“What’s the big deal about design thinking?”
You’ve probably asked that question, one to which Jeanne Liedtka responds in a brilliant article she wrote for Harvard Business Review.
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Because design thinking is a social technology, it has a unique ability to shape the innovator’s journey by countenancing biases of innovators and change the way they engage in the idea generation > product roll-out process. Design thinking is by nature a collaboration that involves both internal and external stakeholders.
For example:
Initiative 1: Design Thinking provides immersion in the user’s experience, shifting an innovator’s mindset toward an improved outcome: A better understanding of those being designed for.
2. DT makes sense of data by organizing it into themes and patterns, pointing the innovator toward…new insights and possibilities.
3. DT builds alignment as insights are translated into design criteria, moving an innovation team toward…convergence around what really matters to users.
4. DT encourages the emergence of fresh ideas through a focused inquiry, shifting team members toward…a limited but diverse set of potential new solutions.
5. DT fosters articulation of the conditions necessary to each idea’s success and transition a team toward…clarity on make-or-break assumptions that enables the design of meaningful experiments.
6. DT offers pre-experiences to users through very rough prototypes that help innovators get…accurate feedback at low cost
7. DT delivers learning in action as experiments engage staff and users, helping them build…a shared commitment and confidence in the new product or strategy. delivers learning in action as experiments
As Jeanne Liedtka explains, “the structure of design thinking creates a natural flow from research to rollout. Immersion in the customer experience produces data, which is transformed into insights, which help teams agree on design criteria they use to brainstorm solutions. Assumptions about what’s critical to the success of these solutions are examined and then tested with rough prototypes that help teams further develop innovations and prepare them for real-world experiments.”
To read the complete article, please click here.
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Jeanne Liedtka is a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Busxiness. I highly recommend Solving Problems with Design Thinking, co-authored with Andrew King and Kevin Bennett, by Columbia Business School Publishing. To learn more about her and her work, please click here.