Last Friday, Jason Ulaszek led a class at Junto on Brand Engineering. With his trademark energy and passion, Jason engaged everyone with three design-based activities on customer and employee experiences in order to help engineer their brands:
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creating an Empathy Map to get us thinking about the people we serve;
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creating an Experience Map to show the sales process or recruiting journey through the customer’s or employee’s perspective;
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using the question, “How might we?” to design improvements for a specific stage/activity/moment in the customer’s or employee’s experience.
That question is commonly used in design thinking to solve problems, and I can see why. Despite their simplicity, each word carries gravity and, put together, the power of the three words is exponentially higher.
“How” forces us to be open-ended and stay focused on strategies and tactics. “Might” enables us to consider any and all possibilities without worrying about capacity or capability. And “We” makes it communal, bringing in others to work with us and proving that this process shouldn’t be a solitary experience.
Rather than just use “How might we?” to solve problems and design experiences, I realized that it can be a powerful question to help us reflect on anything we want to improve, large or small.
How might we run better meetings? How might we make a difference? How might we lead more authentically? How might we be more effective as life and business partners? How might we make a better decision? How might we save more money?
How might we make this a powerful week?
