How can design thinking help you engage stakeholders?

Design thinking in CSR initiatives fosters deep stakeholder engagement. For example, in a healthcare redesign, empathy maps captured patient and provider experiences, leading to solutions that truly resonated. Embrace this approach: involve stakeholders in every step, from ideation to testing, ensuring their needs are central. This not only enhances solutions but also strengthens stakeholder relationships, creating lasting impact.

Design thinking is a great way to boost your ESG strategy. By involving different levels, skills, functions and personalities of your company, you can get contribution from them on how your company might improve your ESG strategy / improve your carbon footprint. Indeed, solutions may come from people at all levels and close to certain fields who are able to identify pain points and area of improvement that the management may not be aware. Also, design thinking workshops will grow the knowledge of the participants and drive their future behaviors for more sustainability. A good question for a design thinking session for an industry could be “how might we implement a circular economy business model in the company?”

Design thinking is a vital component of my company's CSR. It will enable our contributors to think outside the box and come together with one common goal. Picking a topic which they will all want to engage in and contribute to will ensure their goals are aligned and their values will be at the forefront of this.

Knowing each other is the founding stone. The actual story begins thereafter. Once you've known your stakeholders, the real action begins of understanding the strategy, assessing alignment and course modification required to attain better results which could be monetary or time savings etc. Knowing each other helps in adjusting the temperaments and paves ways to work forward. If we're able strike the cord, that's it....This creates the magic?

In my experience, leveraging design thinking techniques like empathy and journey mapping enables organizations to comprehend the needs and perspectives of stakeholders. Design thinking advocates collaborative problem-solving through brainstorming sessions, encouraging experimentation and creating a culture that values learning from experiences. It welcomes diverse outlooks using techniques like co-creation workshops involving stakeholders with different insights, resulting in more innovative and effective solutions.

When Engaging in Collaborative Opportunities, Relating Empathy in Design to Stakeholders is Essential, Demonstrating Care in Design helps Colleagues and Stakeholders understand the Essential Purpose behind Design-Needs/Venture Acceleration!

Design thinking is centered on users. ESG being so broad you can consider users to be your employees, customers, consultants, auditors, authorities. By performing interviews with employees and organizing design thinking workshops with them you can raise their awareness on ESG and co-build solutions with them. You can also ask customers and technical experts how they perceive your ESG strategy in surveys or through qualitative interviews. Indeed, solutions having a positive impact on ESG can come from any person in the organization - from plant workers to the board - and outside. If you follow the design thinking process in full incl. prototyping, you will identify the solutions that will have the most impact on your ESG policy.

On peut aller encore plus loin et rentrer dans une démarche de co-écriture des stratégies et des solutions avec ses parties prenantes. Proche du design thinking, cette approche s’en distingue en impliquant les parties prenantes dans cette co-écriture. C’est généralement l’approche que nous adoptons dans nos accompagnements RSE. En plus de l’engagement dans des réponses qu’elles auront participé à écrire, on récupérera un autre bénéfice loin d’être négligeable : une pertinence plus fine du diagnostic (par une matrice de matérialité par exemple), et des réponses apportées (par une connaissance précise de ce qui fonctionne ou pas pour elle).

Creating empathy maps helps in understanding stakeholders' experiences and perspectives. For a healthcare service redesign, we developed empathy maps to visualise patients' and healthcare providers' experiences. Design thinking is not a one-off activity; it’s a continuous process. In my role as a consultant for a technology firm, we established ongoing workshops and feedback sessions with clients By prioritising the end-user in the design process, stakeholders feel their needs are being directly addressed. In a public transportation improvement project, we centred our design thinking process around the commuters' experiences, leading to solutions that resonated deeply with the primary stakeholders.