The health care consortium Kaiser Permanente hired IDEO to address the problem of losing important patient information as Kaiser nurses handed off their shifts. Through a series of workshops, in which participants presumably empathized with nurses’ experiences, defined the problem, ideated potential solutions, and prototyped and tested them, IDEO and Kaiser defined a new shift-change process: to prevent the loss of important information, nurses would relay that information in front of patients themselves.
This example of design thinking being used to solve the shift-changing challenge at Kaiser Permanente seemed like a perfect example of how design thinking can fail badly. Although they did a lot of workshops, which were claimed to help empathize with the nurses, the designers didn’t REALLY empathize with the nurses. I mean, the nurses are not stupid. If they could relay the information in from of patients themselves and to avoid information loss, they would have done it long ago. They would not need designers to tell them to do so. There has to be some reason why the nurses didn’t choose to relay information in front of the patients themselves. If the designers from outside have researched what the nurses had done to solve the problem, they might have found that out much earlier than they came up with the solution they provided.
The most dangerous thing about design thinking is the false optimism that it can solve everything easily. To teach design thinking as a crash course in a week is a lie. There are so much complication behind each step in design thinking. It is the effort behind each step that makes a design good, not the step itself. Only carrying out the steps doesn’t guarantee a good outcome.
