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You manage projects every day: build a career, plan travel and vacations. We tell you how to develop design thinking, manage your learning, turn dreams into projects and solve social problems
Why is it important to think in terms of projects?
Projects are all around us. For example, you want a playground in your backyard. An image of the future appears in my head – a safe playground with a swing, on which happy children play. Here a project arises, and people around it. In order for a site to appear, you need to get to know your neighbors, negotiate with the management company, choose a contractor, raise money and control the installation. By managing a project, you are in the middle of the system and influence its parts. The final result depends on you – whether there will be a playground in the courtyard of the house or not.
Design thinking is the ability to clearly see the problem in processes and find optimal solutions, taking into account resources and time. The skill becomes essential for people of all ages and professions. Engineers are taught this at the university: students find and fix faults in installations. State structures and business are actively moving to project management in order not to repeat mistakes, but to anticipate and solve problems.
Design thinking is similar to creative thinking, but differs in the ability to see the image of the future and find a way to it. When managing a project, you decompose the problem into parts, look for connections and contradictions between them, select the appropriate tools to solve this problem. Learn the basics of design and technology, develop critical thinking, self-reflection and other flexible skills.
What is a project?
A project is a problem solved on schedule. We purposefully choose a solution that is limited in time and resources in order to get a unique one-time result. Plan a trip, find a job, build a garage – all projects.
A project starts with a problem or a dream. The problem is the discrepancy between our expectations and reality. We want comfortable roads, but they are broken all over the city, so we consider the road a problem. The dream differs from the problem in a more positive and vivid emotional way. For example, the dream of becoming an astronaut can turn into a project with a specific result.
How to develop design thinking
To develop design thinking, you need to manage projects of varying complexity. Go from simple problems to more complex ones – with stages, delegation and changing conditions.
There are four stages in design thinking:
Together with the trainer of the Association of Trainers of the Russian Youth Union (AT RSM) Anna Apolosova, we selected tools for managing ourselves, people and projects. They will help develop design thinking and solve problems in everyday life.
Managing ourselves
Present routine in the form of projects. A project is a task that cannot be solved in one go. Any project can be divided into tasks, and they can also be considered as projects. Present your current affairs in the form of projects with a goal and deadlines. For example, split the repair in the apartment into several tasks. Pick up materials, buy them or order delivery. Find a contractor or do it yourself. Think about how to optimize the project and solve problems in an optimal way.
Mark Forster, author of Do It Tomorrow, divides projects into two types: long-term and organizational. To make a long-term project, you need to perform similar actions for a long time. For example, learn Spanish or play the guitar. Forster suggests turning them into a daily habit and setting aside time in your schedule.
Organizational projects consist of a series of different activities that will lead to a specific goal. For example, an advertising campaign or the launch of a website. It is better to break such projects into tasks and add them to the to-do list for tomorrow.
Do it gradually. Forster is sure that the worst behavior is to rush between too many tasks and suggests doing things in turn. In a restaurant, you cannot physically eat more than one main course. Do the same with tasks. Set a rule: work on only one task.
To gauge your ability to take turns doing tasks, take a piece of paper and make a list of the things you would like to do someday. Write down things that you can’t get your hands on.
Choose one small task from the list and make two decisions:
Teaching as a project A well thought out plan helps you learn and grow. Think of your education as a big project with small milestones. For such a project, the Artem Gorbunov Bureau came up with a metaphor for the climber’s illusion.
Imagine a high peak and a climber who dreams of conquering it. He is sure that this is the highest peak. A few meters before the peak, the climber feels that he has already learned everything and there is no point in going further, so he turns back. Such a climber will not know that this peak is not at all great. This is the foot of a higher mountain, and beyond it are others. A learning plan helps you see a few high peaks and turn your education into a project.
Let the vertices be the key stages of learning. For each, come up with a goal and set deadlines. Plan your summit as a project: gather sources and find people who will help you develop the skills you need. For example, you want to become an art director. The stages can be professional growth: beginner → designer → senior designer → art director. To do this, you will need books, courses, mentors and colleagues at every stage. This path can be long, but it’s worth it.
Managing people
The main tool for managing people is delegation. You transfer part of the tasks, cases and powers to other people in order to achieve a specific result. So you learn to explain the task to another person, control and accept the result.
Basic delegation. You can delegate simple household tasks to save time for more important things:
Delegating simple household tasks is beneficial if your time is more valuable. For example, you ordered five books from an online store. You can pick them up from the pickup point and spend two hours on it, or pay courier delivery for 400 rubles. Let’s say an hour of your work costs 600 rubles, then two hours spent will cost 1,2 thousand rubles. In such a situation, it is more profitable to order a courier, and spend your free time on freelance, self-education or recreation.
professional delegation. Personal and professional tasks can be delegated to a remote assistant:
You pay a remote assistant for the time it takes to complete a task. For example, you send the abstract of your speech and ask to prepare a presentation in three hours. An assistant can be found through social networks, acquaintances or special services – Profi.ru or YouDo.
If you’re writing articles, you can hire a proofreader to proofread and correct errors. If you run social networks, a content manager who will prepare drafts of posts. To manage complex projects and people, project managers use the Agile system and kanban boards. We talked about them in detail in the article on the skill of lean manufacturing.
To effectively delegate:
Managed projects
Dragon in the dream (dream of the dragon). Dragon in the dream is developing a new project management culture focused on personal growth, community development and the environment. The method was developed in Australia by John Croft and Vivienne Elanta, an environmental foundation.
Project management in Dragon in the dream is not limited to planning and action. The project begins with a shared dream and ends with a shared celebration. This is the main value of the approach – participants gather, dream, thank each other, celebrate their own growth and the growth of colleagues.
Project management in Dragon in the dream is represented as a four-part wheel:
Parts keep changing. If we imagine this cycle in the form of lived days, it turns out that at night in a dream we dream, in the morning we plan, in the afternoon we do, and in the evening we celebrate and thank ourselves. The first and last stages are best spent in unusual places, adding team rituals to the meeting. This will build trust and open up the team from within.
Social project. In a social project, people come together to solve a social problem that worries them. For example, bad ecology, an abandoned park, an inaccessible environment for people with limited mobility, homeless animals. Even a small social project will help develop project, people, and self-management skills.
In the RSM project “Development Space” we have developed a set of cards for social design, which help to manage the project step by step.
The set is based on a map of a social project, consisting of nine stages:
A social project starts with a dream. A dream will help to outline the image of the future, find a social problem, come up with an idea and bring it to life. For example, in your city there is a large abandoned park where you want to relax and spend your free time. Most likely, other townspeople also want to walk there. You need to find them and come up with a solution to the problem together. To restore the park, you can remove the garbage, organize free festivals and tours in the park, find partners who will restore the benches and lanterns. Through such a project, you will pump a set of flexible ones, learn how to manage projects, benefit society and yourself.
Project Cycle Checklist
Together with her colleagues, trainer Anna Apolosova prepared a checklist for the project cycle. He will help to come up with, plan and make a project.
To learn how to manage projects