Design Thinking or Designing Your Thinking- What is needed for CIO's Survival

Manish Sinha, Head-IT, Vectus Industries

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Designing Your Thinking is pre­sent in most of the cases as dependency over others. Lots of C-suite Executives are still influenced by others. They quote the same statements every­where and are pre-fed with the ex­cuses for their poor performance and growth.

But is it really true? We still see new inventions and big ideas gener­ated by IT teams that CIOs are mov­ing to board rooms. What are others lacking? They do realize that they’re missing the creativity from their daily routine. Or do they see them­selves as mere procurement manag­ers? What is their future road map to sustain in the job market for next 10-20 years?

We know that we work with our minds but we don’t really pay atten­tion to how mind works and designs our thinking. Our mind is respon­sible for our actions and our actions are the reason for our success and failure. So how can we Design our Thinking for success and convert our habits as an autopilot mecha­nism for a successful life?

Have you ever tried to dig out the main culprit for stopping your growth? Recall whenever you made a decision after many consultations, what triggered you to take final call; take a pause and think- yes, it is your mind!

Your mind is a recording machine and there is a powerful engine on top of it which fetches more results than speed of light. Imagine a scenario where you had a negative experience or a bad feeling about a situation. As soon as you stay engaged with it for more than 17 seconds, you start getting insights or pictures in your mind of another similar negative in­cidents of your life in a fraction of seconds and you start feeling worse about the situation.

Now, imagine your current life scenario, everything is moving to cloud, outsourcing is booming and most of the CIOs are researching about ways to sustain their job, whether they should start looking for an alternative job or business op­tion. The keywords given to them by their minds are- bad job situa­tion, outsourcing, artificial intel­ligence that helps corporates more than CIOs.

As soon as you take control and change your keywords, you start feeling the change in object’s behav­ior and you would be amazed with his generated ideas and situations. Taking control of your mind helps you come out as a winner. As your subconscious mind is a recording machine that doesn’t have the ability to reject and this recording machine offers pictorial incidents from your conscious mind.

Mind is the real end customer that can take us to new heights or make us a beggar. So why not ap­ply Design Thinking concepts to Design its Thinking. It’s possible by following these steps:

Empathizing: Understanding the needs of users who are like peo­ple around us like our family, soci­ety, team members. Do you have a plan to meet their expectations? It’s essential to maintain peace in your mind or you won’t be able to gen­erate ideas for growth. No matter what is going outside, it’s important maintain calm and feed your mind with the right keywords and give it an outstanding environment.

Defining: Re-framing and defin­ing the problem in human-centric ways means to meet the expecta­tions. What you do can be an innova­tive idea to solve a business or social problem. If it is a social problem then we step back due to lack of resources most of the time. The key is to keep pushing your mind; it will start gen­erating ideas to overcome problems after so many iterations. In the begin­ning, we don’t want to take the pain but we have to push to perform when it comes to review and management.

Ideating: Creating ideas in idea­tion sessions. The completion of above steps helps you in meeting peo­ple, takes you to places and gives you indirect support. Things like reading books, listening to songs gives you ideas and helps you change the way you manage situations.

Prototyping: Adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping. When you are right track in giving correct inputs to your mind, you design your own road map 5-10 years down the line. In your vision itself, you’ll know about your short comings, where you lack in your approach and attitude to win your game whether its your pres­entation style, public speaking, team spirit, skill set.

Testing: Develop a prototype/so­lution to the problem. Form a mas­termind group, which constitutes of the people who have overcome these situations and would be present in your own circle. But you never paid attention to them because of your ego. Use this group to take consola­tions, call them fortnightly and you will feel that your has mind started helping you. These people would be supplying right keywords to your mind search engine.

These can help take you from Design Thinking to Design Your Thinking.

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