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Why design thinking is broken and how to fix it
Summary
To bring good ideas to fruition, it is necessary to start with a clear business intent and pay attention to scaling deserving ideas
Design thinking has become a staple in business circles, at start-ups and enterprises alike. While the concept could be traced back to industrial products and principles of architecture, the application of design to solve business and societal problems could well be attributed to the pioneering work of David Kelley and Tim Brown, first at IDEO and later at Stanford Design School.
In India, it was Vishal Sikka, the former chief executive officer (CEO) of Infosys, who brought the term to popular imagination, though with limited success in his own realm.
I’ve conducted workshops on design thinking at many firms, but I believe the concept hasn’t lived up to its promise because only a few ideas get through the organisational maze and bask in the light of reality.
Design thinking is a versatile technique of creativity and innovation, a human-centred model of problem solving. It offers a step-by-step approach, starting with empathy and ending with iterative prototyping,which helps one unearth real issues and address them in a creative manner. The ideas are evaluated on the rubric of human desirability, technical feasibility and business viability, and then presented to the key stakeholders as working prototypes
The strength of the technique is in its collaborative, fun-filled yet disciplined approach, which is time-consuming but provides novel insights.
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Where the problem lies
There are three key issues with design thinking as it is practised today.
Firstly, it pays too much attention to human emotion and desires, often at the cost of expertise and business agenda.
If you start with what customer wants and not what you want, it is likely you will compromise your priorities. Excessive empathy is counterproductive, if not hazardous, to business. While it is advisable to head to the market and listen to the customer with an open mind, one should certainly not have an empty mind. You must have some objectives about what to achieve by this expedition, since unclear intent is the biggest cause of messed-up design thinking projects.
Empathy must be with intent, especially in the world of business.
The second issue with design thinking is a dearth of tools, techniques and methods. While the approach offers useful frameworks—such as empathy map, customer journey map, stakeholder map and pain/gain analysis—there aren’t enough tools for ideation and concept generation.
Most participants still resort to brainstorming to generate ideas, and this certainly is anticlimactical to the initial process. One is forced to borrow methods from lateral thinking, Blue Ocean Strategy (doing business in a space where there is no competition), and other classical work to fill this yawning gap.
Owing to excessive front loading of the process (high on empathy), the participants often lose steam when generating ideas, and I’ve found that counterintuitive insights are met with banal concepts. And then one is forced to go back to the field, or “iterate", instead of marching forward with novel ideas.
Lastly, design thinking is uncannily silent on “what happens next?". Typical workshops begin with a lot of excitement and camaraderie and genuine insights spring up, but it finishes with a lot of validated ideas lying by the wayside.
Partly because of a lack of initial intent of the entire enterprise, the enthusiasm is lost towards the end.
When the fun journey of design thinking must give way to the boring, arduous execution phase and fewer hands go up. This is not the realm of empathy and creativity anymore, it’s about hard business logic and operational excellence.
Often the ideas are way too creative that there are fewer takers in the real world. There is little doubt that such workshops get a thumbs-up on employee experience and customer engagement, but the bottom line often remains unmoved.
The way out
How to address these shortcomings? First, modify the design thinking process and, second, offer a whole host of methods, tools and frameworks for ideation and taking those ideas forward. For the modification in the process, I propose starting with “Inspire", or having an agenda for the entire exercise.
A clear inspiration goes a long way in aligning the stakeholders and securing vital commitment and bandwidth.
Towards the end, introduce “Scale", or listing down the methods useful to take the validated ideas to their logical conclusion. Hence, the modified five stages of the design thinking process should be: Inspire, Empathise and Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test, and Scale (instead of the current Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test).
By starting with a clear business intent, bringing in the rigor of tools and methods, and paying attention to scaling deserving ideas, design thinking can deliver its promise.
Pavan Soni is the founder of Inflexion Point, an innovation and strategy consultancy. He’s the author of Design Your Thinking: The Mindsets, Toolsets And Skill Sets for Creative Problem-solving.
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