Use design thinking to solve wicked problems

In 2017, Maurizio Bussi, Director of the ILO Country Office for Thailand added, “The result (of disruption) is the risk of increased informality and subsistence service sector jobs, leading to a decline in overall labour productivity and the threat of premature de-industrialisation.” And, to add to the depth of the challenge we face in Thailand, the World Economic Forum article entitled “We may have less than 5 years to change how we learn, earn and care” estimates that 65 per cent of children entering primary school will be required to perform jobs that do not exist today and for which their current education will fail to prepare them. 
In Design Thinking, this is what we call a Wicked Problem ie one that is highly complex and which has serious consequences. The threat of “premature de-industrialisation” has many profound implications in a world that is speeding to even more technological innovations and a quickly ageing society. 
The nature and scope of this design challenge requires us to use design thinking in a much more systemic way that includes systems thinking and strategic foresight.
One of the first steps in Design Thinking is to discover and understand the nature of the problem. This step is the most pivotal in shaping a design challenge and requires the skill of defining the best possible questions to frame the problem or opportunity. The first question to ask is how do we define the right questions to better understand the system that we see the problem in? As the management guru Peter Drucker famously observed, “The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is in asking the wrong question.” 
So, how do we get started on asking the right questions? Here is just a beginning set of questions we might consider. Who are the major stakeholders in this Wicked Problem? How many of these stakeholders could be completely disrupted in the future, so making their influence in designing a solution irrelevant? Is the potential optimal solution best created within in the system or outside of it or as a hybrid? 
I was stimulated to raise these questions by a unique educational experiment that recently began in Silicon Valley. 
This is the development of the Design Tech High School, a free public chartered high school which adheres to the same set of curriculum standards as every other public high school in the state of California. However, it differs from other public high schools in one important experimental area – it teaches its students to employ the principles of design thinking in problem solving. 
This “design thinking based” high school is fully supported by Oracle as well as other volunteers and organisations. 
Over 500 students have been enrolled ranging from the 9th to the 12th grades and were selected from an open lottery within the state.
This collaborative approach to Design Tech required many people to reconstruct their beliefs, behaviours and policies about education and the future workforce and take a unique approach to a myriad of related societal and industry challenges! This could also very well become Oracle’s first choice source for recruiting future talent and a model that could disrupt an increasingly irrelevant educational system that appears incapable of making the required changes in time.
Recent discussions in Thailand about the employment impact of disruptive change have often been polarised between those who foresee limitless opportunities in newly emerging job areas and prospects that improve workers’ productivity and liberate them from routine work, and those that foresee massive labour substitution and displacement of jobs. Both are possible, and it is our actions today that will determine where we end up.
There has never been a more perfect storm of opportunity and urgency to unite business and government to act swiftly and boldly to design a plan of resiliency for Thailand’s future. The question is, do we truly recognise the size, urgency, and importance of the challenge ahead? How much time do we really have and how can we act faster and with greater impact by embracing the virtue of doing over the vice of merely talking?

Contributed by WILLIAM MALEK, the Innovation Center Delivery Team Leader at SEAC, Southeast Asia’s leading Executive, Leadership and Innovation Capability Development Centre. He can be reached at [email protected]