Comstock's magazine 1119 - November 2019 | Page 72

n WORKPLACE
arra DeGraff and Adrian Vazquez have an unusual
way of finding creative solutions and encouraging
innovation in the workplace. They laugh. They play.
They goof around. And they encourage everyone else
in the room to do likewise.
Bumbling and fumbling — not having all the answers — are
good things too, at least for a time, they say. In fact, embracing
“clashing perspectives” is something that’s encouraged.
DeGraff, who is based in Sacramento, and Vazquez, the
cofounders of InterTidal, use design thinking to help improve
workplaces. They see design thinking as a way to solve cru-
cial problems that might be holding companies and agencies
back, whether the challenge is how to have more productive
meetings or how to come up with the right product design to
win over their target customer.
Design thinking, one of the hottest methodologies when
it comes to innovation, is embraced by many business leaders
as a way to deal with the complex and competitive 21st-cen-
tury workplace. But there are critics who say the process can
be misunderstood or misused by those who simply go through
the motions without doing the required deep dives to arrive at
new and profound solutions. And some suggest good old-fash-
ioned brainstorming and conceptualizing work just fine too.
One of the challenges is figuring out what design think-
ing is. Is it just another form of brainstorming? Researching
and responding to consumer demand? Getting constructive
feedback on new designs? It’s all that and then some, with an
emphasis on welcoming new — and often unusual — ideas
without someone else immediately shooting them down.
“Design thinking basically is a creative methodolo-
gy for solving problems,” says DeGraff, who learned the
approach at Stanford University’s D.school. “It is inher-
ently human-centered — sometimes it is referred to as
human-centered design. It starts with the end user in mind.
There’s a bias toward action, so you start with prototyping
early, getting things made out of inexpensive materials into
people’s hands early on to gather feedback and then iterate
from there. It’s a design process where instead of sitting in a
room for months or years and spending millions of dollars
on research and talk to make a final product, you prototype
early on and get user feedback.”
Yes, iterate — to say or do again and again — is a word you’ll
likely have on the tip of your tongue if you want to get design
thinking — and its lingo — down pat. In countless treatises on
design thinking, iterate comes up, well, again and again.
The idea of the prototype is key to design thinking.
Non-designers can get in on the action too. You can make a
model, write a story, create a workflow chart and so on. The
idea is to get the prototype out there and gather all kinds of
feedback before proceeding.
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comstocksmag.com | November 2019
“You can prototype anything. You can prototype process-
es,” DeGraff explains.
“Instead of drawing it up on the board, you can get peo-
ple to act it out,” adds Vazquez, who has an undergraduate
degree from Bard College and taught improvisational theater
at UC Berkeley.
USING HUMOR TO UNLOCK CREATIVITY
Leena Riggs, marketing manager for Visit Rancho Cordova,
says her agency hired InterTidal after experiencing DeGraff’s
approach at a board of directors retreat a year earlier. “She
really challenged the way our board members (approach)
problems and think things through,” says Riggs. “We knew
we wanted to bring her back.”
During the InterTidal experience, tourism general man-
agers and sales associates soon found themselves doing and
saying things in unconventional ways. An exercise that be-
gan with someone portraying a falling leaf led to Riggs jump-
ing into a circle as a pumpkin, followed by another colleague
stepping up as a witch. And, no, this was not summer camp
for middle school kids. Another exercise had participants
write down their assumptions about others and physically
push away the pieces of paper — they were invited to shred
or burn them later.
“The exercises they do don’t seem related at first,” says
Riggs, “but they help create a secure environment because
we’ve all just been a little silly and a bit more vulnerable.”
When it came time to brainstorm, at the urging of De-
Graff and Vazquez, the mindset had shifted from “OK, but”
to “Yes, and.”
To DeGraff and Vazquez, using improv is simply a way to ex-
plore, discover and gather ideas — and getting clients to loosen
up enough to say and do things outside their comfort zones.
“Instead of being the kind of consultants who come in
and say, ‘This is what’s wrong,’” DeGraff says, “we come in
and say, ‘Let’s find what’s wrong. You all know what’s wrong
or can figure it out.’ We’re leveraging many brains in the
room instead of one Ivy League grad (from a more traditional
consulting firm).”
“Design thinking basically is a creative
methodology for solving problems. It is
inherently human-centered — sometimes it is
referred to as human-centered design.”
Marra DeGraff, cofounder, InterTidal