Thinking Over “Design Thinking” and “Agile” in Talent Landscape

As modern organizations embark upon innovation and transformation plans to fit the demands of changing business landscape, we are often introduced to a new utopia of terms and methodologies like design thinking, agile and so on. Personally I am quite intrigued by these concepts.

Design thinking is about exploring, discovering, defining, generating ideas, and innovating. In other verses, it’s about the “why”. Agile on the other hand is about the “how”. Design thinking is the marker for problem identification and solving through creative approaches. While, Agile is a timed approach to delivery that builds product/ solutions incrementally from the start, and works by breaking projects down into little bits instead of trying to deliver it all at once at the end.

Design thinking is not only for designers. Similarly Agile is not only for software. They are being applied in multiple disciplines in businesses to achieve powerful solutions. Personally we can make a conscious effort to apply them to our work life. These are mindsets that need to be developed and practiced in the current organizational and talent landscape. All that it would take is a little discipline. And lots of practice.

Another interesting observation to ponder over is how they both intersect. Usually design thinking and agile are considered as two different concepts. In business life, many times we would put all our eggs in one hamper, thinking one of the techniques is a magic wand or the silver bullet solution to our problems.

They complement with one another and can be combined together to come up with more powerful solutions. So we should definitely try merging both in upcoming work opportunities. Just as ice-cream is definitely a blissful indulgence, however, amalgamating it with that dollop of chocolate sauce enhances the taste and experience, similarly agile and design thinking can work as a power combo together.

In a nutshell, they do work fine on their own, but placing them together amplifies your processes multi-fold by combining the best of each to achieve results and success. Hence, sketching parallels between these two realms is definitely one of the keys to new avenues.