An incredulous story in design thinking

If you are open to the incredulous, what happens to you could be incredible.

Well, that's exactly what and how I felt as I was listening to Dr. Kaustubh Dhargalkar as he shared the example of applied Design Thinking at Mahindra Finance in what was a simple and profound way of designing and presenting a session on Design Thinking that Arun Vishwanath - CPF, CPC, PCC and team at the Trainers Forum organised today as part of the monthly Learning Over Breakfast session.

One may wonder: How can an innocuous motorcycle form an important lynchpin in your designing a learning and training programme for more than 12,000 field agents of Mahindra Finance? After all, won't the learning and development in-charges of any company know more than others? Aren't they supposed to know more than others?

But there's a lot you could learn from ethnography, shadowing and a 'day in the life of...' methods.

Well that's what we learnt from Dr. Dhargalkar's Mahindra Finance story, one of the many he shared from his book: "It's Logical: Innovating Profitable Business Models".

The session also reiterated for me why I never liked a traditional, highly regimental, dictatorial school system that was obsessed with rote learning and mugging in a blind, deaf and dumb manner.

It emasculates the natural curiosity and experimental mindset that children are born with; all in the name of some irrational conformities and standardised testing and evaluation systems that are arbitrary, irrelevant and counter-productive.

Curiosity and an experimental mindset for me are akin to the customer-centric empathic inquiry and rapid prototyping that are part of the design thinking process.

But I was glad to learn from Dr. Dhargalkar that design thinking is forming part of the curriculum under the Atal Innovation Mission in schools where tinkering labs are being introduced.

And then I was even more glad to have conversed with someone today who is a mentor to some 150 teachers are part of the tinkering labs.

As part of the active participation from the 200+ participants today, I also came to learn about an interesting book titled: 'Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People' by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald.

Once again, thanks a lot Arun and team for your commitment to building our community of learners, trainers, facilitators, coaches and organisational development professionals with your Trainers Forum and Book Lovers Club activities.

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