How to keep pace with New Year's resolutions by applying Design Thinking

This essay is about applying principles from design and business to personal growth. In doing so, it will help you build deep design thinking skills and creative leadership.

New Year Resolutions are relatively easy to make and yet, hard to sustain. When the end of year approaches, most of us tend to asses our lives overall and set new goals for the upcoming year only to realize that a portion of those goals have died off 3 to 6 months later. The reasons behind this pattern are many and include setting non-achievable goals and lack of real commitment, among others.

In this essay, I take on the principles of design thinking and behavioral design — widely used within innovative organizations around the world — and place them within the context of personal growth, with the aim to make these set of principles a practical guide to help you keep up with your resolutions for the coming year.

Putting your New Year’s Resolutions in business terms

Here I made the assumption that New Year Resolutions are value propositions to yourself, involving inferences and leaps of faith that you must test. I called on the principles of design to solve the challenge of maintaining your resolutions throughout the year to accomplish your desired goals at the professional and/or personal level.

What are Design Thinking and Behavioral Design?

In a nutshell, design thinking revolves around the creation of value propositions that resonates with your customers / users, and can be defined as design-centric culture that transcends design as a role and has a humanizing component as it core.

On the other hand, behavioral design revolves around changing the behavior of your customers /users to resonate with your value proposition, and can be defined as a behavioral approach to product design.

Framing your New Year’s Resolutions as a design challenge

Under the principles of design thinking, your New Year’s Resolutions can be framed as a design challenge. Similarly, when taking into account behavioral design, resolutions are framed as change in behavior challenge. When combining the two, we can make sense of established principles in the business world to help improve yourself. Thus, under this context, the customer / user we are designing for is ONESELF.

Design thinking involves the following components:

Empathize

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

Iterate

Empathy is the work you do to understand yourself better; is about grasping a fair understanding of the way you do things and the reasons behind: your physical and emotional needs, how you perceive the world, and what is meaningful to you and satisfy the aspirations of your being. In other words, empathy is about discovering what makes you happy.

The French thinker Frédéric Lenoir explained in his book “Happiness, a philosopher’s guide” that the process of assessing yourself in order to discover your true individuality and your own sensibility is known as the “process of individuation”. Individuation is about learning how to become yourself irrespective of the cultural and education schemata that surrounds you.

You empathize by taking the following steps:

1.1 Make a list of all activities that make you happy

1.2 Write down the emotions and behaviors associated with those activities

You define the challenge you are taking on based on what you have learned about yourself and the things that make you happy. Your goal is to craft an actionable problem statement, that is, the explicit expression of the problem you are trying to solve (in this particular case, sticking to your New Year’s Resolution from beginning to end.

A good way to get started in crafting an actionable problem statement is asking contrarian questions. PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel described well the advantages of asking contrarian questions in his book “Zero to One”. For instance, if your New Year’s Resolution is to start a new business, because you identified in the previous step that this activity will make you happy, then the contrarian question would be:

What valuable company is nobody building?

You define by taking the following steps:

2.1 Formulate contrarian questions to the list of things you wrote make you happy

2.2 Answer each of the questions, providing you with an INSIGHT about yourself that you did not have before

2.3 Based on the insights about yourself, postulate your value proposition (New Year’s Resolution) and frame it as a promise of utility (if I do ‘x’ I will obtain ‘y’), and as a promise of feeling (doing ‘x’ makes me feel ‘y’).

When you ideate, your focus is on generating solutions to address your challenge of sticking to your resolutions. Here, you generate the broadest range of possibilities keeping in mind that the best solution will be determined later through testing and feedback. Your aim is to get obvious ideas/solutions out of the table, forcing you to consider the previously unexplored.

You ideate by taking the following steps:

3.1 Create as many ideas /solutions as possible by suppressing your judgment — you do this by separating the generation of ideas from the evaluation of ideas -

3.2 According to the Hassso Plattner Institute of Design at Standford, categorize your ideas into “the most likely to succeed”, “the rational choice”, and “the most unexpected”

3.3 Maintain your innovation potential by bringing several ideas forward rather than setting on a single idea from the beginning

You prototype when you iterate in the generation of artifacts to answer the set of questions that will get you closer to your final solution. A prototype can be anything you can interact with, anything you can experience. It is better to start building low-resolution prototypes that are quick and economically feasible to create but at the same time can originate useful feedback from you.

It is essential that you bring several ideas into prototyping to preserve your innovation potential because, physical artifacts or experiences allows for non-linear thoughts to take place.

You prototype by taking the following steps:

4.1 Start prototyping by building the physical manifestation of your ideas for YOU to interact with

4.2 Identify what is that you are testing with each prototype

You test when you create the opportunity to learn about your solution and YOURSELF. Test is when you obtain feedback about the prototypes you created and your interaction with them

Test within the real context of your life. For a physical object, take it with you wherever you can and use it within your normal routine. For an experience, test under different scenarios and conditions. Testing is your chance to adjust and refine your solutions and make them better.

Testing is about failing forward because you learn for the feedback you get about the prototypes you created. This mindset will keep you engaged and committed in finding the right solution for you to keep up with your New Year’s Resolution.

You test by taking the following steps:

5.1 Use and experience each of your prototypes and interpret your interaction with them

5.2 Ask your close co-workers, family members and friends how they perceive you when testing different prototypes you created for yourself: do they notice a positive change in behavior or mood from you?

5.3 Assess each prototype in their capacity to help you keep up with your New Year’s Resolution

You iterate when you cycle through the above process multiples times. Iteration is fundamental in order to achieve good design, that is, you come up with a methodology that really works for you in sustaining you resolution throughout the year, improving and refining with each iteration cycle. By iterating, you make the process your own, adapting your style and work habits.

Iteration is the most challenging aspect of the design thinking process because it demands from you several rounds of attempts until you reach the solution that best works for you.

And, there is one more thing …

I want to close this article by citing a fragment from the Talmud that I believe is aligned with the spirit of design thinking as discipline:

Pay attention to your thoughts, because they become words

Pay attention to your words, because they become actions

Pay attention to you actions, because they become your habits

Pay attention to your habits, because they become your character

Pay attention to your character, because it is your fate

Happy New Year!

References:

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Standford. An introduction to design thinking process guide: accessed on December 1, 2015.

Warren Berger (2010). The four phases of design thinking. Harvard Business Review: accessed on December 2, 2015.

Mikael Krogerus & Roman Tschappeler (2012). The decision book. Published by Norton & Company Inc.

Alex Osterwalder et al. (2014). Value proposition design. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Peter Thiel & Blake Masters (2014). Zero to one. Published by Crown Business.

John Kolko (2015). Design thinking comes of age. Harvard Business Review: September Issue.

Frederic Lenoir (2015). Happiness: a philosopher’s guide. Published by Melville House.

Aaron Otani (2015). A behavioral approach to product design. Medium: accessed on December 7, 2015).