Turns out we would all be better off if we could adopt the mindset that comes naturally to people who design things for a living. So-called “design thinking” is now pervading every aspect of not only business management but life management as well.

In their best-selling new book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans describe how thinking like a designer can enable you to take a broad view of your life as a whole and create an optimized balance between your work life and personal life. Interestingly, the methodology they advocate follows the same principles that I’ve talked about in previous blog posts about the development of new products in your company and the design of your business itself. In other words, design thinking is kind of the all-purpose philosophy for creating or improving anything.

Taking a holistic view of your life rather than making work life and personal life decisions in isolation is highly desirable but too rarely practiced. I’ve seen so many situations where people jump into a new job or start a new company only to find that they’re day to day lives consist of more pain than gain. So, I highly recommend the book to you because it provides some helpful life-planning tools and insights. The overall message is that life is a process not an outcome. And that you can systematically evolve your life in a direction that will optimize satisfaction and fulfillment no matter what your starting point is.

Here are some thoughts about how the core principles of design thinking can be applied to help you create products, new businesses or business improvements, and even a better life:

Designing is Best Done by a Team

We’re all used to the fact that you need a multi-disciplined team to develop a new product. In fact there’s no way to create products without successfully integrating the talents of marketers, designers, engineers, QC specialists, and production people. Same is true for business design and development. It takes a diverse senior management team to move a company forward. Interestingly, Burnett and Evans feel the same applies to life development. In one of the most novel aspects of their approach, they believe “live design is a communal effort” and recommend that you put together your own personal life development team to help you generate the best possible result.

It’s Never Too Early or Too Late to Start

Life design is a life skill and the earlier you learn it the better but it’s never too late. It’s something equally beneficial to high school and college students as it is to recent retirees looking for a meaningful way to spend their remaining years. Similarly designing your business properly from the outset would be ideal but it’s never too late to start getting it on a better track.

It’s a Lifelong Process

Designing is not a one and done proposition. If you want to maintain market share in the juvenile industry, you need to keep improving the performance of your products and your company over time. Life design too is a process of continuous evolution. There are always new problems to solve and new opportunities to address. And just like with products and businesses, it’s best done via a repeating process cycle.

It Always Starts with Truly Understanding How Things Are Going

The first step in any improvement effort is a thorough understanding of current reality. For product development, that’s done by talking to and observing customers to try to identify an unsatisfied need. For a business, you conduct an environmental scan or SWOT analysis. To improve your life, Burnett and Evans recommend assessing your current satisfaction with work, your health, what you do for fun, and your relationships as well as creating a “Good Time Journal” to help you identify what kinds of activities truly engage and excite you.

Then You Dream about the Way Things Could Be

In product development at my company, we used to call this a “Design Goal Definition” which outlined the requirements the new concept had to meet to be acceptable. For business development it’s your ambitious 3 year and 10 year objectives. In Designing Your Life, the authors ask you to create multiple hypothetical job descriptions that incorporate the fulfilling activities you identified in your journal.

Next You Develop the Best Way to Make Your Dream a Reality

In all realms, this involves creating prototypes that can be reviewed with little risk or investment to identify what resonates and what doesn’t. For products, you would be showing prototypes to consumers. For business models, you would test concepts in the real world via small scale simulations. For your life design, the authors suggest you create alternative 5 year “Odyssey Plans” and, with the help of your development team, imagine what it would be like to live those life styles.

Finally You Implement and Move On

Tool up, produce, and ship the product. Start up the new or improved business. Start down your new life path. But in all cases, don’t agonize over whether you made the right decision. Recognize you made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time. And realize that if it doesn’t work the way you hoped, you can learn from it and repeat the cycle again.

As self-development guru Jim Rohn once said, “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you. Not much!” If you’d like me to be part of your life or business development team, take advantage of JPMA’s CEO Mentor Program. Contact Kyle Schaller at kschaller@jpma.org for more information.