Design Thinking at Cisco
Cisco is a multinational company that develops and sells networking equipment for large organizations and telecommunications companies. It is a conglomerate of businesses under one brand. As a global leader in information technology, Cisco helps smaller companies communicate and network between themselves and giants in different areas.
The company was founded in 1984 in San Francisco by two computer scientists. It now sells its solutions through a partner network of 2,000 representatives. In 2018, it grew to nearly $50 billion in revenue. Their team is a multilingual, multicultural community of 135,000 employees working in 100 countries on 4 continents.
Cisco used to be able to overcome any challenges with just their name. But now conditions have changed. The market is changing very rapidly, and at any moment a small company may appear and offer an innovative solution and quickly grow into a serious competitor.
Then Cisco began to look for other solutions and came up with design thinking.
In the business context, design is the creation of a solution. Steve Jobs said, “Design is not how something looks or how it feels. It’s how something works.”
Design thinking is what will allow you to use more empathic solutions to solve problems. In business, it’s those solutions that understand the user first, and help solve their specific problems. It always starts with empathy and appears at the intersection of three aspects: human, technology and business.
What is design thinking
Doug Dietz of GE Healthcare designed a new MRI machine. He was very proud of his invention because he put all his knowledge and skills into it. The machine has received many awards and recognitions. And, of course, the author couldn’t wait to see it in action.
The first machine was installed at a local hospital at the University of San Francisco, and the first patient was a 6-year-old girl. She came to the examination with her parents, didn’t want to let go of their hands and was even shaking with terror.
Dietz was shocked because he didn’t expect his invention to provoke such a negative reaction. What struck him even more was that the doctor working with the machine had to use anesthesia to get the girl through the examination after all. At the time, anesthesia, an expensive and dangerous procedure, was used in 80 percent of examinations of young patients.
Then Dietz realized that he had created an MRI machine for medical diagnostics, but completely overlooked the user, which could be such a little girl. To solve the problem, the developer reached out to pediatricians, teachers, and even a children’s museum at Stanford University. He observed children in different situations. And he realized that a flight of fancy – a creative process – is important for children.
Based on this idea, Dietz modified his machine – he hung pictures and stickers on the machine, around it and even on the way to his office, and created different stories for each of his machines. He invented a whole world in which he immersed the child even before the procedure, and the patient wanted to become a hero of that world, not to be afraid of the examination.
Thanks to this approach, the use of anesthesia was reduced from 80% to 2 cases a year. At the same time, nothing has changed in the technology itself. In fact, they just decorated the machine to make the user more comfortable with it.
When we elevate the user to the first place and try to find a solution that will be comfortable for him, then we are really solving the problems of ordinary people.
Cisco appreciated the design thinking and created a unique system, where any client can come to a special division of the company and, talking to specialists, create a specific solution.
They no longer say, “Here is our solution – buy it.” They say, ‘Let’s meet and solve the problem together. Out of that was born a whole business process that increased their conversion rate.
This application is just one example. Design thinking can also be used internally, within teams, to build internal processes.
