design thinking

Design thinking is a new social technology that has the potential to revolutionize how organizations innovate. A social technology is a blend of tools and insights applied to a work process, leading to extraordinary improvements, much like Total Quality Management (TQM) did for manufacturing in the 1980s. Design thinking aims to unleash people’s creative energies, win their commitment, and radically improve processes by addressing human biases and attachments to status quo behavioral norms.

The Challenges of Innovation

To succeed, innovation must deliver three things: superior solutions, lower risks and costs, and employee buy-in. Organizations often face obstacles and trade-offs in achieving these outcomes:

1. Superior Solutions

   • Problem: Conventional problem definitions lead to conventional solutions; customers struggle to articulate needs for non-existent products; diverse voices can lead to divisive debates.

   • Tactics: Asking more interesting questions, incorporating user-driven criteria, and bringing in diverse voices.

2. Lower Risks and Costs

   • Problem: Uncertainty is inherent; too many ideas dilute focus; people often kill creative ideas more readily than incremental ones.

   • Tactic: Building a portfolio of options and being willing to abandon bad ideas (“call the baby ugly”).

3. Employee Buy-in

   • Problem: Involving many people can lead to chaos and incoherence.

   • Tactic: Engaging employees in the idea-generation process.

Underlying these challenges is a tension between efficiency (driving out variation in stable environments) and variation (needed for success in unstable worlds). Design thinking provides a social technology to manage these trade-offs and address behavioral obstacles.

The Beauty of Structure

Design thinking provides structure and linearity, which are crucial for managers (who are often not designers) to adopt new behaviors like customer research, cocreation, and experimentation. This structure helps to:

• Keep people on track and prevent over-exploration or impatient skipping ahead.

• Instill confidence and psychological safety, counteracting the fear of mistakes and encouraging action.

• Its physical props and formatted tools offer security, enabling innovators to move assuredly through discovery, idea generation, and testing.

Design thinking involves seven activities, each generating an output that leads to an implementable innovation, and profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves.

Design Thinking Activities and Their Impact on Innovators

Customer Discovery

This phase focuses on identifying the “job to be done” by examining the meaningful customer journey, drawing from ethnography and sociology.

1. Immersion

   • Problem: Innovators are trapped in their own expertise and experience, leading to bias and overlooked unexpressed needs.

   • Design Thinking Action: Provides immersion in the user’s experience, shifting the innovator’s mindset.

   • Improved Outcome: A better understanding of those being designed for.
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