Introducing the Open Competency Model for Design Thinking
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
The Open Competency Model for Design Thinking is now available to the public.
You can access it here.
We chose design thinking for our first published open competency model as design thinking is relevant to many different roles and jobs. In recent years. Some the areas where this approach is applied in business are …
Innovation - generally construed
Product Innovation
Service Innovation
Customer success
Revenue generation
Organizational design
Learning design
Design thinking is also applied to social problems. Some common examples are
Education
Poverty
Housing
Food Supply
Design thinking is a recursive process. That is to say, design thinking can be applied to design thinking to improve the process itself. It is not static.
This competency model is based on the IDEO-Stanford d.school process. You can learn more about this approach here. We chose this model as it is what people are most often referring to when they say ‘design thinking’ as we have found in several surveys of the 172,000 person LinkedIn Design Thinking group that Ibbaka manages.
This is not the only approach to design thinking, and it is not appropriate in all circumstances. For a broader view of design thinking see G.K. VanPatter’s excellent book Rethinking Design Thinking and for an alternative see the Frame Innovation introduced by Kees Dorst..
What is in the design thinking competency model?
This model uses the common architecture we have developed for our open competency models. See Designing the open competency model architecture.
Jobs - In this approach, we include jobs as suggestions and make no attempt to be comprehensive. We do this because most organizations will want to create their own job descriptions that are specific to their organizational design, values and the details of their work.
Roles - Roles are one of the most important components in our open competency models. Jobs can be thought of as bundles of roles. But that is not all, roles can also be team or project roles. There are also ad-hoc roles (‘I am doing that off the side of my desk.’) Roles are critical building blocks for jobs, teams and work in general.
We have tried to identify the key roles that are reused most often. We may add other roles to this model if we see more roles showing up in our platform.
Behaviors - We have done something a bit unusual in the Open Competency Model for Design Thinking. We have mapped behaviors to the six steps in the IDEO-Stanford design thinking process. We did this for two reasons: (i) to have an explicit way to represent the process and (ii) having observed hundreds of design thinking teams over the years, we believe that these are much closer to observable behaviors than they are to steps in a formal process.
Note that some versions of the process include a sixth step, Implement. We decided not to include this as it tends to be very doman and solution specific.
Skills - At this point there are more than 50 different skills documented in the model and connected to Roles and Behaviors. These skills, or more accurately KSAs (Knowledge, Skill, Attitude) conform with the US National Institute of Standard and Technology guidance on Task Knowledge Skill (TKS) Statements Authoring Guide for Workforce Frameworks.
The general approach is to have
the NIST skill (or knowledge or attitude) statement
A simple description to provide more context
Links to external resources for those who want to learn more
Learning Resources - We are going through and adding learning resources. We are generally doing this as the level of the Skill as this is how to give the most direct guidance, though we will also be adding this at the role level in certain cases.
Why no tasks? - Competency models often include tasks. Note that the NIST document referenced above refers to Task Knowledge and Skill statements. In our experience, the actual tasks in design thinking work tend to be specific to the domain and organization. We are happy to help you add tasks to your own version of this model.
How to use the design thinking competency model?
The design thinking model is meant to be explored. Click around and see how the Roles, Behaviors and Skills are connected and support each other.
You can use the model directly as you develop a design thinking capability within your organization. The roles are the key here. Ask …
What jobs would benefit from adding one of the design thinking roles?
What projects need design thinking in order to deliver more value?
Do we need to have formal ‘design thinking’ projects?
Individuals can also use this model to develop their own skills. Ask …
Is design thinking part of my job today? Should it be? Will it be tomorrow?
Which of the design thinking roles do I play? Which do I aspire to play?
What skills do I feel passionately about. No one will be an expert on all of these skills, nor need they be. Pick the skills that resonate with you and develop expertise.
Every organization and every individual will have their own approach to design thinking. Your design thinking skills will not be the same as mine and that is a good thing.
We are experimenting with the idea of personal competency models at Ibbaka. Over the summer we will open up Ibbaka Explorations for people who want to join us on this journey.
Eventually you may want to create your own version of this model, in fact we encourage you to do so.
Evolving and combining the design thinking competency model
This model is meant to get you started. Most organization’s will want to take this model and customize it for their own goals and circumstances.
There are several ways that you may want to do this. The most common customizations are to
Add design thinking roles to jobs
Add new roles, that you need for jobs or teams that are applying design thinking
Add new behaviors specific to your approach
Add new skills for the domains and disciplines you are active in
Add tasks to the model, to connect it to your own business processes
Pruning can be as important as adding. In your custom model you may want to remove (or switch off) certain parts of the model to focus it for your own purposes.
If you are willing to share your model under the same Creative Commons license that this model is provided under we are happy to host this for you.
If you would like to keep your model private as it is part of your competitive strategy, or because you need to integrate it with other parts of your ecosystem, you can subscribe to the Ibbaka Talent Platform.
The Ibbaka Talent Platform also lets you connect the competency model to skill profiles. This is where competency. models really come to life. For example, by connecting a Role to a Profile one can see if an individual has the skills needed for the role and design a development plan to close any gaps.
At an organizational level, one can use competency models to find where the talent you need to introduce design thinking as a core capability may exist in your own organization.
