Design Thinking: Who Is Your End User?

I started ministry in new church development. While most people think you should actually know what you’re doing to start a new church, there were times I think it helped I didn’t know my hindquarters from a hole in the ground. I had the advantage of knowing I didn’t know much.

While not a total blank slate, you could say I was pretty open to any idea that might help. One of the most helpful people at the time was a local pastor named Larry Coulter. Larry and I probably had some theological differences, but he didn’t care. He helped me anyway. One of the best things he taught me: you can love people fully while still acknowledging they bring different gifts and liabilities to what you’re trying to accomplish. He taught me to avoid becoming a dog at a whistler’s convention (something really easy for a pastor to do) by thinking of the people we serve as falling into four rough categories: very creative people, very influential people, very supportive people, and very draining people. (N.B. As children of God, they are all very important people, Larry would say. And one of the best things about Larry is he doesn’t just say that. You always feel genuine love from him.)

When leaders aren’t thoughtful about how we spend our time, we will wind up hanging around the very supportive people and very draining people around 80% of the day, Larry would say. The supportive people are just there all the time. And the draining people…sigh. Yeah. They are, too. The influentials and creative wind up getting around 20%.

But when you are leading change, he said, you have to flip this upside down. You need to consciously seek out the influentials, the people whose approve you REALLY need to get things done whether they serve an official body or not, and the creatives, the people with the best ideas. Leaders need to be the bridge, because in most systems influentials think creatives are nuts, and creatives resent the power these stodgy influentials wield.

I still find Larry’s wisdom to be among the most helpful things anyone shared with me. The design thinking class I’m in has added a dimension to this way of thinking I hadn’t considered.

In the last piece I wrote about the importance of empathy in design thinking- that all good thinking starts by caring about and putting oneself in the shoes of the people we want to serve. The antiseptic terms design thinkers and business types use for this person is end user. While I’m not a fan of how the term “end user” hits my ears, it is helpful. In technology end users are the people intended to ultimately use a product or service, and it stands in contrast to the folks who spend time maintaining the product. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how there might be tension between designing technology for end users versus designing it to be easy for the folks who maintain it.

This distinction provided me with an insight. While Larry’s thinking is good and right on- it’s missing something important. As I received it Larry’s four-fold division treats church members and adherents as the end user. The creatives, influentials, supportive, and draining folks are all people you see on Sunday morning.

But what if we see the people who show up on Sunday morning as the maintaining users and not as the end users? What if the real end users of the church have no intention of darkening our doors on Sunday morning?

Tim Brown, President and CEO of IDEO, the design thinking consulting company tells a really helpful story in his book: Design to Change. The bike company Shimano was working with IDEO to help break them free from a stall they were having. Normally, Shimano grew by staying one step ahead of their competition by incorporating newer and better technology. For years, however, this was no longer working. They approached IDEO probably hoping that the design wizards could help their engineers see some overlooked technological possibility, but they got was something much better.

IDEO design thinkers focused not on the technology but on the people who rode bikes. In their research they learned something astonishing: 90% had good memories of riding a bike growing up but stopped riding as adults. 90%! Most normal people had good feelings about riding bikes, but were put off by the complexity and expense of bikes today, and they put off by the experience of going to a cycle shop filled with condescending obsessives wearing weird clothes. IDEO helped Shimano shift (no pun…well, ok, pun intended) their focus on the 10% of cycling enthusiasts as the end user to the 90% of people who had good feelings towards bikes but didn’t ride them as the end user.

Shimano still made high end hardware for the most discriminating among the cycling elite. But their incredible growth came when they started to focus on all of these normal people who wanted something easier to use, less expensive, and more fun. Shimano wound up creating new coasting technology that paired a kind of sophisticated automatic transmission to the retro feel of coasting bikes, and Brown remembers this as one of the most successful partnerships of IDEO’s storied history.

The church today is in a similar spot. Most of the time we compete among ourselves for an ever-shrinking number of “religious” people. These are like the cycling elite Shimano naturally wanted to please. Meanwhile, we spend precious little time talking to and learning about the vast majority of normal people out there, people who might have vaguely positive feelings about what some of us are doing, but might be put off by some of the practices we don’t even know we’re doing. What would it take for us to begin to spend at least some of our time with these end users?