If you’ve visited a bookstore recently, you probably noticed there’s been a lot written lately on the subject of design thinking. Whether or not you think it’s just another trendy buzzword, the topic has been gaining momentum in the last 5 years and is beginning to spark genuine interest from both designers and business executives alike. Big brand names like GE, Proctor & Gamble and Harley Davidson have elevated design thinking to their management ranks and Stanford University has even created an Institute of Design lead by IDEO cofounder David Kelley that believes “great innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers.”
Could design thinking really be a management paradigm shift or is it just a bunch of hype? Could it have an impact on businesses and help to solve the world’s most wicked problems? The following is a roundup on design thinking’s tools, methodology and why you should care.
At first, design thinking comes off as being an odd marriage between two very unlikely parties. “As one MBA joked, in his world the language of design is a sound only dogs can hear,” writes brand guru Marty Neumeier.
Design thinking is an innovation process that uses the designer’s sensibility to find unmet needs and opportunities in order to create new solutions that matter to people. Thomas Lockwood, president of the Design Management Institute (DMI), explains that the object is to “involve consumers, designers, and businesspeople in an integrative process, which can be applied to product, service, or even business design. It is a tool to imagine future states and to bring products, services, and experiences, to market.”
In short, design thinking is a methodology to enable innovation. It does this by:
- Supporting the build-up of ideas and outside-the-box thinking
- Taking risks at early stages
- Eliminating fear of failure
- Deeply understanding the customer and their goals, behaviors and attitudes
- Testing ideas early on to gain immediate feedback
- Challenging a product or service’s usability, feasibility and perceived value
While business typically focuses on metrics and analytics, the focus of design thinking is primarily on human-centered goals and invention. Roger Martin in his book, The Design of Business, writes that in the future the most successful businesses “will balance analytical mastery and intuitive originality in a dynamic interplay.” He continues to boldly predict that an “unwavering focus on the creative design of systems, will eventually extend to the wider world. From these firms will emerge the breakthroughs that move the world forward.”
As implied, design and design thinking aren’t just about posters and toasters. Design can be applied to solve the most wicked problems. According to Jennifer Riel, associate director of the Desautels Centre, you know you have a wicked problem if:
- The causes of the problem are not just complex but deeply ambiguous; you can’t tell why things are happening the way they are and what causes them to do so.
- The problem doesn’t fit neatly into any category you’ve encountered before; it looks and feels entirely unique, so the problem-solving approaches you’ve used in the past don’t seem to apply.
- Each attempt at devising a solution changes the understanding of the problem; merely attempting to come to a solution changes the problem and how you think about it.
- There is no clear stopping rule; it is difficult to tell when the problem is “solved” and what that solution may look like when you reach it.
- In order to solve a wicked problem, you must get at the nature of the problem itself, and the way to get at the nature of the problem is through design thinking.
The first tool of the design thinker is observation. What people say is important and this is why so many companies depend on focus groups and surveys. However, the design thinker knows that what people say isn’t as important as what they do:
“An ethnographer attempting to understand how youngsters in China think about their handheld phones would watch them use their phones before even asking a single question. And when appropriate to ask, the question would likely be of the form: ‘I saw you punch one button repeatedly; you looked frustrated. Then you flipped the phone closed and opened it again. Why were you doing that? What were you thinking? How did it make you feel?’ That’s a very different approach from asking, ‘What are the top five things that matter to you about your handheld phone?’”
That question—Martin argues—is for the design thinker.
The second tool is imagination. Design thinkers hone their skills of imagination to pose questions and open up areas unseen before. As Tim Brown writes, “They can imagine the world from multiple perspectives – those of colleagues, clients, end users, and customers (current and prospective). By taking a ‘people first’ approach, design thinkers can imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet explicit or latent needs. Great design thinkers observe the world in minute detail. They notice things that others do not and use their insights to inspire innovation.”
Imagination is best fostered when it’s able to work without fear of rejection or failure. The design thinker is able to imagine future possibilities and communicate them. Imagination might be inspired by the challenge of having to work within limitations, by making the complicated, simple or by simply wanting to make a better experience for the end-user. Imagination is the bridge between knowledge and concept.
Configuration, the third tool, starts with a prototype. A prototype can be as simple or complex as needed and is tested early and often in order to get immediate customer feedback before the more expensive production stages of development. It also allows for any big course corrections early in the process when the stakes aren’t high. A prototype can be anything from a hand-drawn wireframe to a fully operating model. “Often the goal is to fail quickly and frequently so that learning can occur.” According to Lockwood, failing in the early stages of a project is a stated objective at Pixar Animation Studios where it “leads to better work done more quickly.”
The design thinking process varies widely with different nomenclatures and number of phases, but more or less includes the following:
- Define – Decide what issues you are trying to resolve and for who
- Research – Find other examples of attempts to solve the same problem and get to know your end-users
- Imagine – Identify the needs, behaviors and attitudes of your end-users and generate ideas to serve them
- Prototype – Configure, expand and refine ideas via multiple iterations and feedback from end-users
- Choose – Review the objective and select the ideas that resonate the most with the end-user
- Implement – Assign tasks, build and deliver
- Learn – Gather feedback and measure success
Mixed into this methodology at all stages is the iterative development cycle: design, test, modify, repeat. “Test early and often” is the mantra of the design thinker.
Design thinkers are not necessarily confined to people who wear black turtlenecks, thin glasses and who were graphic designers in their past life. Design thinkers have a variety of backgrounds including sociology, anthropology, journalism, technology and business. Brown explains that “many people outside professional design have a natural aptitude for design thinking, which the right development and experiences can unlock.” Brown lists the characteristics of a design thinker as:
- Empathy – They can put themselves in other’s shoes and are focused on end-user goals rather than business, technology or aesthetic ones.
- Integrative thinking – “They not only rely on analytical processes (those that produce either/or choices) but also exhibit the ability to see all of the salient – and sometimes contradictory – aspects of a confounding problem and create novel solutions that go beyond and dramatically improve on existing alternatives.”
- Optimism – They are convinced there’s a solution to be found for every problem.
- Experimentalism – Design thinkers pose questions to find new directions and open up unseen areas.
- Collaboration – Design thinking is a collaborative effort that brings people together with a wide range of disciplines, skills and knowledge. Marketers, psychologists, industrial designers, anthropologists and engineers all might be recruited to work alongside each other.
Partly as a result of this integration, design has come a long way in beating back the perception of being the corporate beauty station. In the past it was mostly used by companies to create beautiful annual reports, flashy brochure websites and marketing materials that would standout at trade shows. While creating aesthetically attractive materials has its value, design is much more than the way something looks. Neumeier explains that up until now design has never “been used for its potential to create rule-bending innovation across the board.”
At first glance, the idea of combining design thinking with business strategies doesn’t bode well. Chuck Jones, vice president for global consumer design at Whirlpool says ”Design thinkers are like quantum physicists, able to consider a world in which anything—like traveling at the speed of light—is theoretically possible. But a majority of people, including the Six Sigma advocates in most corporations, think more like Newtonian physicists—focused on measurement along three well-defined dimensions.”
Many design leaders such as Neumeier are also warning businesses that in the 21st century, it’s all too easy to become a commodity. The old way of doing things is crumbling apart—ownership of factories, access to capital, distribution chokeholds, customer ignorance…It gives the phrase “innovate and die” new meaning.
At the same time, design thinking doesn’t claim to be the be-all and end-all for business. Design leaders who before were skeptical about design thinking surviving in a Six Sigma environment are now finding there’s value in bridging the two skill sets. According to Sara Beckman, faculty director at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, companies that are able to bridge both design thinking and Sigma Six approaches will be the most likely to survive: “Design thinking offers tools for exploring new markets and opportunities [and] Six Sigma skills can be applied to improve existing products. Companies that adhere strictly to one or the other risk failure.”
What you need to know about design thinking:
- It’s a methodology to enable innovation
- It’s a collaborative effort that brings people together with a wide range of disciplines
- Focused on human goals
- Based on observation and testing
- Not a replacement for business analytics
- Has the ability to solve “wicked” problems
- Reduces risk
- Doesn’t require a traditional design background (although it helps)
Guest post from Daniel McKenzie crossposted with permission from his original post.
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Links to articles on the subject:
Fast Company: Design Thinking… What is That? by Mark Dziersk
Design Observer: What is Design Thinking Anyway? Roger Martin
Harvard Business Publishing: Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You by Peter Merholz
Design Thinking Blog Thoughts by Tim Brown
New York Times: Welcoming the New, Improving the Old by Sara Beckman
BusinessWeek: How to Nurture Future Leaders by Venessa Wong
Business Week: How Business is Adopting Design Thinking by Venessa Wong
Business Week: Design Thinking Can Be Learned Interview with IDEO cofounder, David Kelley
Wall Street Journal: Inspired Design is Essential—and All Too Rare by Gary Hamel
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Recent books on the subject:
The Design of Business—Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, by Roger Martin
Design Thinking—Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value, Edited by Thomas Lockwood
Change by Design—How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, by Tim Brown
A Fine Line—How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business, by Hartmut Esslinger
The Ten Faces of Innovation—IDEO’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate & Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization, by Tom Kelley
The Designful Company—How to Build a Culture of Nonstop Innovation, by Marty Neumeier
Do You Matter?—How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company, by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery
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Other:
Design Management Institute (DMI)
List of the world’s best design programs for integration of design thinking and business