Alan is from Curious. We discuss how prototyping has changed how he does business, its relevance to organisational culture and the effect it has on collaboration and innovation.

Alan was introduced to innovation in business school, and has since done a lot of reading and attending events to strengthen his design thinking knowledge. He’s passionate about the education arm of design thinking, especially in entrepreneurial and school environments.

In the past, Alan would spend enormous amounts of time and money on creating perfect, hi-fidelity prototypes. Design thinking has shown him how quickly one can dirty-prototype an idea – that it doesn’t have to be perfect or expensive and that it’s okay to fail. As long as you learn. We explore the benefits low-fidelity prototyping can have for the prototyping team and the client.

We discuss how empathy – a key principle of design thinking that we tap into when creating and testing products or ideas with potential users – pops up in everyday life, and how you can use this in your personal life to make life better for those you interact with.

One topic we touch on is people and their performance in organisations: people who are connected give better results. But how do we design these positive, collaborative cultures? How do we create and foster a culture of innovation in large organisations? Alan describes the design thinking process he applies to change cultures within organisations by starting out small for big impact.

Alan shares some of the tools that have helped him to start culture change. He notes the benefits of the Business Model Canvas as a starting point for a team to map out their shared vision and get aligned and takes us through what he experienced while implementing it.

If you are unfamiliar with design thinking, listen to episode 1, where we discuss the methods and mindsets of design thinking and clear up some of the terminology.