Why Design Thinking in Business Needs a Rethink
To reach its full potential, the popular innovation methodology must be more closely aligned with the realities and social dynamics of established businesses.
In recent years, “design thinking” has become popular in many industries as established companies have tried to apply designers’ problem-solving techniques to corporate innovation processes.1 Key elements of the design thinking methodology include fast iterations; early and frequent interaction with customers; agile process design with less hierarchy; and a learning-by-doing approach that involves building prototypes and creating mock-ups of any kind as early as possible in the process.
Here’s how design thinking initiatives are supposed to unfold in a corporate setting: A clearly defined innovation challenge is presented to a team trained in design thinking. The team conducts research to better understand the problem. Drawing on their insights, they propose a variety of solutions, start building prototypes, and in the end, identify a fresh, profitable business opportunity.
That’s how the process is supposed to work — but it hardly ever does. Over the past seven years, we have helped more than 20 companies pursue more than 50 design thinking initiatives and have found that such initiatives rarely proceed according to the textbook model. Innovation is an inherently messy process, made even messier because it conflicts in many ways with established processes, structures, and corporate cultures. Fortunately, once you understand the challenges, you can avoid the most common pitfalls.
The root of most of the problems is the disconnect between design thinking and conventional business processes. After all, most companies’ successes are built on delivering predictable products by repeatable means. That means organizations almost instinctively resist bringing fuzzy, messy, and abstract vision into the equation. This antipathy toward design thinking runs deep, all the way from the C-suite to line workers. We find that employees often try to dodge design thinking assignments, shying away from the habits and mindsets the methodology requires.
The organization of the teams themselves leads to a second difficulty. The design thinking methodology calls for egalitarian, self-organized teams, but this isn’t how most established large companies work. In fact, the design thinking teams we have studied tend to have clear process and project owners, usually senior managers. These managers not only supervise the design thinking project but also assign tasks to team members and are responsible for its outcome. To make things worse, these senior leaders often supervise 12 to 15 design thinking projects at a time. This maximizes the leader’s time but reduces the teams’ efficiency, hinders passion and commitment, and slows progress.
In many companies, four cultural factors tend to aggravate these structural limitations:
Specialization
Specialization often leads to a tacit agreement that makes certain tasks the territory of certain departments. This has two effects on design thinking. First, participants from different departments often have difficulty communicating because of their very specific viewpoints. Second, many people who belong to departments that are traditionally considered less creative, such as accounting or internal audit, suffer from low levels of what management thinkers David and Tom Kelley call “creative confidence.”2 If you’ve never been encouraged to see innovation as part of your job and have been told that you’re no good at it, you’ll probably take people’s word for it. This may reduce friction and make the organization function more comfortably, but it also reduces the chance of a creative spark.
Human Speed Bumps
Managers in some departments (particularly legal, compliance, and regulatory affairs) tend to see their role as basically to stop things from happening. To get the most out of a design thinking exercise, people in these departments must embrace a can-do attitude and focus their creative energies on exploring how else things can be done. It takes a special kind of leadership to enable this supportive culture in traditionally conservative and risk-averse functional domains.
Focus on Monetary Results
In projects with a high degree of novelty, the expectation should be around the amount of learning that takes place, not the result. Focusing too early on monetary results (or other metrics) can discourage creativity — and ironically, reduce the chances of a profitable long-term result.
Failure Phobia
Many established companies punish failure, which discourages the risk-taking design thinking requires. In a workshop with a large consumer goods company, we asked participants to formulate hypotheses regarding consumers’ buying behavior in one product category. Instead of formulating useful hypotheses, participants developed ones that were so broad and unspecific that they would be impossible to test. We soon realized that the workshop attendees were avoiding mistakes for which they could be held accountable. Unfortunately, reducing their personal risk of failure meant reducing their collective chance of success.
Our research suggests that companies need to take five steps to take full advantage of the potential of design thinking:
1. Encourage top managers to champion design thinking initiatives. We find that design thinking teams require two kinds of attention by top management: proactive and follow-up. Proactive attention comes in many forms, such as launching an initiative, taking part in the process, developing and submitting ideas, and removing obstacles. Follow-up attention is the energy the leader invests after the design thinking team does its work, such as pushing ideas through the organization and sometimes giving explicit feedback when ideas are not pursued. Such behaviors can help embed and sustain design thinking in established organizations.
However, the biggest limiting factor is that managers are spread far too thin. Rather than try to monitor the progress of 12 to 15 design thinking initiatives, managers are better off pursuing a single design thinking goal at a time.
2. Balance the teams. Balancing intuitive and analytical thinking is one of the biggest challenges when establishing an innovative culture. Such teams are very tricky for established organizations to manage, as it is difficult to allow people freedom while at the same time ensuring that they don’t lose focus on other important business goals.
One key is for team members to recognize and appreciate the diversity of their experience and skills. For example, some members might focus more on workshop facilitation, whereas others may use their personal networks within the company to identify potential projects. The teams should include all pertinent functions, including marketing, sales, product management, and research and development.
3. Set ground rules. Design thinking teams need a lot of autonomy to function well. They should be empowered to act without getting permission for every tiny step. A good way to do this is to set minimal rules for the team, for example, by writing a list of five things they are not allowed to do, such as endanger brand perception or engage in illegal activities. Everything else, by default, they are allowed to do.
4. Integrate design thinking into product-development processes. Design thinking is often treated as yet another assignment from headquarters — just one more box to be checked. To change that perception, the teams responsible for design thinking should look more closely at their existing product-development processes. It can be helpful to integrate specific design thinking deliverables, such as early customer feedback in the problem-definition phase, larger-scale customer feedback in the market-solution phase, and prototypes and mock-ups throughout the process. Linking design thinking to innovation strategy should make it easier to measure the influence of design thinking on the quality and market fit of new products and services. More stakeholders will then see it as an integral part of product development, and not a parallel process.
5. Redefine the metrics. Because design thinking is about the early phase of the innovation process, teams should focus not on profit but on learning. By clearly defining learning outcomes through questions (such as “Why don’t patients sign the consent form?”), you can then define precise hypotheses (such as “because the form is too long” or “because the language is incomprehensible”). Even if the overall project fails, the captured learning will lead you to a better question or another project.
Supporting Design Thinking
Too many enterprises have naively invested in training employees in design thinking methodologies, and then been disappointed when they don’t see a tangible impact on innovation outcomes. Innovation is an inherently social process that involves not only inventing but also convincing people to do something in a new way. To be successful, a design thinking program must be closely linked with the organization’s social dynamics. Without the right supporting mechanisms, you probably won’t achieve the desired results.
Martin Kupp is an associate professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the Paris campus of ESCP Europe. Jamie Anderson is an adjunct professor of strategic management at the Antwerp Management School in Antwerp, Belgium. Jörg Reckhenrich is an artist based in Berlin as well as a faculty member of CEIBS Zurich Institute of Business Education in Switzerland.
References
1. Peter G. Rowe’s book “Design Thinking,” published in 1987, was the first publication to use the term. The book described a systematic approach to problem-solving used by architects and urban planners. The application of design thinking methodologies beyond architecture emerged in the 2000s; instrumental in this were works by Tim Brown and by Roger L. Martin. See P.G. Rowe, “Design Thinking” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987); T. Brown, “Design Thinking,” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 6 (June 2008): 84-92; T. Brown, “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation” (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); and R.L. Martin, “The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage” (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Press, 2009).
2. T. Kelley and D. Kelley, “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All” (New York: Crown Business, 2013).
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