Why Many Companies Struggle With Design Thinking

For many firms, design thinking has not led to the payoffs they anticipated.  Executives invest large sums in training programs. Employees attend workshops, and they find the concepts and techniques fun and stimulating. Companies build idea labs and innovation hubs to support creative collaboration. They purchase mobile whiteboards and loads of Post-It notes. Unfortunately, the energy soon dissipates.  Many ideas emerge from various workshops, but few of them stick.  Prototypes never become finished products.  Executives begin to bemoan the lack of return on investment. The pressure to produce results quickly leads to general disenchantment with design thinking. People begin to wonder whether it’s just another management fad.  Designer Tim Malbon, co-founder of Made by Many, offers a humorous, yet insightful take on the unrealized potential of many design thinking initiatives:

Design thinking all too often delivers a wonderful day or two off from the realities of boring old business-as-usual. You’ll always remember the day you were let out of your work cubicle (aka veal-fattening pen) to ‘play’ with Sharpies and Post-Its along with colleagues on Brainstorm Island. You’ll meet colleagues on a Design thinking safari whom you may not even have realized before actually have first names. Working together — probably in teams — you’ll be empowered to ideate the heck out of some really tough business problems, instead of just using boring old Excel and Word to count beans and execute your tiny piece of ‘The Plan’. Afterwards, you’ll probably tell loved ones at home about it, and you’ll think back to it wistfully for years to come as you sit safely back inside your pen… However, in terms of lasting, impactful, commercial innovation, the Design Thinking scorecard doesn’t look so healthy. In reality, when you return from a trip to Brainstorm Island you probably won’t have done any real innovation — at least, not the sort that’s going to transform the fortunes of your business.[i]

  Why has design thinking encountered roadblocks in many organizations?  Many experts blame the culture of large companies. They are too bureaucratic and risk averse.  Executives do not tolerate failures that inevitably occur.  These concerns certainly ring true. The problem runs much deeper though.  Linear thinking permeates most enterprises, whether in the private sector, the non-profit world, or the government.  Design thinking, in contrast, is a fundamentally non-linear process. Implementation does not follow formal planning in this approach.   You build to think and iterate repeatedly, much as Leonardo did in all his creative endeavors.  Adopting this creative approach requires a mindset shift.   

Many companies have failed to make the shift from the traditional planning mindset to a learning by doing approach. Strategy formulation and implementation remain largely disconnected from one another. Firms continue to engage in annual strategic planning rituals, pretending that they can predict the future from the confines of the corner office. Even worse, they have treated design thinking as just another linear process that they can deploy.  Step two always follows step one.  They march through the phases robotically, as if they have discovered a magic formula for innovation. Rikke Dam and Teo Siang explain the flaw in this approach: “The five stages are not always sequential — they do not have to follow any specific order and they can often occur in parallel and be repeated iteratively. As such, the stages should be understood as different modes that contribute to a project, rather than sequential steps.”[ii]  Trying to turn any creative process – design thinking or otherwise – into a highly structured, linear system turns out to be a colossal mistake. No one believes that a great artist can create The Last Supper through a programmatic, paint-by-numbers approach. Why do business leaders believe that the iPhone, Amazon Echo, Ember mug, or Dyson vacuum should be any different? 

           Why can’t organizations shed linear thinking and shift to a learning by doing mindset?  It turns out that most of us don’t enjoy iterating frequently, nor are we particularly good at it.   Why? We become invested in a particular solution quite easily, and we do not handle feedback effectively.  We know that learning and adaptation will enhance the quality of our solutions, but we fall in love with our initial ideas. We build mock-ups to validate concepts rather than to learn. Many people might say that they desire feedback, but most really crave praise and unconditional love.   Non-linear processes simply cause us far too much discomfort.   The table below highlights some of the powerful impediments to a successful process of learning by doing.

To put it simply, most humans hate to iterate.  We can’t become effective design thinkers, though, without overcoming this aversion to the challenging, occasionally frustrating, and yet highly fruitful process of learning by doing.  We must become more effective non-linear thinkers to truly unleash our creativity and find desirable, viable solutions to our most wicked problems.

Michael A. Roberto is the author of Unlocking Creativity, published by Wiley in January 2019, and the Trustee Professor of Management at Bryant University. This article is excerpted, with slight adaptation, from that book.

Sources:

[i] https://www.madebymany.com/stories/the-problem-with-design-thinking Accessed November 10, 2017. 

[ii] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process Accessed November 9, 2017.