What Could POSSIBLY Go Wrong?

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We’ve probably all seen the IDEO model for Design Thinking many times before. I completed my first “Design Thinking” consultancy back in 1994, at a Bank, when Design Thinking was just starting to become a part of the language of business. To me, Design Thinking just seemed like an explicitly customer focussed, structured exploit of critical thinking. Never one to follow trends, without calling it out, I followed the Design Thinking principles to the letter. The results were outstanding.?

The process itself sold engagements. I’ve been lucky enough to complete a number of similar projects over the past 30 years. Occasionally I’ve used the “empathise” phase, which I normally refer to as discovery, just to lock in my customer engagement. All I’ve ever asked for, is for the client to indulge me for no more than two weeks (and sign an NDA). My work is my proof. If I can’t come back with significant strategic insights within that timeframe, then I’m the wrong guy, this is the wrong customer.?

That never happened.

Design Thinking has been widely adopted, including by no less than IBM, and Google, who have appropriated it within their institutional practises.?

As a practise however, Design Thinking has been much maligned of late, and I can also understand that. For all of the insights I’ve gained, with all of the customers I’ve worked with, it’s been pretty disheartening to see how customers treated these initiatives.?

A February 2023 article in the MIT Technology Review by Rebecca Ackerman identified some of the “tension” around Design Thinking. “But in recent years, for a number of reasons, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. And they have maintained that by centering designers—mainly practitioners of corporate design within agencies—it has reinforced existing inequities rather than challenging them. Years in, “innovation theater”— checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts—had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects.”?

In my experience, Design Thinking has essentially five problems — literally a problem every step of the way, but they can all be readily overcome.

1. Empathise It all sounds great when you’re pitching it, but very few clients have ever ultimately allowed free access to their customers. The closest I get sometimes is an abstraction of the customer, or “personas.” That’s something the marketing department uses to align the project with target markets and the current advertising campaign, which is working ass-backwards. The most successful projects I’ve ever had, wore the names and experiences of specific customers. That kind of hyper-realism is a game changer when you need something to change. A banking project once completely turned on the identities and experiences of just two customers (and I had more)!
2. Define Defining your opportunity, or problem, is where things often start to get complicated. People define problems in their own context, and sometimes in their own "insider" language, rather than in open-ended terms and common language. An engineer and a customer service specialist, sitting side-by-side, will make very different notes. It’s too soon. Interpretation doesn't help. Neither do acronyms. We can’t solve anything with tunnel vision. Avoid at all costs the use of nouns. Use the language of the customer (the best projects still include them at this point).
3. Ideate I know! Get all the best people in the same room, right? Get them brainstorming! Supply bottomless coffee, chocolate biscuits, Post-It notes and Sharpies. Nah. That’s an unqualified assumption. People come together in peer groups, and they bring their group-think with them. Group think is the lowest-common-denominator value of the collective intelligence of any group. It’s all the stuff nobody will argue with, even if hey don’t explicitly believe it either. More often than not, groupthink is exactly why things are the way they are. A recent post in the UXCollective Blog by Lillian Ayla Ersoy noted, “Co-design and group brainstorms often fail because our minds are limited to the knowledge we know at that point.” To REALLY see anything useful come out of the this phase of the project, you need not horizontal groups, but vertical groups. You need people from all different areas of the business, people who don’t know each other, or at least not well. You need to meet people outside the gaze of their stakeholders and management. You need to have the courage to really unseat them, disabuse any notions of authority or hierarchy. People have to reconsider the status quo, and any cognitive bias they brought with them. This phase is all about the art of the possible, the “what if …” spitballing. It’s the difference between knowing and learning, between realism and aspiration, engineering and synthesis.?Quoting the UXCollective again, “The problem however is that critical problem-solving and design skills seem to evaporate when there are too many team-members and/or stakeholders involved in the process. Co-design with many stakeholders also takes a lot of time. Once a team thinks they have discovered gold together, they are only at the tip of the iceberg — but they often rush into the development without further maturity.”? The best way that I’ve found to make sure that this process succeeds, is to call a halt at some point, and start allocating and grouping the ideas, prioritising “customer delight” and “brand value” over values like quick wins and “available within latent capability.” Rushing to a conclusion, or a solution, is no solution at all. Simple gains will be identified and made, but that shouldn’t define the outcome. Introducing “soft, emotional” success criteria, like “delight” into the equation, is often enough to unseat more pragmatic notions of success. That’s crucial. Defining success as smiling faces and thumbs-up emojis is a realistic goal. The potential of any project is pretty much determined in this phase, and it needs to be successful in terms of overall customer value, business and brand value. There's no pass-or-fail answer.
4. Prototype Most often I’ve been involved in process design, and so making a “working prototype” involves a bit of imagination. Creating a storyboard on the wall is as good as far as that goes, but I’ve found that making people “actors” in a process walk-through is a really helpful tool also. Again, it’s important to keep everyone on their toes. Don’t let engineers assume “automation” or application roles — that’s too easy. “Score” each phase of the process with happy faces, thumbs-up etc, remembering the overall criteria being customer effort and satisfaction.
5. Test The dogma of traditional functional testing can pretty much obliterate all the value gains identified in the Definition and Ideation phases. An arbitrary “pass” or “fail” result from perfunctory functional testing shouldn’t be allowed to define success.?As Steve Jobs said, “real artists ship.” In this day and age, with the complexity of a lot of projects, it’s OK to “fail fast.” Get it out. Listen to feedback, fix it and get ready to fail again. Iteration is the new norm. Nobody is sitting around waiting for a general release.

It’s never too soon to start again. Just because the process implies five stages, that doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve re-booted the Ideation phase a few times, once just because of the excessive use of insider jargon! In reality, the Design Thinking model should be more or less continuous, or at least have a beat rate that is consistent with other milestones in the business, ideally more regular than annually. ?

Professionally, my expertise has been pretty well recognised, but as I progressed to become an official Thought Leader, I was being progressively relegated “to the margins,” as Fast Company magazine put it, where I wasn't able to see any of these projects through to fruition. Professionally that’s been very frustrating. Insight without action is … well, it’s worthless. Quoting from the MIT Technology Review again, “Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking. Some versions of the codified six-step process even omit that crucial final step of implementation. Its roots in the agency world, where a firm steps in on a set timeline with an established budget and leaves before or shortly after the pilot stage, dictated that the tools of design thinking would be aimed at the start of the product development process but not its conclusion—or, even more to the point, its aftermath.”?

Any process that relies for it’s integrity on the abstraction of the customer values is essentially devalued, but Agile management and Design Thinking can essentially work in lock-step. The inclusivity and free-thinking of Design Thinking are core elements of the value and insight that it provides. This kind of problem resolution and decision model is explicitly customer focussed, and that should be at least implicit in all the work streams that get you to your aspirational goal, no matter how they’re being managed.

The key reason that Design Thinking projects fail is often the lack of genuine institutional buy-in. One engagement I had began with a stakeholder prescribing for me the outcome she expected, and told me it won’t take Post-It notes or Sharpies to get there. Taken seriously, this is not just some abstract creative project, or a team-building thinking exercise — Design Thinking needs to be wholly outcome-focussed. That implies deep, company-wide engagement in the process. It implies the participation of real customers. It needs team members who can commit themselves, put aside their egos and groupthink conditioning, and contribute the best of themselves to the process. In short, as an organisation you need to be not just thinking, but Design Driven.

If you’re interested in knowing more, DM me for a copy of my book, “Nothing Is Unthinkable; How we know what we know, why we’re likely wrong, and how to unleash the power of conscious curiosity.”

Additional insights can be found here:

A Fast Company magazine critique of Design Thinking can be found here.

A Harvard Business Review on the real-world advantages of Design Thinking can be found here.

Harvard Business Review tips on successful Design Thinking are here.

LucidSpark outlines some rules for success in this post.

The Interaction Design Foundation has posted a great piece on overcoming the problems implied in Design Thinking projects here

Designorate posts some interesting work on Design Thinking, including this one on “Why Design Thinking Doesn’t work” and which explains how to fix it.