Could Design Thinking help football clubs perform better?

From a young age I have been fascinated with football, every aspect of it, from the tactics, to the business aspect of the game, to the drama of transfer deadline day. As the new football season starts, myself and other football fans around the world become absorbed by the process of choosing our ideal fantasy team. On completion of this yearly ritual, a season of arguing with friends and family is a foregone conclusion, along with the constant subdual of your colleague’s hopes… at least that’s what I do.

Despite my inherent use of mind games, (something that Mr Mourinho is all too familiar with) I can’t help being completely enthused by the start of the season anticipation. The mere build and pre-game hype intoxicates my weekends, to the occasional displeasure of my wife. Maybe in another life I would have been a Football Manager!

However, with no feeling of remorse, my professional life took me into business, where, two years ago I stumbled upon Design Thinking while working for PDAgroup. I was instantly fascinated by the whole concept. The vast array of different tools that could be used to solve challenges was something that captivated me. The more I researched and used the methodology, the more submerged I became in the topic. It was like being a small child again. I was totally energised and couldn’t wait to know more about this fascinating subject.

In the past few weeks I have been thinking that ‘wouldn’t it be great to combine my two passions together’, Design Thinking & Football. Imagine, using the Design Thinking methodology in creating the perfect football team or even club. Design Thinking is much more than product design or service design or even something which is user experience oriented. It’s about amalgamating all of these parts together to create a single vision and strategy that your team or company can truly believe in.

It’s about Strategic Business Thinking! But how would it work? Let’s begin by thinking of a scenario where this could work in the football world, something that is more personable to people but could be transmitted into business.

It's the end of season and your team has finished in the lower mid table of the league again. Everything started off great, but in the end, things just withered away as usual. As is often the case, the management find that they are thinking of what could they have done differently this year? My solution is simple. By using the Design Thinking process they could tackle the challenge of the new season in way that easy to implement and could provide the answers that the team were looking for. The first thing that would need to done would be to build the perfect Design Thinking team. Sounds farfetched I know, but all it would take (in the context of football) would be the right mixture of football coaches, fans and club executives. The football coaches would bring the technical expertise to the team. The fans would bring the user desirability and customer view to the team; remember these are the people that pay to watch their team week in and week out. And lastly, I would include the executives of the club, who would give us the feasibility and business viability to the team and the challenge.

Now that we have the perfect team we could move on to the design thinking process;

We need to be set a challenge in the beginning. Let’s say, the owner of the club has said that he would like the team to gain promotion within the next three years.

1. Scoping – Firstly, we need to understand our challenge. By using context mapping we can quickly understand what the challenges are. It is important to remember that we are looking to understand the challenge here and not solve it. Only by understanding the problem can we truly fix it.

2. Researching – Secondly, we need to gather data, we need to talk to the players, fans and other experts in order to find out what they think about the club. What do they think about the challenge?

3. Point of view – Moving on, we need to group all of our findings. We can now see patterns starting to emerge. At this point we might even discover that the challenge set by the owner might not even be the right challenge. Do we need to go back and rephrase it?

   Only now can we really understand what the actual challenge is, and only now can we start to solve it. This is only possible because we have collected all the data and truly tried to understand the challenge. Maybe there are several challenges! (This would be normal) but as we have clustered all of these together can we now start to answer the problem.

4. Ideation – We now gather our team together and start to brainstorm ideas. It is important to remember that the Design Thinking team might change here and we might include more experts at this stage. It is also imperative that the team keep focused on the true purpose of this exercise. It is very easy for a Design Thinking team to start solving different problems.

5. Strategy Action Plan – Here, we are able to combine our team and develop a Strategy Action Plan based on the best ideas. This is where the meat is put on the bones so to speak like for example; if the club requires a new left back or needs to encourage more supporters to go to away matches. It is then necessary to put these ideas into a workable project/action plan. We might even have several Strategy Action Plans, where these plans would include all the data that is essential for the owner to make an informed decision.

6. Validation – This is where the plan(s) is presented to the owner, and they are able to see how the Design Team has built a solution working within the perimeter that was set at the start of the challenge. We might discover at this point, that challenge needs to be revaluated as it is impossible to be promoted within 3 years with the budget that was given. We might also discover that the challenge could be solved quicker & easier than originally perceived.

The true beauty of Design Thinking is that the club would have several workable Strategic Action Plans to achieve its goal, and also the whole process would include all the major stakeholders of the club. The buy-in would be clear from the players, to the fans, and right up to the executives. Everyone would be on the same page and could work on this clear vision.

The majority of football teams & businesses in the real world don’t have rich benefactors to help them achieve their goals. Maybe Design Thinking could just level the playing field a little?