The Institute of Management Accountants released a pair of reports on how accountants can use design thinking and creative problem-solving to find innovative ways to address issues in their organizations.
Both reports, released last week in conjunction with International Management Accounting Day, are considered Statements on Management Accounting.
The Creative Problem Solving SMA describes a four-step process that leads to unique solutions within a matter of hours by optimizing creative thinking and building upon business partnerships. The methodology provides a framework for companies to identify a challenge, brainstorm solutions, and plan for implementation. Addressing accounting and finance-related challenges through creative problem-solving can help accountants generate ideas in a more inclusive and efficient way, strengthen their strategic decision-making skills and add competitive value to their organizations.
“Creative problem solving provides a really efficient path to solutions,” said Loreal Jiles, vice president of research and thought leadership at the IMA, who co-authored the reports with Marsha Huber, an accounting educator, researcher and IMA member-at-large. “It’s only a few hours to employ the process … . Going through those steps, the goal is to walk out of that session with a real feasible solution identified, and a plan for how to implement that solution, and it takes us a step beyond the traditional solutions or ideas that we might have come up with in the past.”
To come up with more creative ideas, accountants should engage with outside groups who may not be obvious stakeholders to hear a different perspective.
“It’s this notion of being able to intentionally get creative,” said Jiles. “In the past, we thought you just had to be a creative person naturally; it’s accepting the school of thought that creativity can be taught and fostered. It’s engaging diverse stakeholders to understand what’s needed. But the ideation step is beyond traditional brainstorming. You use these unique techniques that force out-of-the box ideas to be generated, which may mean you’re combining ideas that multiple people have, or you’re using things like roleplaying to come up with an idea that you might not have ordinarily thought of. And then the conclusion of it is how do we develop these ideas and evaluate them, narrow them down to the one we think would be best, and how do we identify what steps we need to take to implement them.”
The Design Thinking SMA teaches a five-step methodology for finance and accounting teams to develop new strategies, systems, processes and products. Management accountants can leverage design thinking to define challenges, ideate solutions and evaluate prototypes to quickly generate, converge and test new innovations.
“Design thinking is not something that you can do within a few hours,” said Jiles. “It’s something that typically takes weeks or months. That’s primarily because design thinking includes development and implementation of the solution. While the beginning of the design thinking steps are quite similar to what you’ll see in creative problem-solving, the key difference is you’ll go through executing that plan that will develop in your initial discussions, and you go through this almost circular process of prototyping and testing the solution itself.”
The problem-solving methodologies can be applied to issues like sustainability. “With sustainable business information, there’s such an increased demand for being able to generate that data and provide assurance for it in the way that we do for finance,” said Jiles. “We have spoken with chief accounting officers, chief financial officers, and partners. What they have to figure out is how do we prepare this information? How do we report sustainable business information? That’s something that can be attacked using the design thinking methodology.”
One step involves empathizing with various stakeholders’ needs. “That’s where we understand all the different stakeholders and put ourselves in their shoes,” Jiles explained. “In this instance, you’ve got so many different stakeholders — you’ve got external from a regulatory perspective, and you’ve got internal goals within the organization to meet certain objectives from an environmental perspective. It’s about empathizing and understanding what each of those stakeholders needs, and then as you progress with ideation and brainstorming, you’re going through that same process to go past the traditional ideas that come to mind.”
To come up with a solution, management accountants may need to go into multiple systems at the company and collect a number of pieces of data and other information, decide how to consolidate it, automate it, and then develop a prototype of what a report might look like for internal or external use.
“Coming up with that prototype is a formal step in the design thinking process, re-engaging stakeholders to iterate that prototype, and ultimately coming up with a plan to test it and implement it and put it into production,” said Jiles. “Something that’s growing in popularity is this notion of sustainable business information in the first place. And you could see something similar with performance reporting, for planning or forecasting,, a new approach to some of those things have been forecasted off on a regular basis. And FP&A financial planning and analysis teams might leverage design thinking to rethink how we approach the forecast. How do we get it more accurate? And you would go through this similar iterative process where you’re prototyping, testing and delivering.”
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