Murray Berghan - Managing Director

1. Murray Berghan Founder & Managing Director of Sensitive Group

2. Extensive experience, professional expertise and a passion for innovation underpin Murray Berghan’s dynamic and creative approach to his role as Managing Director of Sensitive Group. A social enterprise that encompasses Raise Your Spirit, Make Innovation and Make Communications, Sensitive Group is an initiative that provides new ways of thinking to organisations that aspire to make the world a better place. Thinking can be highly beneficial for transforming organizations to develop their services, products, or entire business models. In recent years, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), charities, and social enterprises started to apply thinking like designers, as this approach can bring together what is desirable from a human perspective.

3. I will cover 5 main reasons why Design Thinking should be adopted for social innovations by the above mentioned organizations.

4. It provides a bottom-up solution • Human-centred approach • Co-evolution of the problem and solution • Design thinking is utilized for wicked problems • Practical process

5. It provides a bottom-up solution Nonprofits are beginning to understand that design thinking can help create solutions bottom-up rather than top-down. The method allows working closely with the clients and consumers; thus, design thinking enables high-impact solutions to come up from the lower social levels rather than being imposed from the top. This is preferable when developing a social innovation because the solution emerges within the situation, starts growing, and eventually brings socio-economic changes. Human-centred approach Design Thinking applies a very human-centered approach as it became the fundament of the method. Its creative way ensures that products, services, and processes are rooted in the needs of people, communities, and/or end-users. For this approach, the different viewpoints of people are understood and analyzed, and the solutions are designed from their perspective.

6. Co-evolution of the problem and solution During designing, the creators’ attention commonly goes back and forth between their comprehension of the problem and their ideas for a solution. Therefore the problem and the solution co-evolve together by creating prototypes and a minimum viable product (MVP). Ideas can be constantly developed onto a deeper level. Design thinking is utilized for wicked problems NGOs and social enterprises usually aim to create solutions to the so-called ‘wicked problems. The Design Thinking process can provide a practical approach to resolving these complex problems, such as hunger, poverty, clean water, sanitation, or inequality.

7. Practical process One of the most important advantages of Design Thinking is practicality. The designing process has three basic steps: During the first step, inspiration, people can open up for creative possibilities; learn on the fly, and brainstorm. The ideation step is to select ideas, improve the good ones, test them, and create prototypes. The third and final step is implementing, during which the team can get the idea out to the world, develop partnerships and boost the business model. The process may be thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Projects may loop back through inspiration, ideation, and implementation more than once as the team refines its ideas and explores new directions.

8. I recommend researching more about design thinking regarding NGOs, charities, and social enterprises. They can offer a tangible way to establish the right mindset and bring the necessary changes to social situations.