What is Design Thinking?
As with design, there’s probably no one definition of design thinking everyone will agree on. The term design alone can refer to nouns such as designers, physical products, and style as well as verbs such as process, create, and make. For example, Charles Burnette in his IDeSiGN curriculum calls it, “…a process of creative and critical thinking that allows information and ideas to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained.”
Lately many more people are talking and writing about the application of design thinking to intangible problems, design not only as a verb but as a way of thinking about situations. I felt a need to review what has been said and define the term for myself before I could put it into use. Ways of thinking are always difficult to define, but I’m reminded of how Lao Tzu said “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao” yet he still managed to write a book about it.
Design thinking is…
Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk
Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions
I’m sure one could play with the language and categorization to find more or less characteristics, but I’m happy with just those six.
Design Thinking and Business
I'm collecting references here to create an overview of ideas on design thinking as applied to intangible business problems, such as process and organization design. At the Management Innovation Group we're working on new ways to integrate analysis and creativity to help companies grow and operate their businesses, and welcome discussion on the topic.
Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.
—Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969
Lao-tzu also illuminates part of the reason why design is a neglected dimension of leadership: little credit goes to the designer. The functions of design are rarely visible; they take place behind the scenes. The consequences that appear today are the result of work done long in the past, and work today wil show its benefits far in the future. Those who aspire to lead out of a desire to control, or gain fame, or simply to be "at the center of the action" will find little to attract them in the quiet design work of leadership.
—Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline, 1990
The new job description of leaders will involve design of the organization and its policies. This will require seeing the company as a system in which the parts are not only internally connected, but also connected to the external environment, and clarifying how the whole system can work better.
—Ray Stata, quoted in The Fifth Discipline, 1990
We need a new generation of organizational architects. But to get there we must first correct basic misunderstandings about the nature of business design. It's not just rearranging the organization structure. We have to get away from the P&L statement and design for the long term — based on understanding interdependencies. Most changes in organization structure are piecemeal reactions to problems. Real designers are continually trying to understand wholes.
—Ed Simon, quoted in The Fifth Discipline, 1990
This role of manager as designer is hardly mentioned in the literature, and barely acknowledged in business practice. ...Managers practice "silent design"...the many decisions taken by non-designers who enter directly into the design process, no matter how unaware they or others may be of their impact.
— Angela Dumas and Henry Mintzberg, Managing the Form, Function, and Fit of Design, 1991
Today's markets are increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Managers can never know precisely what they're trying to achieve or how best to achieve it. They can't even define the problem, much less engineer a solution. For guidance, they can look to the managers of product design, a function that has always been fraught with uncertainty.
—Richard K. Lester, Michael J. Piore, Kamal M. Malek, Interpretive Management: What General Managers Can Learn from Design, 1998
We should not underestimate the crucial importance of leadership and design joining forces. Our global future depends on it. We will either design our way through the deadly challenges of this century, or we won't make it. For our institutions - in truth, for our civilization - to survive and prosper, we must solve extremely complex problems and cope with many bewildering dilemmas. We cannot assume that, following our present path, we will simply evolve toward a better world. But we can design that better world. That is why designers need to become leaders, and why leaders need to become designers.
—Richard Farson, Management by Design, 2000
What now matters is the design and delivery of value. That needs design thinking. That needs creative thinking. Judgment thinking alone is not going to be enough. Most people, in business and elsewhere, have done very well on judgment thinking. Such people are rarely aware of the need for 'design thinking'. They find it difficult to conceive that there is a whole other aspect of thinking that is different from judgment thinking. It is not that such people are complacent. It is simply that they do not know that there is another aspect to thinking.
—Edward de Bono, Why So Stupid? How the Human Race has Never Really Learned to Think, 2003
Design's power runs far deeper than aesthetics.... If you are mapping out a sales strategy, or streamlining a manufacturing operation, or crafting a new system for innovating you are engaged in the practice of design.
—Bill Breen, Masters of Design, 2004
As most companies already lavish quite a bit of expertise on the technical, financial and operations aspects of what they do, it is the equal focus [of design] on the emotional connection with customers that stands out as novel.
—Gabriella Lojacono and Gianfranco Zaccai, The Evolution of the Design-Inspired Enterprise, 2004
In the end, design is about shaping a context, rather than taking it as it is. When it comes to design, success arises not by emulating others, but by using organizational assets and integrative thinking to identify, build on, and leverage asymmetries, evolving unique models, products and experiences -- in short, creative business solutions.
—Roger Martin, The Design of Business (.pdf), 2004
The most fundamental difference between [design and science] is that design thinking deals primarily with what does not yet exist; while scientists deal with explaining what is. That scientists discover the laws that govern today's reality, while designers invent a different future is a common theme. Thus, while both methods of thinking are hypothesis-driven, the design hypothesis differs from the scientific hypothesis.
—Jeanne Liedtka, Strategy as Design (.pdf), 2004
There appears to be an important link between design and learning processes, which needs to be supported in daily design practice. Major skill and knowledge areas lacking in many design teams include the ability of teams to define objectives, to develop collective insight into the scope of a design project, to streamline communication processes, and to manage design decisions effectively during a project. These are process-oriented and management-related skills that all stakeholders need to develop collaboratively, in order to be able contribute to the quality of their design process. Teams can only learn these skills from experience, as they engage as a team in the act of designing. This is what I call learning from design. To achieve superior design thinking in business, we need to facilitate learning from design across organisations.
—Madelon Evers, Learning from Design, 2004
Designers are teaching CEOs and managers how to innovate... They pitch themselves to businesses as a resource to help with a broad array of issues that affect strategy and organization - creating new brands, defining customer experiences, understanding user needs, changing business practices.
—Bruce Nussbaum, Redesigning American Business, 2004
Companies that are successful exploiting the full potential of design do so because it's present in all of the decisions the company makes. ...these companies aren't choosing to apply design to their respective business strategies, but have chosen design as the fundamental strategy itself. Design is the philosophical core of the company. Everyone in the company becomes involved in designing, whether that means creating financial plans or selecting casing materials for an industrial product. Design isn't something that the design department does. It's a way of operating the company. It's an ongoing set of choices about how the company is going to exist, to compete, to grow.
—John Zapolski, Design as a Core Strategy, 2005
Really, what we're doing as designers is, ultimately, and inevitably, designing the business of the companies that we're working for. Whether you like it or not, the more innovative you try to be, the more you are going to affect the business and the business model.
—Tim Brown, speech at the Rotman Business Design Conference, 2005
If business and design are to come together fruitfully on a large scale... change must come from separating design thinking from 'the crafting of things'. The power of design thinking must be freed up to deal with all sorts of issues on a global scale.
—Patrick Whitney, speech at the Rotman Business Design Conference, 2005
We believe having designers in the mix is key to success in multidisciplinary collaboration and critical to uncovering unexplored areas of innovation. Designers provide a methodology that all parties can embrace and a design environment conducive to innovation. In our experience, design thinking is the glue that holds these kinds of communities together and makes them successful.
—David Kelley, Dave Beach, George Kembel, Larry Leifer, Jim Patell, Bernie Roth, Bob Sutton, and Terry Winograd, founders of the Stanford University Institute of Design, 2005
[In this labor relationship] all stakeholders need to abandon their adversarial thinking and approach and engage in design thinking to find a win/win solution... It is simply about changing beliefs and perspectives and designing an optimal solution. Remember, it is beliefs that determine the limits of your achievements.
—Dr. Rudi Webster, speech at the Trinidad & Tobago "Thinking Sport" seminar, 2006
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