Here’s a recent commentary featured by the Drucker Exchange (DX), sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Drucker Exchange (the DX) is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

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“Design thinking” has become all the rage in management circles—so much so that there is now a backlash building against the concept. One blogger, in fact, recently suggested that “we need to stop this ‘exciting new phenomenon’ before it kills its host.”

Nevertheless, we at the Drucker Institute remain big believers in the notion of using design principles to help spur innovation and enhance effectiveness. Indeed, the mantra around here has become “Fail fast and fail hard,” as we increasingly incorporate the process in our day-to-day work.

Embracing failure is just one part of design thinking. According to Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, design thinking

is“best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps.” The three spaces are:

Inspiration: expose yourself to the customers’ environment, patterns, choices and behaviors to discern what the customers’ actual needs and values may be;

Ideation: rapidly generate ideas without judging them;

Implementation: build prototypes to quickly test ideas with customers, and fail fast to get rid of those that don’t work.

The central role of the customer in design thinking is closely aligned to Peter Drucker’s own ideas.  He advised that the customer should always be at the heart of any business or organization. “‘Who is the customer?’ is the most crucial question in defining business purpose and business mission,” he wrote in his 1973 book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.

“Fail fast” is the mantra of design thinkers because if you do that, you can avoid investing a huge amount of resources—both time and money—in something that then fizzles when it finally hits the marketplace. Your risk goes gown greatly.

Drucker, for his part, favored this kind of experimentation. “You have to start small,” he said.

To put these concepts into practice, we’ve zeroed in on two specific design thinking tools best tuned to our work: engaging customers in co-design, and not relying on assumptions about what customers need.

Co-design means inviting customers to dive in to our ideation and prototyping work long before we have a final implementation ready for them to use. At first, we were worried about looking rough around the edges. But we quickly discovered that our customers love to help us shape our end product, and that the product is always far better—thanks to their input—than anything we could’ve created on our own.

For example, we host a few high-level executive forums each year, and even the very busy, very in-demand people who are our customers at these events love to take a few minutes to help design the experience in which they’ll soon engage.

What do you make of design thinking? Is it mostly hype, or a useful frame for approaching your work?

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The Drucker Exchange was first published as Drucker Apps in 2009 (see Archives). It was re-conceived and re-launched in April 2010 so that it would do more than simply convey information. Re-named and re-configured in October 2010, the Drucker Exchange is now designed to stimulate a discussion of current events that is illuminated by Peter Drucker’s timely and timeless teachings. It is a blog for people who want to get informed, involved and inspired to convert ideas into action.

I highly recommend these sources:

Roger Martin’s The Design of Busines

Tim Brown’s Change by Design

Thomas Lockwood’s Design Thinking

Roberto Verganti’s Design-Driven Innovation