Ludwig van Beethoven: Biography

What is Design Thinking?

When I think of Design Thinking, I think of it as a problem-solving strategy which focuses on getting individuals to ditch their personal bias on any subject and really think outside the realms of their accumulated knowledge alone. In a more literal sense, Design Thinking is a framework used by designers to solve complex problems with desirable solutions.

At the core of Design Thinking is a deep desire to truly understand the people in which we are designing a solution for, it asks designers to not only question the solution but question the; problem, assumptions, implications & people surrounding it.

During the Design Thinking process, the designer follows a structured framework that allows them to; empathize with a user’s challenges and constraints, accurately define the problematic areas, strategize and ideate viable solutions/working methods and importantly, prototype and test the success of said solutions against defined criteria.

Today, Design Thinking has been analyzed by many pioneering academics and as a result has an abundance of subject matter experts and collateral that can be easily referenced, although like many things it had humble beginnings. I think the first-time Design Thinking was really put into practise was during the second world war, around about the same time as the industrial revolution. The war created an environment that required critical problem solving and the ability to shift the needle of technological advancement could have meant winning or losing for either side. I think it was this desperate environment that called on politicians to bring forward experts from all fields to share their accumulated knowledge and contribute ideas towards a common goal, even if it didn’t align directly with their field of study.

Fast forward sixty-odd years, Design Thinking is most commonly found is the corporate workplace, where it’s used to address procedural shortfalls, enhance products and services, design go-to-market products, increase marketing effectiveness and much more. In the modern workplace, successful Design Thinking has always been about the ability to lift yourself away from personal bias and maintain an objective mindset. It success does not come down to an individual’s contribution but the ability to foster an environment of collaboration that enables designers to see problems and ideas from another perspective and genuinely question all the elements without fear of judgment.

Design Thinking built the bridge for the problems that could not be solved by politics or science, it fostered an environment for creative thinking that is based on fact but more important possibility. Design Thinking created a structure that moved it from creative perceptions to the rational and objective. Design Thinking is something that can be used by all to solve complex everyday problems.

What are the benefits of Design Thinking?

Almost every modern-day organization has an endless supply of objectives and goals for the future, from addressing procedural flaws to the design of new products and services for their clientele – design thinking can cater for all of these objectives because at the heart of it’s purpose is the ability to problem solve in an agile nature.

The benefits of Design thinking are widespread, in my experience of design thinking, five benefits stand out the most, these are:

• The catalyst of change and organizational evolution
• Employee development and morale boosting
• Developing a broader understanding of your customer
• Increasing productivity and collaboration
• Increased ROI throughout the design process

The catalyst of change and organizational evolution

In the process of design thinking, one of the more unnoticed side effects of design thinking is the catalyst for change and evolution. Internally it is a great way of building new paths of collaboration between often siloed teams, creating an environment for the sharing of ideas and building of innovative solutions. It translates the diverse set of languages that various parts of an organization use to communicate into a single clear narrative that everyone can appreciate and understand.

Employee development and morale-boosting

Naturally facing challenges as an organization can be a daunting task, change and restructuring in any environment can bring about stress and a poor employee experience. Having a design thinking mindset tends to remind both businesses and individuals that the solutions are there and help them focus on the future of the business they work for, and in most cases deliver innovative solutions that not only support the employee experience through designing process but deliver outcomes for their clients their particular industry has never seen before.

When you bring employees on the journey of designing solutions for problems they face in their job, it not only gives them a greater understanding of the business they work for by understanding the root cause of issues, but it allows them to see the cause and effect relationship of change to surrounding teams in their business. It’s a huge advantage for businesses to have employees who holistically understand the business they work for, and not only is it advantageous to the business itself but can be used by employees to create pathways to management through a big picture understanding of the organization they work for.

Developing a broader understanding of your customer

Almost all companies share one thing in common. It is their relentless focus on their customers and delivering the best user experience possible—as you have already heard many times before, this exact same concept is at the roots of Design Thinking itself.

During the design thinking process, designers are asked to develop a end-user mindset when developing their design. It many cases a lot of organizations ask their customer to take part in the design process where possible, whether that be in the workshops themselves or through customer feedback loops, the more credible inputs you can source into the design process inevitable increases the effectiveness of the end product.

Throughout the process, various team members contributing to design take a deep empathetic view of how their prospective customers will need to use a process or product they are developing, this gives even non-customer facing employees a better appreciate of their customers experience in their organization and broadens the greater perspective on who their customer are, not just the name of the company.

Increasing productivity and collaboration

For me, great design always starts and ends with collaboration. It takes ideas and inputs from everywhere – including culture, history, surrounding communities and customers – and continually asks for feedback from not just the design team but the end-user as well. The Design thinking framework has the same approach to all the challenges of a business it is looking to solve. If your sales team struggle with customer retention, design thinking influences salespeople to look outside of current sales strategy to develop new techniques and ideas to increase their customer retention.

Collaboration means engaging with people from all over the organization they work for. It seeks to leverage the countless hours of knowledge acquired by its employees diverse background and accumulate it all into a problem solving environment. Design thinking allows employees, external influences and subject matter experts to connect in a single forum and contribute and expand on current ideas and knowledge, which I am sure in many cases will lead to increased personal relationships for future networking. This kind of design thinking influence leads to strategic innovation and boosted work culture company wide.

Increased ROI throughout the design process

Return on investment, one of the most important metrics any private or public company run through in great detail. It’s a measure of success that is on par with profitability and market share among few others.

Whether you hold top spot of a company (CEO) or work for a marketing division, reviewing ROI is always going to be an integral part of any project’s success, at least in the eye of senior management. Here are a few undeniable reasons any company would want to invest in design thinking:

Focusing on customer experience (CX) can increase your revenue

• Increasing customer retention rates the through means of self-service and a digital CX
• Increases sales through better design of products and services
• Improving on user experience (UX) saves you money in the short and long term
• Investing capital into upfront UX research can save hundreds of hours in unnecessary engineering of solutions
• Better definition of problems means better design of solutions
• Decreasing operational cost of customer support by having less reliance on support functions like call centres and helpdesks

What are the criticisms of Design Thinking?

When looking at both the effectiveness and application of Design Thinking, it’s my view that the positives far outweigh the negatives. The use of design thinking has solved many more problems than it has created, but with that said it is no master key to organizational success.

A common argument against design thinking is that it turns design into a structured, must-follow process of design. Critics argue that real design is unstructured, messy and complex in nature and that it can’t be derived from a stack of post-It notes and a few brainstorming sessions.

Design is human intuition. Does it really take an expensive and exhaustive design thinking process to understand that a golf courses should have a certain amount of sand traps? There are elements to design that come from raw creativity and vision, not brainstorming and story boarding. At times design can be the masterpiece of one and not the work of hundreds, so there is a time and place for the framework and it could be argued that it is overused and counter-productive.

Design Thinking as a Buzzword. With the countless amounts of corporate jargon and tech-start-up buzz words circulating the web and these days, it’s easy to get lost in the lingo of corporate innovation and business-based problem-solving. Often Design thinking can be misinterpreted and without the proper expertise to run design-based thinking session, designers can miss important steps in the problem-solving process which could leave them exposed in the long run.

Design Thinking as a Corporate Checkbox. As a business embarks on any large-scale change in products or process, it could be easy from them to become complacent at the beginning of the design process by being so sure that if they comply to a written framework, eventually they will reach success. Design thinking as I mention earlier is no master key to success, it’s a possible means to problem-solving although without the right sponsors and motivation from the business it can very easily fail.

In which context(s) might the application of Design Thinking be useful?

When I think of the application and best-practice for design thinking, I think of organizations that are either looking to transform their digital capability to help better serve their internal processes and optimize the way their customers buy their products and use their services.

Today, more and more consumers want to take care of their shopping and lifestyle needs from the comfort of their own home, and incredibly the world wide web has made this possible for them.

Customer support centers play a crucial role in the overall customer experience. It can either make or break a customer’s perception of a company. Customer call centers help to gain customers' trust with instant real-time interactions. Most businesses have traditionally relied on human interaction over the phone to solve a customer’s inquiry. With the introduction of email and written pathways we saw a slight reduction in the reliance in call centres although this never addressed the real-time interaction benefit that came with making a phone call. With the use of technology, there has been a surge in the use of artificially intelligent (AI) powered chatbots that customers can engage with to solve some of the simpler enquiries that arise, and as a flow-on effect this reduced overall wait times on the phone and reduced the cost of operating a call center. With a happier customer and a reduced overall cost, you see Design thinking put into to practice not only to solve issues for customers but reduce operation expenditure for the business as well.

Another great example of design thinking is the e-commerce business as a whole. It wasn’t even 15 years ago that if you wanted to buy a product or service you either had to do so in person or over the phone. The shopping business was ultimately dominated by shopping malls and postal pamphlets. Design thinking has been used since by business to ride the wave of e-commerce success by delivering a customer experience for various online retailers. It’s allowed customers to virtually walk through entire stores, shift and filter for the things they want to see, and as a flow on effect customers are spending more money and retail business are growing rapidly faster than what they could 15 years ago.

Whilst design thinking has been used successfully in many industries, there are a couple out there that I believe could really reap the rewards of investing in a greater level of design thinking. Let’s look at the flower and plants market, in the US alone this industry is estimated to be worth over USD $1.3B, although there isn’t a single retailer turning over more than USD $10M per year. Looking at the possible use case for design thinking, how could you create a single one-stop-shop for plant sales than can support US-wide logistics? The solution would need to consistently deliver undamaged products and some kind of returns policy would need to be in place (among other things), although how many other industries have no single provider with more than one percent market share? Not many!

The possibilities of design thinking and it’s use-cases for business are endless, it’s something that is going to be seen more and more in the future, and just like its framework for solving problems, no doubt it will see best practice iterations to Design Thinking itself as it evolves over time.