100+ Projects: Thoughts on Design Thinking from a Corporate Perspective

Design Thinking (DT) seems to be an intangible mystic that every modern company wants, however not so many companies are successful in making relevanly use of it for themselves. Very quickly it turns out, that understanding the process and memorizing the principles is not enough to fully embrace Design Thinking.

So what could be the problem? Why do we have such a hard time applying Design Thinking effectively?

My lovely colleague and former student, Reka Leisztner and I decided to share some thoughts about it with you. I’ve been working with Design Thinking for over a decade now, and I have to admit that misconception of the methodology is one of the biggest barrier to a successful implementation.

 “Design Thinking is seen as a fancy diet that should provide you immediate results. It’s just so insane, Oliver”.

In fact, it is very true, and there are already many articles worth to read covering the misunderstanding with DT on Huffpost, e.g., such as:

• Rethinking Design Thinking by Thomas Fisher, or
•  Beyond Design Thinking: How to Ensure Design Is Always On in Your Organization by Geoff Tuff

However, Reka and I decided to go one step further. We believe that vagueness of the concept is one of the biggest obstacles to a successful use in corporate environments. Therefore, we decided to bring some clarity into the topic, in order to give orientation. To make our thoughts more digestible we decided to split our thoughts into three pieces, which we will share with you within the next couple of days:

1. What is Design Thinking? An Approach / Tool(-Set) / Mindset / Methodology / Process?
2. Who created DT and will it guarantee innovation for me?
3. Why do corporates have problems applying it effectively?

 What is Design Thinking? An Approach / Tool(-Set) / Mindset / Methodology / Process?

Not so long ago a situation just stuck into my mind. I was participating at a conference with many corporate people from different industries; the main topic was - of course - digitalization. What else could it nowadays be...

I’ve been attending the conference to co-facilitate a Design Thinking introductory workshop; to introduce what human-centered design is, and what it means if a company is truly “user-centered”. Millions of buzzwords were circulating in the conference room, and everyone could see the mist of vagueness. We all know everything but nothing.

Later at this conference, I had a conversation with a colleague who was interested in Design Thinking. I tried to be ambitious and also tried to explain him my take on DT and how it could help companies to catch up with (the other fancy topic,) ‘Digitalization’. It was a quite interesting conversation, with many arguments for and against Design Thinking. However, the conclusion of this overall talk could be described as follows: “Yeah, I see your point, but we just don’t have anything to do with design and it’s just not for us.”

It was also not new to me, that a lot of people were still thinking we are talking aesthetics. Anyhow, a few months later, I got a call from the exact same person, sharing with me, that a huge DT befell the company, asking whether it would it be possible for me to support them. Sure, no problem.

Anyway, after 100+ projects and more than 150+ workshops and coaching sessions, the overall DT situation made me think that probably there is a misconception on this topic. I see companies “applying” Design Thinking for cultural change, to empower their employees or to develop disruptive new products and services. However, I do not see a lot of success cases, and very often do not see companies having set their own expectations of why they are applying DT. 

I believe, that the one of the main problems is, that Design Thinking right now is seen as a diet that brings us in shape within 10 days without investing time, giving up junk food (doing things differently) and making an effort. In addition, if you follow a lot of offerings, Design Thinking seem to promise that once you did it once only, this diet will make you never gain weight again.

Let me make one thing very clear at this point: there is no diet like that. There is no new innovation methodology that allows you to create extraordinary and disruptive concepts in two weeks, ready to go to development, on low budget without assigning a very hard-working and passionate team on the project. “Don’t worry, we have sticky notes and foam boards, we interview some people, draw user journey, so we do design thinking, and it will be fine.”, is unfortunately not the way to go.

Although, Design Thinking is a very promising framework to create stakeholder-centered solutions, respond very fast and interpret user behaviour in a very meaningful way; it is not a magic. Design Thinking itself will not make any change without hard work, talent and discipline.

I have seen very often companies, deciding after a very often half-baked project setup that DT is nothing for them. Similar to us dropping the new, fast, promising diet after two weeks, since we don’t have that wonderful body what we’ve seen on Instagram. The root cause is based in the beginning of each Design Thinking activity and should be assessed with the little word “why”. Why do we want to apply Design Thinking? Since there is obviously a lot of misconception out there, we should talk about it. Let us start at the very beginning: de-mystifying Design Thinking

1.    What is Design Thinking? An Approach / Tool(-Set) / Mindset / Methodology / Process?

Whenever you are following or listening people on stage talking about Design Thinking - and I have to admit, that it also happened to me at the beginning - people are trying to stress the uniqueness of Design Thinking, by masking its nature as an “approach”. However, what should approach really mean? Etymologically, approach describes the aspect of how to tackle a problem in order to solve it. Design Thinking for sure is a way how to tackle problems. Since the concept of DT consists not only about a process, but also about a team philosophy and space concept, the founding fathers wanted to stress the holistical side on Design Thinking, not only the procedural. This seems to be valid and reasonable, however ten years after the appearance of Design Thinking and its integration in the business world, there are still not many companies relying completely on Design Thinking (which means, that they are running all, resp. the majority of their wicked problem-based projects in the Design Thinking fashion, in a multidisciplinary fashion and in the right environment).

Having advised / led / strategized the Design Thinking implementation at several multinational corporation, I am convinced that one reason for the scarce implementation in corporations is its indigestibility and fuzziness by its definition. I remember back in the days a discussion with one of my subordinates, an Ivy-League alumnus with a limited amount of experience in corporations. I argued that we need to find a common idea why the company I was working with should implement Design Thinking. Basically, I wanted to develop a unified definition for our company. He couldn’t really follow me and argued that the community is avoiding to find a unified definition because “it’s not possible”. However, having a Change Management background, I tried to explain that it’s not about finding the scientific absolute definition, but moreover a definition that works for us as a company in order to strategize, communicate, operationalize and calibrate Design Thinking for us. At the end this very company decided to reposition my former subordinate.

 Let me make a strong point here: design thinking can be described as an approach, but if this is the only sentence a consultant / advisor or any other sort of expert can bring to the table, it may be time to re-think alternatives. Design Thinking, from a problem solving perspective, can be described as an approach, true, but due to its integration of several dimension, we should not forget:

• The Design Thinking sequence of what to do, is a process, embedded in an agile-style of project management (Process)
• Each step of the process has a set of underlying tools which should help you (Toolset)
• to solve problems successfully; this demands a specific mindset.

Having said that, this also means that depending on the cultural fit, the reasoning of the application of Design Thinking, and based on the team setup, we have to carefully consider each of the dimensions along the project.

Design Thinking also incorporates several existing concepts in its pursuit of innovation. These concepts are “multidisciplinary teams” and “workspace”:

• To work in creative rooms is described by reciprocal effects, and
• The work in teams is described by labor organisation

 Especially in combination with the implementation (= to make it applicable for an organisation at scale) also incorporates the change management aspect.