right into finding a solution to the problem instead of going into detail about what the problem really is.
What can we do about our customers' pain points, needs and desires?
As we read in Chapter 1, after the empathy process, we come to know the customer's pain points, needs, and desires. That is the material for us to integrate together to create a problem statement that we need to solve. To define the problem, we will start with the question “How might we…?” This is a tool in design thinking. It has the following structure: How might we help [user/customer] achieve [a specific goal]? When I was writing this book, the Covid-19 pandemic has not yet been averted, for some country leaders, a burning question in their minds might be: How might we help people return to work, study, business... as safely as possible? As for me, when I know the pain points, the need, and desire of the
readers
who
are
reading
the
book
that
I
am
compiling/publishing, my questions will be:
The application of new and innovative knowledge from good foreign books (that have been translated into Vietnamese)
faces many difficulties because of the lack of sharing, training sessions, and local real stories, advice from people with professional experience… How might we help more readers to successfully apply new, useful knowledge from good books to their businesses and lives? How might we give our readers the confidence to turn ideas into reality? How can we help businesses apply design thinking to solve their problems in an innovative way? Now it's your turn, what problem do you want to solve? Write down the problem description and the questions “How might we…?” of your own like the examples above. Once we have pinpointed the problem we need to solve, the next steps will become clearer. If you still haven't got the customer's pain points, desire, and needs to build a problem description, then you need to repeat the empathy step described in chapter 1, this step is very important, you cannot ignore it. Without well-prepared input, there is no good output (result). In this early stage, don't
solve the problem for everyone, focus on a specific group of customers you know and understand. Have you remembered the early days of Facebook? They do not serve everyone in the world, they only serve Harvard students, then gradually expand and dominate the world as it is today. That is the meaning of “think big, do small”. Once the problem is visible, we need to stop for a moment and ask ourselves: is this problem worth solving for us. Because the road ahead is very long, we should only invest time, effort, and money in the things that we feel are valuable.
How can the outsider helps us in identifying the problem? When it comes to defining a problem, it's usually just our team involved. However, in some cases, we need some outsiders from our organization. As introduced in chapter 1, we can invite a facilitator from outside our group or organization to facilitate our brainstorming sessions. If we have a mentor to guide us, that would be a great thing. Currently, the mentoring movement is
being strongly developed, we can find ourselves a suitable mentor. They will also actively assist us in the problem-solving process. I used to be a mentee of the SME Mentoring 1on1 program in 2015, and a mentor of the Give It Back program from 2020 to the present. Those are reliable destinations for you. Note that these people will help us get more input into our problemdefining process, but they don't provide a solution for us to implement. With the development of social networks, we can bring our problems to this kind of environment to get useful comments, feedback and advice. If we do this well, we will promote collective intelligence in solving problems. So once again, we need the collaboration skills. Back in chapter 1, we saw the collaboration between interdisciplinary team and members/teams, now collaboration between inside and outside the organization. That's why I included Collaboration in my ACTION framework to introduce to you.
“Pull” or “Push” model? Sometimes we wonder why we don't implement the idea immediately, but to go through many stages of the design thinking method. By this point, we've gone through 2 of the 5 stages of design thinking.The purpose is to keep abreast of market needs, create products/services that customers and the market will accept and liking. None of us want to fail with the “no market demand” reason that 42% of startups have as I mentioned at the end of chapter 1, not to mention other reasons. So, instead of using a “push” mechanism: burying your head in a closed-lab, creating your own products/services, and then bringing them to market and waiting for luck to knock on your door. We switch to the “pull” mechanism. This is how we start: “pull” market signals and create products/services from there. This is the successful approach in the world introduced through modern methods: Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Agile (flexible software development method) )…
The leanness is shown in that instead we do not have to make lengthy plans, but only short as well as condensed, concise, and accurate problem descriptions. If you ever heard the “humancentric” approach, this is exactly what we're all about. This is also the approach used in digital transformation and customer experience. According to the author of the book Lean Customer Development: every hour we talk to customers, we save a lot of time and money. The shift is taking place strongly from a “push” model to a “pull” model. Therefore, we should not miss this opportunity to change our thinking to choosing the right and appropriate model in this digital age.
#To conclude 1. We need to spend a lot of time defining the problem, reperceiving the problem.
2. We need to write down the questions “How might we…?” to clearly define the problem we need to solve and everyone on the team has a unified understanding of the problem.