Dealing with uncertainty through prototyping

Abstract

As the COVID-19 struck, many organizations faced the challenge to rapidly adapt in order to stay relevant. Over night consumers’ needs changed, leaving the organizations in an uncertain environment. The current situation highlights that organizations need approaches that must enable them engage in search activities, in order to find out how to adapt and deal with uncertainty. This thesis was carried out in the context of a strategy design agency. They help their clients to explore how to adapt an organization by designing strategies and new business models. By a design doing approach they help their clients to engage in search activities with a focus on business model innovation. An initial business idea is considered to be a ‘guess’ that needs to be tested. During the search activities a prototyping process is followed to test these ‘guesses’, referred to as assumptions.The prototyping process is carried out by a multidisciplinary team, consisting of employees of the organization from various departments and business designers from a strategic agency. These (validation) teams aim to use prototyping to reduce uncertainty. By carefully deciding what assumptions needs to be tested, an experiment (activity) is designed to do so. Prototypes in the form of artifacts are build to generate learnings. With the use of these learnings, teams can iterate their business model, value proposition and product designs.Initial observations show, validation teams face difficulty to create suitable prototypes, and setups to test these assumptions while uncertainty is only addressed to a limited extent. Underlying assumptions, which are not explicit at first, are seldom considered. To enhance the current practice, a wide range of prototypes are created which are implemented within the context. The implemented prototypes are aimed to enhance the current process, mainly through a digital manner due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through numerous of prototypes, new ways were explored with the intention to enable teams to address uncertainty, and moreover, help to create suitable prototypes. These efforts manifested in enabling teams to utilize prototypes as a straw man within the team or use prototypes to trigger customers in an early stage. These activities helped the team to go beyond testing assumptions, and enabling them to reveal assumptions. Through the practice of revealing assumptions, the prototyping process enables to drive continuous learning, since the newly revealed assumption can influence learnings goals for the next steps.The project also identified obstacles that could hinder a successful use of prototyping, such as a risk avoidance mindset and lacking skills of team members.Eventually, based on the developed prototypes and generated learnings, a boundary object in the form of a digital warroom was designed and presented. So the teams are being enabled to go through the prototyping process to address uncertainty. The embodied approach of the warroom should help teams to drive changes by developing new business models, value propositions with product & services supporting these.