Design thinking 101: here's everything you need to know

Design. It’s one of the most misunderstood words around, evoking pictures of studios a world apart to the offices of a typical enterprise. The truth could not be more different. To quote a wonderful turn of phrase by Robin Mathews, “design is where science and art break even.”

Need proof? The companies that treat design as a strategic imperative are the ones topping the highest-earners lists and far outpacing their competitors.

What these companies have in common is their embrace of design thinking – a methodology that starts with the core human-based problem (understanding and defining) and uses intuition, creativity and agility (ideation, prototyping and testing) to solve it. Importantly, this takes place within a structure that encourages action, creation and testing.

An example of this is the Fido project that uses data and wearables to help people manage their diabetes. At the heart of the design was one little boy who’d been diagnosed with diabetes. The Fido team started by thinking about how he’d need to manage his diabetes according to his everyday lifestyle – riding a bike, gym classes and so on. They then applied their design principles to discover, define and refine a solution to his needs.

The Fido Project - Helping manage Diabetes

The designers in the above projects gave themselves the permission to experiment. Design thinking understands that problem solving is almost never a clean linear process that goes from point A to B, but one of regular dead ends, unexpected tangents and analogous sources of inspiration. Design thinking applies a structure to ultimately turn the strongest of those ideas into reality, while allowing for the freedom to fully explore them in the first place.

Sound familiar? If you play music or paint or create any other kind of art, you’ll recognise the methods at play. It’s a very right-brain approach, something that has traditionally taken the backseat to hard numbers and analytical thinking in many large companies. Design thinking trains up those areas of the brain responsible for creativity, intuition and empathy, allowing them to inform left-brain processes for a more holistic approach.

As digital technologies continue to disrupt everything we thought we knew, the right-brain stuff is going to become even more valuable across all industries. Computers will take care of much of the analytics and number-crunching, so the difference will be evident in the companies that have the creativity to use those insights.

Of course, as many an enterprise has found, implementing design in a large organisation can be like shifting a herd of buffalo. But it can be done - Here’s how:

#1 - Be brave

Companies like Uber have struck gold precisely because they’re unafraid to experiment. Large organisations by contrast are often risk-averse, leaving them without the agility they need to meet evolving customer needs. Design thinking calls for bold leadership and a willingness for enterprises to really open themselves up to new possibilities, ideas and approaches.

This doesn’t mean boiling the whole ocean, but using existing data and insights to find the area in which you’re best positioned to take risk. Is there a market segment you’re about to lose? Start there, with that particular customer at the centre.

Once you’ve made the initial leap of faith, you then need to be prepared to fail – and fast. Apply an iterative approach that enables you to try certain things out quickly, and improve them with each round of feedback. So while you may be falling short in the short term, each failure is a small, easily surpassed stumbling block on the road to a fully realised solution.

 #2 - Design is a doing word

Execution is everything in design thinking. Olof Schybergson, co-founder of Fjord sums it up by saying: “for success, the design power play is Design Thinking, Design Doing, and Design Culture.”

In order to turn thinking into action, there needs to be the right mix of technology, talent, culture, environments and hierarchy. It also means having agile methodologies in place to get it into the hands of the people you’re trying to reach, so you can see how it works in practice.

Chances are, certain parts of your organisation are already adept at this kind of thinking and doing. Look for existing pockets of innovation in your organisation and seed them outwards. Think about how the overall structure, both physical and operational, lends itself to day-to-day innovation and gradually build a culture of design.

#3 - It’s not just about the business case

With design thinking, the solution may not necessarily be easily observable at first glance. The methodologies at work are about challenging existing norms and considering alternatives to the obvious. What this means is that the solution will often not be immediately apparent – and that’s okay!

This doesn’t mean throwing out the business case completely, merely defining the problem you’re trying to solve rather than fixating on a set product. It’s the process itself – which calls for a lot of trust and patience in the designers – that ultimately creates the solution, not the business case.

It’s important to let this process play out rather than push for instant monetisation. Just look at Airbnb, which was bringing in a whole $200 per week in its early days. Patience and big thinking won out, and today Airbnb is valuated at a cool $24-billion.

How are you strategically incorporating people-centric design in your business? In which aspects of your organisation can you see this thinking already in play?