Adopting Systems Thinking and Design Thinking to solve daily problems | Pragya Saboo | TEDxXIE

hi everyone I'm progress Abu I work as a product manager at a health care company in New York and I also run my nonprofit called Project 21 in India which focuses on providing holistic education to the youth I graduated from Georgia Tech in 2017 with a degree industrial and systems engineering today I'd like to speak about adopting principles of system thinking and design thinking to solve complex and daily problems most people think that you can either employ a systems thinking approach or a design thinking approach to solve a problem and that both these approaches are

mutually exclusive of each other but in my experience as an engineer and a product manager a good balance of both these approaches have yielded the most positive results as engineers over here we've had the privilege to imbibe principles of systems thinking quite naturally but most of us have confined the use of these principles to only solving problems in class or in their textbook or at a workplace but before he does any further I'd like to define what systems thinking is and what design thinking is and how these two concepts actually blend together so what is

systems thinking a system could be an organization or a macro problem domain it relies on two very critical facets the underlying structure and the relationship that each individual component shares with each other the system contains interdependencies of the events and the data which can be analyzed to understand the basic trends and the pattern with systems thinking the fundamental concept is to identify the holistic perspective of the entire system to find the root cause of the problem it's commonly known as an iceberg model with four levels the first one being events followed by patterns followed by

structures and finally mental models this indicates that the piece of information above the surface is only a single event and in other words a mask for the real issue to gain an increase leverage for solving the problem affecting the entire system there's a need to understand the system as a whole and all levels submerged below the tip of the iceberg it's also useful to move up and down the underlying levels and improve the morale throughout the process some examples of system thinking treating your body as one system whose parts interact so for example if you

have a stomach disorder and you want to take a medicine that improves your stomach condition you want to make sure the medicine doesn't impact other parts of the body harmfully second example reading the employees of a company as a part of an integrated whole for example in a hospital a physician is no more important than a janitor as all of these two components work together to ensure the hospital is fully functioning and providing the best care it can for the patient moving over to design thinking design thinking is an iterative process in which the goal

is to empathize with the user to gain user inside break common notions and challenge visions that are usually taken for granted define the problem using lateral thinking strategies id eight on the define problems and finally release a Minimum Viable Product as a prototype to the user base and establish a feedback loop which allows the product creator to test the prototype and take feedback - I did more and more each time this process is always evolving and the key to Design Thinking lies truly in getting a deep understanding of the users needs while keeping your biases

aside the other critical component of Design Thinking is questioning each and every assumption that is taken for granted now I've kind of explained what systems thinking is and what design thinking is I'd like to walk through the process of design think where each step in design thinking process is integrated with the system's thinking philosophy I will be explaining how this is of use in the day-to-day life of an engineer or a designer or a product manager and at the same time draw parallels as to how you can use this approach in your personal life to

solve daily problems the Design Thinking steps are integrated with the system's thinking fundamentals and you should consider this whole system as a in its unity and not in isolation each step has an underlying systems thinking philosophy which can enhance the results yielded by the design thinking the first step in design thinking is empathy and understanding the user as a product manager as an engineer as a designer we spend a lot of time trying to understand what our users actually want and we do a lot of user research for that product managers like other humans tend

to have biases within themselves as well and it's very difficult to keep these biases aside and make sure that they don't influence what the user insights actually say so for this reason we define research plans that are free flowing and no one prospective prescriptive if when you want to use this approach in a personal life let's say you've identified yourself to be maybe unhappy at your current job and that's a problem that you want to solve how would you approach this problem from understanding the users needs perspective so the first step is to get very

critical to understand the root of the problem before jumping into the solution most of these needs are identified by asking the right questions mainly questions you've not asked yourself before for instance if you're not happy at your job your instant reflex reaction may be that I should find a different job and I should quit this job but the truth is maybe you do like this job because you prefer working as a freelancer or an entrepreneur or because you don't like your job as you're not qualified as and as you should be and you major may

spend your time better in qualifying more skills instead so another way to understand the user in this case which is yourself I'm gonna take a systems thinking about offer that and to analyze yourself from end to end take a journal and start reflecting on your day ask yourself new and difficult questions you've not asked herself before and I'll help you understand what your true needs are another example could be taking a time sheet marking off 30 minute slots through the day and actually filling in what you did in those 30 30 30 minute slots versus

what you actually intended to do when you start observing this over a period of time you will realize that there's a lot of things that you've uncovered about yourself which you didn't actually before so the reason that you may uncover is that maybe you'd spend a lot of time reinforcing like if talks about your job and that is why the reason you don't actually enjoy your job so after you do this for a period of time and you start figuring out behavioral patterns you end up understanding yourself better a few questions you can ask yourself

or did I work out the day I had a productive work day how much caffeine did I have the day I had a productive work day did I actually eat the right nutrition or the right meal the day I had the most productive work day and so on and so forth the next step could be to visualize your problem and put them on a Venn diagram or a flow chart or a graph as PMS we tend to do that with all the user insights we gather and it really helps us understand what the themes and

trends are it can help you solve the most complex of the problems and also the most micro level problems and it helps the creative thinkers better interpret nuances and data entrance so that's step number one step number two is defining the problem as part of managers once we have the user insight and the empathy developed we start defining the problem it's important to note that the right definition of the problem is the only way to get the right answers the problem if the requirements constraints and the problems are defined inaccurately the solution will follow the

same path so the first thing you can do is challenge every single thing that comes to you the question everything approach helps you break down societal norms and assumptions to begin devising out-of-the-box ideas imagine you're an architect trying to build a certain size driveway in a bungalow typically you may state your challenge like this there is no and based on me to build this dry way but challenging this assumption you may instead ask a question like what if I could create a way into the driveway into the back entrance of the bungalow or what if

I reduce the entrance of the bungalow by one and a half feet when you break down very very all the barriers preventing you from your success you take the first step towards developing a brilliant solution another way to help you defining the problem is thinking of the inverse again a spout product managers we sometimes struggle to find the solution if the problem is defined in a very specific way so many times we take the inverse of the problem and try to solve for that for instance a straightforward question is how do you measure a success

of the feature you're about to release but the inverse could be how do I know this feature has failed what can I do about the users this feature has feel because the user has done XYZ taking the inverse I can actually learn how I may want to implement the success metric so in your personal professional life once you're able to get a basic deep dive into yourself start defining the problem let's continue to build on the example of the user being unhappy at their job after empathizing and gathering all the user inside you may define

the problem as something that maybe you're not as excited to go to the workplace anymore or you may feel tired during work hours or you may not have a good relationship with your coworkers all of these problems do indicate that the user is unhappy at their job but each of these problems have very distinct and different solution from one another so that is the step number two of of defining the problem step number three is idea ting on your solutions in this phase the goal is to let your mind run wild as product managers think

of we think of all the possible solutions take small except eccentric crazy but the common thread tying them together is the fact that each idea saw the defined problem in some given capacity when trying to implement this professionally or personally having multiple solution also really helps as it does as in your workplace so maybe a few things that you can do is get a help get help of all the people that you may know that can help you create a brainstorming session and id8 on a defined problem use some idea generation hacks like maybe mind

mapping or social listening name of you this is a very specific step in which I think system design as a concept can really take of the critical really big front seat usually an ideation began limited by solving the very specific defined problem and then that leads us to get an analysis paralysis however if we take the define problem to be a part of the holistic system and a goal is to improve the system the solution would go much longer wave for instance let's say you identify the problem in your level of fatigue and the solution

was to ensure a nutritional balance in your body using your body as a system and then thinking of a solution or the remedy you decide to adopt your what you decide to adopt unintentionally doesn't harm other parts of the body the next step is to prototype and test the MVP as product managers we prototype and test the Minimum Viable Product which ensures that the defined problem is solved with the highest impact and the lowest amount of tech lift we also conduct user tests to get feedback on the prototype and establish a feedback loop with the

ideation phase incorporating a feedback loop is another indication of the fact that this whole process is the creation of a system instead of just analyzing things on paper and having redundant conversation with stakeholders we ensure that we ship out the quickest and the cheapest option with the feedback loop to the end user for us to learn from the prototype this helps us get a very clear direction of what the next step has to be we also end up a be testing our prototypes to understand which version of the solution has the most impact this involves

splitting our groups into maybe one or two groups and group a remains the control variation which ends up seeing the existing flow of things while group II is a new group which sees a new improved version of the group a solution and let's see the problem that you defined was that you were not interested in the field that you were working in currently in your ideation phase you merely have may have identified a few possible solutions for instance and a quick prototype could have been something like interviewing people in a new field shadowing someone who

works in the field of interest or taking online courses to gauge your interests in the feel if you did all of these things you would have you could actually avoid the hard work and the risk of actually not liking what you end up switching to and you end up learning a lot more about yourself before actually doing everything else the happier you are and the further you can go into your prototype until you find a significant roadblock or a barrier you can also a be test different solutions on yourself on the based on the data

collected you can actually do raft power analysis to see how long this test should run for and how much impact can each solution carry forward I think the final step that is not incorporated officially in any of these design phases is resilience and acceptance of failure the only way to be innovative with feature releases and being comfortable with doing things that you've not done before is accepting the high possibility of failure if you do not want to change something continuing the same way will not let you bring about the change similarly when you imbibe these

principles in your day to day life you must seek comfortable with the risk of failing and not getting answers instantly in one of the projects that I actually worked on recently we shipped a very risky feature out that broke the entire site and did not allow our users to make payments as you can imagine that was Michigan mission critical for the existence of our site but that failure helped me realize and reflect and analyzed for what went wrong I was able to come up with a playbook which had solutions of how to address this problem

should it ever come up in the future this is just this did not just benefit me or my team but it benefited in that entire organization and we were able to foolproof so many more risky projects from becoming failures if I was afraid of failing and not shipping that project out I would have never known how to bounce back and I want to end of this note saying that ultimately it is grit and resilience that sets winner is apart and not just Talent thank you