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Next Chapter - Broaden The Awareness About Your Challenges The Understanding is the first step of the design thinking process. It is part of the first diamond, And the big twist to innovation. We noticed that if you are not used to work with creative processes and usually work with well-structured plans to solve situations you will probably be going to feel a little uncomfortable at this point. But that's OK, it's normal. The first tip is that in design thinking processes you must work in a group. Groups with a minimum of three people so you can have different perspectives, knowledge and capacities to build a really innovative project. In the design thinking process we use moments of divergence. Moments of divergence are when we create options and moments of convergence are those when we start choosing the options. We´re not in that moment right now, we´re in themmoment of divergence. Where people with a more traditional style, that work with a plan of action feel more uncomfortable. But this is the most important moment to generate creativity. That's when we start to leave common sense placing ourselves in a different place to become creative. The difference between these two thoughts is described by Roger Martin which is one of the greatest authors on design thinking as integrative thinking. When we manage to integrate a Cartesian or convergent way of thinking with an expansive or crazy way of thinking, when we get out of the box creating more options about knowledge areas that we are not used to work with. So we leave specific problems to analyze new references around it. We start to create references regarding the challenge we are working on. Roger Martin talks a lot about integrative and conventional thinkers. The integrative thinkers try to understand the complexity of a challenge. What are the non-linear causes of those challenges. and in what context it is inserted. And at the same time they understand the details of this challenge. That's what we are looking for at the Understanding step. The integrative thinker doesn't accept solutions that are presumed. He tries to bring new solutions at this step. When we are trying to understand a problem we must see it as a whole where does it come from, what is it for and why I am trying to solve it. As an example, if I were trying to develop a new way to bake a cake I would have to understand why people eat cake, where does it come from why a cake is a cake and why people would like to have or bake one. what are the difficulties and where does all the ingredients come from. How the interaction patterns are formed or not. That's what it means to really understand a problem. This is also a very nice moment because the team can share their experiences related to this challenge. So I would talk about my cake experience if I like it or not, what are my preferences. And why do I use it on a daily basis or why I do consume it or not. The others would also share their interactions related to the challenge. Everyone has their own views and this is important to understand the challenge. So we can have common knowledge on the subject. The Understanding is the start and the entrance into the challenge. We believe that at this moment we will start to zoom out where get some distance from the problem seeing it from a far perspective. And also the zoom in where we start analyzing the the details and every aspect of this problem. We can see this very clearly on the video Powers of Ten which was developed by Charles Eames a long time ago and shows the zooming in and out of a problem. It's like a movie when you see the whole and then dive deep to see the details of a challenge. Next Chapter - Powers of Ten Video