Mindset over Process
Attempts to turn Design Thinking, a mindset, into a process, a Design Sprint, flip my skepticism bit. Software producers, those of us with a decade or more on-the-job, watched a handful of guiding principles in the Agile Manifesto succumb to industrialization and ultimately corrupted by prescriptive processes like Scrum.
Agile is a beautiful thing. Design Thinking is a beautiful thing. Hard stop.
Why are we compelled to turn a philosophy, a mindset, an adaptive framework, into prescriptive processes?
Our blunders are two-fold:
- Applying 19th century mass production innovations to creative and human endeavors; and
- Submitting to external pressure to go faster.
That products require engineering and problem solving is a given. Some engineering is cookie-cutter, but much of engineering is actually a creative process often involving some parts analysis, some parts problem-solving, and some parts adaptive trial and error. Designing for how people use a product is most certainly a creative process requiring empathy, insights, discoveries, and human-centered testing.
People unfamiliar with the nuts & bolts of software development imagine it’s an engineering process, but it’s a profoundly human activity.
― Alan Cooper
The kinds of activities required by product development, particularly software products, are often hampered by prescriptive processes that impose day-by-day (or hour-by-hour) markers, milestones, and checkpoints.
For the most part, product development isn’t a 19th century assembly line that can be poked, prodded, and optimized for speed. As craftspeople who design and produce, we must push back on― and respectfully resist― the pressure to go faster.
Often we must slow down to go faster.
If you don’t know where you are going, it’s easy to iteratively not get there.
— David Hussman, 5:40 PM Nov 3rd, 2009 Twitter
A philosophy, or a mindset, can serve us well. I fancy myself a craftsperson steeped in the principles of the Agile Manifesto and familiar with the Design Thinking framework who, on my best days, helps make some pretty good stuff.
The Agile Manifesto is guidance that holds up 20+ years since inception. Design thinking gives us a helpful framework and some tooling. Let’s leave it at that and resist the temptation to industrialize it.
A prescriptive process in a creative realm seems like a good thing, until it isn’t.
