We human beings, have this perception that our needs and desires are known to us. We are well connected with what we want. Quite the contrary actually. In fact, when we were young, we had things to say like, I want to rule this country, I wish to travel to the moon and so on. In the process of growing up these have changed to things like, I need a new car. I want to holiday in Venice this year. I need to visit my parents this summer. I wish they would come live with me. This list of wants and needs and wishes loosely become our goals. Trying to achieve them loosely translates into ambition. Yet somewhere in all this, we hear a lot of people around us who despite having fulfilled their wish lists, seem ‘unfulfilled’. As if something was missing, some desire yet not met. What would that desire be? Yawn, yawn……..will think about this tomorrow………there’s a whole checklist of stuff to be done before I call it a day. Such a typical dialogue in everyone’s heads. Where is the time to think about why the un-fulfilment, why the incompleteness.
Maybe, there are some desires that are so deep down that they don’t find a reference in our checklists. Neither in our ‘things to achieve before I turn 40’. They are too un-identified, too un-articulated and therefore forever un-met. There’s a whole bunch of people who’d agree to this instantly. Take the whole community and you’ll hear a louder roar of yaays. So, it is such a prominent feature of people? To have tons of unarticulated needs? Sure. Routine, transactions, mundanity keeps us occupied. With activities. There is literally no time to stop and think. Slowly, lack of time is replaced by intent. If everything is going fine, the intent disappears. Till such time that an unfortunate wake-up-call thingy happens, we will happily fade behind the anonymous state of existence.
Organizations (a collection of people) are no different. As long as everyday routine keeps the organization busy, all is well. To shake the status quo, it takes much more than a small wedge in the wheel. The whole lot of people running the organization have each got a list of un-articulated needs and desires that if met can bring up the ‘fulfilment’ quotient of each one and thus of the organization. Imagine having one big happily fulfilled company rather than not. Approaching a biggish goal along with these small yet important fulfilled desires will be so different than hurtling towards this very goal with several compromises, unhappy team-mates, escalated situations and such more chaos.
People are at the heart of all innovation. Placing them at the center of all future plans is pivotal to any success story. Using this very basic theory, we at AAKIT love using the people-centric Design Thinking approach to understand what and where everyone around us are headed. Design Thinking helps us ensure we have collaborated with people to understand their latent, unarticulated and unmet needs. It gives people a platform to identify their unidentified problems. And further it ensures, we are headed towards finding the solutions to these problems and not just already-articulated ones.
Here’s more happiness to you all!
