Design Thinking Gets Spanked!

Let's talk about the problems first. Some folks say Design Thinking doesn’t deliver, designers say it’s not cool, Design Thinkers feel misunderstood…WHAT’S GOING ON?! and why is that? Is Design Thinking a gimmick that one should avoid? Has it been over emphasized?

Let’s talk about this ‘poor' Design Thinking first. I won’t cite any official definition here and will instead speak my plain crude language. Design Thinking is an attempt to extract the mindset of a Designer, an Artist, a Creator, or even a child into a series of steps that can be applied to any discipline (like corporate business, or politics). All of these steps are so logical that I can’t imagine anyone opposing them. Yes, it makes sense to speak and observe the customers. The opposite is just ignorance. It’s entirely normal to take all the findings and try to make sense of them, right? Once we have all this (in a context of a problem), we can be in a better situation to try to resolve the problem, and then we test to see if our solutions are on track. If someone thinks this makes no sense, then ‘yes’, Design Thinking is not for them. Many techniques that fit in this framework are interchangeable and vary based on the situation and design thinkers’ preferences. Hopefully, this has not yet violated any rationality. And if it hasn't, then the problem is not Design Thinking itself, but the way it is being used, or I would say filled out. I use the word ‘filled out’ because Design Thinking is a mental template, a mindset that gets applied by the practitioners who frame and fill it with appropriate techniques.

Here lies the problem. It’s the pseudo-experts, junior practitioners and the companies, that twist the human-centricity and design essence out of this promising discipline.

LET'S GO OVER SOME EXAMPLES:

1. PROBLEM: Person takes a Design Thinking training, gets branded as a practitioner of a discipline that requires years of experience (if you’re a lead) of situations, industries, and techniques that will make Design Thinking real. This person leads a Design Thinking challenge with results that may disappoint the client or their own company if done internally. This leaves a sour taste and gives DT a bad reputation.

FIX: Take the training, and co-lead with a proven veteran Design Thinker to learn and inject your own personality. How do you know you found the right DT coach? If you listen to this person, you will feel the energy and empowerment, and you’ll think he/she is a bit nuts.

2. PROBLEM: Someone sees the 5-Step IDEO framework and thinks it’s a linear process (no iterations).

FIX: It’s not linear! It’s a series of experiments that go into all crazy directions. If someone forces you to make it linear or tells you to accelerate tell them that discipline is called Business Thinking.

3. PROBLEM: There is little DT work happening outside of a glorified 2-3 day workshop. What the workshop produces gets pushed forward. Why not? It must be right, since it was Design Thinking (yes, sarcasm is evil.).

FIX: It’s not cool to frame Design Thinking in a fixed 4-8 weeks, and anything less than that is a sin. How can you predict where the rabbit hole takes you? Or worse, what if you’re onto something that requires more time with people just to be told to wrap it up in 2 days because…

4. PROBLEM: Ethnography/Immersion get reduced to phone interviews and the period of creativity is at best a half-day part of the 2-day workshop.

FIX: Get out and spend time with the users, and do what they do. If you are not given the time, communicate that Design Thinking effects will be drastically reduced. Extend the creativity/ideation time to days, as ideas come at different times, and many folks’ brains will be stirred by the workshop just to produce ideas afterwards. Give people the chance by providing them with the right creativity techniques, environments, and time with other people. Having an on-line platform can be a plus to keep the collaboration going outside of the ’sacred’ 2-day F2F workshop.

5. PROBLEM: Co-creation with the client equals 2-day workshop. This is the one that I have a serious problem with. Every single time after myself and my DT partners spend time with the client’s customers and then digest the findings to come up with the insights and early ideas, our brains are much farther along the DT journey from the folks who are showing up to the workshop. They simply have not had enough time to get mentally and emotionally vested in the problem space. Not mentioning the fact that many of them don’t know DT. Additionally, most of these poor folks who get sent to these workshops have their ‘regular’ jobs, so DT at best becomes a short-lived spark of fun and hope. Then there is a problem of personalities where some folks are just not the open-minded types, and they will stall the efforts.

FIX: Either form a team with your client in such a way where they do what you do 100% of the time, or just do it yourself (your DT team) and communicate your progress to your client. When it comes to putting together the client part of the DT team, make sure you have the right folks…you know what they should be (hungry to make a difference, curious, not-compliant, low fear, playful, funny, energetic, dreamers, creators, builders…)

6. PROBLEM: Yes, as Design Thinkers we often re-Frame the problems once we get deep enough to see a different reality. When the customers don’t like that and continue using DT to justify their initial hunches, we are cutting corners and reducing the possibilities.

FIX: Educate the customer and tell them what may happen when they violate the sacred concepts :) They can still decide no to re-Frame, but you are absolved.

7. PROBLEM: Using Design Thinking for obvious challenges may still help, but it may be an overkill. Yes, making the most user centric digital app with the coolest UI is still a user-centric problem. However, the UX discipline may be a better fit for this than DT, even though both UX and DT may apply the same or similar techniques such as User Journey and Empathy Mapping at certain stages.

FIX: Before waving the Design Thinking flag, determine the nature of the stated problem. If the problem is well understood where the solutioning path is obvious, let DT stay away from it. If the problem involves deeply understanding people, and solving it may have significant impact…and the team gets energized about it, then you’ve got yourself a nice Design Thinking challenge.

8. PROBLEM: Design Thinking is marginalized, so it operates at lower level silos. Then even the best results will have a hard time getting accepted by the strategic higher powers. Executives are often not sold on Design Thinking as it goes against their corporate pedigree.

FIX: Ensure the DT efforts are visible to the higher powers, or even better, involve these executives to some degree. Negotiate with the execs to give you some space and time to make the DT practice grow…or don’t do it at all. As a pinnacle of left-right brain balance, inject Design Thinking into corporate strategy planning. It’s a separate and longer subject, and it can be the most effective approach for the DT to become seriously considered.

So to summarize, Design Thinking’s problem is a paradox of its openness and its absence of prescriptive nature, which may lead to misapplication or misunderstanding of this discipline. This is an inherent human problem, where given too much freedom, some would abuse it (imagine if paying taxes was voluntary). So what does that mean? One should become an apprentice for some time before claiming the Design Thinking badge, and with that badge comes a responsibility to not let the higher powers diminish the real intention of this framework…which is bringing empathy back to business, taking some time to get creatively stimulated, and to conduct many experiments, all that and more before saying that we are innovating! And even that may not be enough; an aspiring Design Thinking practitioner should understand corporate politics and the basic principles behind Behavioral Economics to understand why people say ’no’ to what is the best known system for mobilizing a systematic company innovation culture.

Design Thinking has a serious challenge. It’s a child with a promise of a great future, yet the corporate parents tell the DT child to become like them. 

If you want to be an authentic Design Thinker, then the integrity of the practice may come with a price of stress, doubts, disappointments, or even switching a job or consulting. Conversely, you could become a corporate resident (pseudo) Design Thinker who forsakes creativity and human-centricity for obedience and appeasing the happy old-timers…but that will not last very long and will leave you empty and disappointed. When done right, and by the right person, Design Thinking will feel like a hard challenge itself, full of hurdles and ambiguity, but it will make you feel good.

To wrap it up, please have more patience for this young Design Thinking child, and give it some time and space to grow to make you rich. After all, it’s trying to do the impossible job of changing the minds and hearts of the veteran corporate citizens (who are driven by a degree of fear).

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!