Design your Jiu-Jitsu
According to Interaction Design Foundation: “Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. Understanding the five stages of Design Thinking will empower anyone to apply the Design Thinking methods in order to solve complex problems that occur around us — in our companies, in our countries, and even on the scale of our planet.”
Design Thinking
Design thinking represents one of the most powerful tools in innovation processes, without it innovation and competitive advantage becomes a lot more difficult. As engineer I find easier dealing with a problem using the analytical thinking, it sticks to solving a problem by using data and making sense out of it and forming rich insights or patterns. Design thinking on the other hand goes further and turns that information you learned and mixes it up with creativity and design skills to come up with some innovative.
A well balanced process of both analytical and Design Thinking could be the success formula you are looking for.
The five stages of Design Thinking, according to the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school), are as follows: Empathize, Define (the problem), Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
It is important to note that the five stages are not always sequential — they do not have to follow any specific order and they can often occur in parallel and be repeated iteratively.
As a passionate practitioner of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the last of the ways I would consider the “Arte-Suave” is as a problem, but at the same time I find it fascinating how the design thinking methodology can be combined with the development of one’s own jiu-jitsu
Empathize and Define
The first stage of the Design Thinking method is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. In this phase we focus on collecting the factors that will help us to better define the “problem” and in our case our jiu-jitsu style. For example, it can happen that you train in less than optimal conditions, train focused on a competition, be more or less stressed, as well as prefer one technique over another. It is essential to empathize with yourself in order to gain insight into your needs. All these factors will help us to define both in the short and in the long term what is the style of jiu-jitsu that we want to develop considering that it is essential for us to actually have a sense of desirability towards our jiu-jitsu solution. As obvious as it may seem, listening to your body, empathizing with yourself and then adapting your jiu-jitsu is one of the most important parts of the practice. The more one goes on with the practice, the more one acquires self-awareness; in fact, for example, we can observe less experienced practitioners who very often tend to stop at the first signs of still unknown pain or at least worry (not that it is incorrect), while more advanced practitioners also train in conjunction with more or less serious injuries. In the conditions described it is therefore essential to better define “the problem”, and therefore we must put together the information we have created and collected during the Empathize phase. This is where you will analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the central problems you have identified up to this point. Returning to the case of the experienced practictioner, the correct definition of the problem will allow him to prefer one approach in training rather than another, decide to do sparring with lighter or heavier people, etc.
Ideate
I like to think of jiu-jitsu as a way of expressing yourself, a very creative way, the deeper you go into the practice the more you come into contact with the myriad of techniques and styles that can be explored. Despite not considering myself as a creative person, I find the ideate phase as the most beautiful phase in which you are able to draw from many sources so as to sew the style of jiu-jitsu that suits you best. After understanding your needs in the Empathize phase, and analyzing and summarizing your observations in the Define phase, you are ready to start generating ideas about your style and approach. One of the most brilliant examples of the Ideate phase regarding to jiu-jitsu is the experience of the Brazilian black belt Roberto “Gordo” Correa. After a knee injury he found that regular guard work was too difficult and painful, and began experimenting with half guards instead. He found that by putting himself on his side, fighting for holds and connecting a series of sweeps he could keep his opponents on the run. Major competition victories soon followed. Ideating and developing a new style of jiu-jitsu in this case arises from the necessity that is analyzed and synthesized in the two initial phases.
Although the most common tools of this phase are not traditionally used in jiu-jitsu (brainstorming, worst possible idea etc), there is a great possibility of drawing on online sources as well as comparing with many other practitioners, more or less experienced, so as to collect ideas that will serve as a basis for the prototyping and testing phases.
It is important to underline that the five phases are not always sequential — they do not have to follow any specific order and can often occur in parallel and be repeated iteratively, and in fact in this case, as in many others, the prototype and testing phases can start earlier, later or in parallel to the ideate phase, providing important feedback to it.
Prototype and Test
One of the best ways to gain insights in a Design Thinking process is to carry out some form of prototyping and it is often undertaken concurrently with the Prototyping stage. Testing, in Design Thinking, involves generating user feedback as related to the prototypes you have developed, and that’s exactly what we look for in the design of our jiu-jitsu. When undertaken correctly, the Testing stage can often feed into most stages of the Design Thinking process: it allows you to Empathize and gain a better understanding of yourself; it may lead to insights that change the way you Define your problem statement; it may generate new ideas in the Ideation stage; and finally, it might lead to an iteration of your Prototype. In fact, every time we try a new technique or decide to use a different style from the one we usually use, we explore a new area and the feedback we generate from this experience is essential in order to feed iteratively the different phases previously analyzed. Returning to the example of Roberto "Gordo" Correa, let's imagine that in his transition from a traditional closed guard game to a half guard game he was not successful immediately, but initially he did a lot of testing by failing. Thanks to the feedback from the testing phase, he adjusted his game up to a definitive style. "Fail fast to succeed sooner" is the essential paradox of design thinking. The learning guide embraces that paradox by providing a mechanism to make sure your project isolates the most crucial lessons and learns them in an affordable way.
Conclusions
Although the ultimate goal of sport, for those like me who do not practice it as a profession, is having fun, try to improve while practicing as well as finding the style of jiu-jitsu that suits you best, is one of the goals of training. This research, although complex, is the most beautiful part of this path and thanks to it we will discover a lot about this art but above all about ourselves. Studying the Design Thinking methodology recently, I couldn't help but find many similarities with my way of learning and designing my jiu-jitsu style. Whether you are a practitioner who is approaching the Arte-Suave recently or you are a person with more experience, from my point of view design thinking will come in handy as a powerful and easy-to-use methodology.
Enjoy the jiu-jitsu journey.
