11 ms·

Why Design Thinking Works

218 points by helloworld 8y ago

onoj 8y ago
Might work, otherwise just a word pitch on past "business improvement" protocols and snake oil
- adzicg 8y ago
  If I remember correctly, the key case study in Change By Design (that started he whole Design Thinking movement) was Nokia Ovi. So even ‘might work’ needs to be put into a time bound context. At the point when Brown wrote the book it was ‘working’, and there were claims in the book how Nokia is reinventing itself driven by design thinking, but then the whole ship sank soon after.
  - onoj 8y ago
    my understanding (without research) was that one of the founders of IDEO created the concept so they could broaden their client pool from traditional design to finance / business consulting. https://trydesignlab.com/blog/great-design-thinking-tim-brown-ideo/ https://trydesignlab.com/blog/great-design-thinking-tim-brow...
revskill 8y ago
I prefer examples of Why "XXX Thinking do not work". Why ? Because learning from failures will shape correct lessons. That's how AI works, too.
- yodon 8y ago
  The convergence rate on learning from "x didn't work" is much slower than from "x did work". If you're looking for a peak, most of the time you want to climb the gradient rather than descend it. That statement is true even if you suspect there are multiple peaks in the landscape.
  - julvo 8y ago
    Learning from negative examples can be more effective when we can conclude that all inputs didn't work. The problem with positive examples is that we don't know which of the inputs was responsible for the positive result.
fermienrico 8y ago
I do not understand what Design Thinking is. Can someone explain in plain English without the business verbiage? Every time I come across Design Thinking, it just smells like bullshit - get a bunch of people together, give them post it notes and open walls. IBM’s DT website does not help nor do videos on YT. What is Design Thinking?
- wirrbel 8y ago
  design thinking is a method that helps justify management opinion with a process of processing people's input so long until it is diluted/lost enough and replaced by the view of ppl in power.
- maire 8y ago
  Design Thinking is a way of integrating user feedback into the development process. When your product is iterative it almost always works. When your product is outside the comfort zone of the current users - that is when it is a problem. At least it is good to know what the user perception is and experiment.
  - kitd 8y ago
    It is one reason why I encourage my s/w dev colleagues to go and spend time in customer support. The environment of what your users experience can be fundamentally different to what you imagined during the development phase. My eyes were opened when I worked on one product. We added scriptability and for 3 years we assumed that would cover a multitude of user requirements. Until I actually tried to implement a customer's solution using it and realised how crap the experience was. 3 years late.
- BjoernKW 8y ago
  I like the summary given by Jeff Sussna in “Designing Delivery”. In a nutshell, Design Thinking consists of these elements: - abductive thinking - an iterative process - ethnography - empathy
  - kristianov 8y ago
withhighprod 8y ago
As always Tech first almost never works. Customer and product first works
plainOldText 8y ago
An excellent article. > To be successful, an innovation process must deliver three things: superior solutions, lower risks and costs of change, and employee buy-in. Over the years businesspeople have developed useful tactics for achieving those outcomes. But when trying to apply them, organizations frequently encounter new obstacles and trade-offs. < It is of extreme importance to realize that any proposed solution will have its trade-offs and it will be highly depend upon context and actual implementation. It’s worrisome to see how many people nowadays, who are in positions of power, jump on the bandwagon of conventional “wisdom”, failing to realize that down the road, adopting blindly current solutions might trickle down into unwanted consequences. Perhaps social media and the indiscriminate sharing of information, without proper scrutinization and analysis is not helpful either. Furthermore, people who are critical, are not always expressing their views publicly, out of fear of being labeled a certain way.
munchbunny 8y ago
For the people who are reading this and going "well, duh?" I think that's actually a very instructive reaction. The analysis/brainstorming/prototyping/testing cycle (usually what "design thinking" refers to) is burned into many of us just because that's how we've been doing/aspiring to do things for years. However, you have to remember that's not how a lot of people were doing things, and many of those people (I won't claim all of them, no process is universal) could probably benefit from judiciously adopting the practices.
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
  A lot of people say "duh" but when was the last time they actually prototyped anything in the work or personal lives before doing it? A lot of people may be "aspiring" to do it but few people actually do it. I worked at a relatively progressive, design-centric company and even there "design thinking" tended to be relegated to a handful of projects and wasn't the norm/default.
  - rorykoehler 8y ago
    I do this for everything I do. Always did. Sometimes the prototype evolves into the product/service to save time but everything starts as a prototype. I don't know how else you could successfully deliver anything?
    - freddie_mercury 8y ago
      I never really understand the goal of comments like this. Since we don't have access to your entire work history, it is impossible for us to judge a claim that, literally, every single feature you've ever built in your entire career -- even that one about allowing people to export to CSV -- involved you following the steps of: "[On immersion] identify hidden needs by having the innovator live the customer’s experience." "The final stage in the discovery process is a series of workshops and seminar discussions" "In the next step, articulation, innovators surface and question their implicit assumptions." And so on. Design thinking isn't "building a prototype". That is but one small part among many. You have workshops for everything you build? You do contextual inquiries, sitting in a customer office all day to see what their interactions are like, for every feature you build? You sit down with paper prototypes (not even code yet) with actual customers? For every single feature you build? Even when a customer just wants a button to sort Column X? I guess I'm dubious but if you've managed to create a work environment where that's the expectation, then more power to you. Design thinking is time consuming and expensive. That is why it is rarely used.
lordnacho 8y ago
My wife went on a workshop at a Big 4 about Design Thinking. Everyone sat through it and then one of the ladies turned about and blurted out "it's just thinking! Why is it called Design Thinking?"
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  Yeah... an acid test for these things is often, "what are you telling me not to do?" In my encounters with design thinking, the controversial "don't" has actually been frequent, iterative release. For some folks, design thinking is a defense of a "measure twice, cut once" waterfall-y approach to product development. That might make a lot of sense for some things, like physical consumer products, where a ton of branding and manufacturing go into each release. I think it's a bad idea for most software, where the ease of distribution means that you can learn from your market much more dynamically.
  - AndyNemmity 8y ago
    The times I've been a part of it, it's been in time boxed proof of concept situations where you're outlining a customer's desire, and then coming up with solutions for it, then delivering on them with an iterative process. It's worked out better than any other process I've been apart of, but it may just be some other factor than it's value. The companies that were open and interested in using it, were often... of a generally higher quality of talent, and perhaps better outcomes is natural no matter what process is used.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  What was the response? I’ve wondered the same thing at times but never had the nerve to ask so bluntly.
  - lordnacho 8y ago
    I think it was one of those situations where the attendees didn't want to rock the boat so they just kept their contempt to themselves.
bobjordan 8y ago
I took an executive education course a few years ago through Darden which was led by the author of this article, Jeanne Liedtka. She co-wrote a step-by-step guide called "The Designing for Growth Field Book". I've found it useful.
kriro 8y ago
I think that all these "happy meeting room" type of methods seem very biased towards extroverted people which feels like a bad idea and a major missed opportunity. Of course I don't find it shocking to read this article in HBR since business schools (and Harvard in particular) have very extroverted-centric cultures.
stergios 8y ago
"Design Thinking" is a semi-recent moniker for design methodology centered around product design. Its real value is for younger and inexperienced designers. It is easily accessible even by high-school students. [1] If you are a product designer who has 10 to 15 years experience bringing products to market, then IMHO there's not much in design thinking that you have not already seen. But if you are an undergrad or MS student with little work experience then it is a very useful structured thought process centered around product design. If you are a mechanical design engineer in the sense of Shigley design thinking does not have a lot to offer your work product. [1] http://www.thedfarm.org/s2/?page_id=1009
paganel 8y ago
I think that using ethnography just to sell more stuff (because that's what "know your customers better" actually means) should be the subject of an ethnographic study about our present-day society in a couple of decades, when (hopefully) we won't be so fixated anymore on selling stuff that presumably most of the people don't need.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jaabe 8y ago
I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, and I've seen design thinking work. A muniplacity wanted to do something about the high degree of long-term-sickness, with a goal of getting people back to health sooner. They set down a task force filled with design thinkers by education, with that goal, but no specific anything else (pretty unheard of in the public sector where everything is typically measured and weighed and only approved after the analysis and planning is over). After around 6 months, the task force changed a few things. One of them was the changing location of the waiting room. It had previously been in a pass-through corridor, making it very busy and noisy, something that wasn't good for people with long-term-sickness such as stress. In fact it was terrible, and such an obvious small fix, but nobody had thought about it before they asked people what could be improved. The biggest thing they did, was make a cardboard tool for your long-term-sickness plan and journal. In short terms, it's a plan with all the meetings and appointments you're required to go to filled in, with room for comments. Every time you go to an appointment, the case worker and you write down what you discuss and agree on during the meeting, and the case worker fills in the time and place for your next appointment before you leave. This muniplicity is now significantly better at getting people with long-term-sickness back to health (and work) than every other muniplicity in the country. I can't remember the exact numbers but it's somewhere around 30% which is an insane amount of life quality increased (and money saved). I've seen it in action and I think Design Thinking can be absolutely brilliant. In most cases it's not though. Successes like the one I just describe lead other people to want the same thing, in fact, there is a now national program to utilise Design Thinking in every muniplicity of Denmark. Which is all well and good, except change management isn't easy. Most muniplicities send one or two employees on a three day course to learn Design Thinking. It's employees who work with lean and other process/project management types, so they're certainly suited, but you don't really learn Design Thinking in three days. That the first problem, the far bigger problem is that nothing changes in the project models we utilise or the way management orders projects. I mean, sure, you can commit your citizens and do a few prototypes and that'll probably improve every project, but you're not really doing Design Thinking if you are still doing the full analysis, the full planning and the full requirement specification for what results you want from a project before you start doing your Design Thinking. This lack of commitment, ownership and focused change management is why Design Thinking is failing in most muniplacities. It's not just Design Thinking, it's also Enterprise Architecture, Digitisation, Benefit Realisation and a wide range of other brilliant tools that fail.
ThomPete 8y ago
Design Thinking doesn't "work" it works for those who sell it sure. But for everyone else its all based on whether the people who have the power in the organizations understands the value and is able to formulate that into useful tasks. One of the biggest differences between a person like Jack Dorsey who really do understand the value of design and is able to formulate at the C Level and then someone like McKinzey who might just claim they are (or parts of them are) design led but don't really mean it because they don't really understand it is the ability to use sesign as a strategic parameter. Design Thinking doesn't solve the fundamental issue which is transcendence between analysis and outcome. Someone have to be able to take the insights and turn them into something of value. The analysis is not the value in itself. Or put another way what Design Thinking doesn't solve is transcendence between idea and execution. So don't buy the BS and I say that as someone who consult companies on how to use design and design thinking strategically.
- uxcolumbo 8y ago
  Can you dive in a bit deeper... what do you mean with 'Don't buy the BS?' Design Thinking to me essentially is user centered design, I don't think you're saying UCD is BS. What I'm reading is that without getting buy-in from execs, engineering etc - 'design thinking' is useless. What did you do, so the 'design thinking' piece transcended into execution / desired outcome. Or did you only work on projects where the value of 'design thinking' was already understood, i.e. design was seen as an executive priority. EDIT: typos
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    User Centered Design doesn't have to be BS but mostly is because it's used mostly as a get out of jail card more than as an actual tool. Here is a critique I made of UCD back in 2010, https://medium.com/@hello_world/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong-1c3845092575 https://medium.com/@hello_world/getting-to-the-customer-why-... UCD still have the same issue which is that it requires transcendence between insights and solution which is much less solid than what people suggest. So what I mean with don't buy the BS is don't think that design thinking as a process is going to improve anything for you if you don't have the right people at the right places implementing it and even then it's not actually clear how much value it provides.

218 points by helloworld 8y ago

onoj 8y ago

Might work, otherwise just a word pitch on past "business improvement" protocols and snake oil

adzicg 8y ago
If I remember correctly, the key case study in Change By Design (that started he whole Design Thinking movement) was Nokia Ovi. So even ‘might work’ needs to be put into a time bound context. At the point when Brown wrote the book it was ‘working’, and there were claims in the book how Nokia is reinventing itself driven by design thinking, but then the whole ship sank soon after.
- onoj 8y ago
  my understanding (without research) was that one of the founders of IDEO created the concept so they could broaden their client pool from traditional design to finance / business consulting. https://trydesignlab.com/blog/great-design-thinking-tim-brown-ideo/ https://trydesignlab.com/blog/great-design-thinking-tim-brow...

revskill 8y ago

I prefer examples of Why "XXX Thinking do not work". Why ? Because learning from failures will shape correct lessons. That's how AI works, too.

yodon 8y ago
The convergence rate on learning from "x didn't work" is much slower than from "x did work". If you're looking for a peak, most of the time you want to climb the gradient rather than descend it. That statement is true even if you suspect there are multiple peaks in the landscape.
- julvo 8y ago
  Learning from negative examples can be more effective when we can conclude that all inputs didn't work. The problem with positive examples is that we don't know which of the inputs was responsible for the positive result.

fermienrico 8y ago

I do not understand what Design Thinking is. Can someone explain in plain English without the business verbiage? Every time I come across Design Thinking, it just smells like bullshit - get a bunch of people together, give them post it notes and open walls. IBM’s DT website does not help nor do videos on YT. What is Design Thinking?

wirrbel 8y ago
design thinking is a method that helps justify management opinion with a process of processing people's input so long until it is diluted/lost enough and replaced by the view of ppl in power.
maire 8y ago
Design Thinking is a way of integrating user feedback into the development process. When your product is iterative it almost always works. When your product is outside the comfort zone of the current users - that is when it is a problem. At least it is good to know what the user perception is and experiment.
- kitd 8y ago
  It is one reason why I encourage my s/w dev colleagues to go and spend time in customer support. The environment of what your users experience can be fundamentally different to what you imagined during the development phase. My eyes were opened when I worked on one product. We added scriptability and for 3 years we assumed that would cover a multitude of user requirements. Until I actually tried to implement a customer's solution using it and realised how crap the experience was. 3 years late.
BjoernKW 8y ago
I like the summary given by Jeff Sussna in “Designing Delivery”. In a nutshell, Design Thinking consists of these elements: - abductive thinking - an iterative process - ethnography - empathy
- kristianov 8y ago

withhighprod 8y ago

As always Tech first almost never works. Customer and product first works

plainOldText 8y ago

An excellent article. > To be successful, an innovation process must deliver three things: superior solutions, lower risks and costs of change, and employee buy-in. Over the years businesspeople have developed useful tactics for achieving those outcomes. But when trying to apply them, organizations frequently encounter new obstacles and trade-offs. < It is of extreme importance to realize that any proposed solution will have its trade-offs and it will be highly depend upon context and actual implementation. It’s worrisome to see how many people nowadays, who are in positions of power, jump on the bandwagon of conventional “wisdom”, failing to realize that down the road, adopting blindly current solutions might trickle down into unwanted consequences. Perhaps social media and the indiscriminate sharing of information, without proper scrutinization and analysis is not helpful either. Furthermore, people who are critical, are not always expressing their views publicly, out of fear of being labeled a certain way.

munchbunny 8y ago

For the people who are reading this and going "well, duh?" I think that's actually a very instructive reaction. The analysis/brainstorming/prototyping/testing cycle (usually what "design thinking" refers to) is burned into many of us just because that's how we've been doing/aspiring to do things for years. However, you have to remember that's not how a lot of people were doing things, and many of those people (I won't claim all of them, no process is universal) could probably benefit from judiciously adopting the practices.

freddie_mercury 8y ago
A lot of people say "duh" but when was the last time they actually prototyped anything in the work or personal lives before doing it? A lot of people may be "aspiring" to do it but few people actually do it. I worked at a relatively progressive, design-centric company and even there "design thinking" tended to be relegated to a handful of projects and wasn't the norm/default.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  I do this for everything I do. Always did. Sometimes the prototype evolves into the product/service to save time but everything starts as a prototype. I don't know how else you could successfully deliver anything?
  - freddie_mercury 8y ago
    I never really understand the goal of comments like this. Since we don't have access to your entire work history, it is impossible for us to judge a claim that, literally, every single feature you've ever built in your entire career -- even that one about allowing people to export to CSV -- involved you following the steps of: "[On immersion] identify hidden needs by having the innovator live the customer’s experience." "The final stage in the discovery process is a series of workshops and seminar discussions" "In the next step, articulation, innovators surface and question their implicit assumptions." And so on. Design thinking isn't "building a prototype". That is but one small part among many. You have workshops for everything you build? You do contextual inquiries, sitting in a customer office all day to see what their interactions are like, for every feature you build? You sit down with paper prototypes (not even code yet) with actual customers? For every single feature you build? Even when a customer just wants a button to sort Column X? I guess I'm dubious but if you've managed to create a work environment where that's the expectation, then more power to you. Design thinking is time consuming and expensive. That is why it is rarely used.

lordnacho 8y ago

My wife went on a workshop at a Big 4 about Design Thinking. Everyone sat through it and then one of the ladies turned about and blurted out "it's just thinking! Why is it called Design Thinking?"

evrydayhustling 8y ago
Yeah... an acid test for these things is often, "what are you telling me not to do?" In my encounters with design thinking, the controversial "don't" has actually been frequent, iterative release. For some folks, design thinking is a defense of a "measure twice, cut once" waterfall-y approach to product development. That might make a lot of sense for some things, like physical consumer products, where a ton of branding and manufacturing go into each release. I think it's a bad idea for most software, where the ease of distribution means that you can learn from your market much more dynamically.
- AndyNemmity 8y ago
  The times I've been a part of it, it's been in time boxed proof of concept situations where you're outlining a customer's desire, and then coming up with solutions for it, then delivering on them with an iterative process. It's worked out better than any other process I've been apart of, but it may just be some other factor than it's value. The companies that were open and interested in using it, were often... of a generally higher quality of talent, and perhaps better outcomes is natural no matter what process is used.
gnicholas 8y ago
What was the response? I’ve wondered the same thing at times but never had the nerve to ask so bluntly.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  I think it was one of those situations where the attendees didn't want to rock the boat so they just kept their contempt to themselves.

bobjordan 8y ago

I took an executive education course a few years ago through Darden which was led by the author of this article, Jeanne Liedtka. She co-wrote a step-by-step guide called "The Designing for Growth Field Book". I've found it useful.

kriro 8y ago

I think that all these "happy meeting room" type of methods seem very biased towards extroverted people which feels like a bad idea and a major missed opportunity. Of course I don't find it shocking to read this article in HBR since business schools (and Harvard in particular) have very extroverted-centric cultures.

stergios 8y ago

"Design Thinking" is a semi-recent moniker for design methodology centered around product design. Its real value is for younger and inexperienced designers. It is easily accessible even by high-school students. [1] If you are a product designer who has 10 to 15 years experience bringing products to market, then IMHO there's not much in design thinking that you have not already seen. But if you are an undergrad or MS student with little work experience then it is a very useful structured thought process centered around product design. If you are a mechanical design engineer in the sense of Shigley design thinking does not have a lot to offer your work product. [1] http://www.thedfarm.org/s2/?page_id=1009

paganel 8y ago

I think that using ethnography just to sell more stuff (because that's what "know your customers better" actually means) should be the subject of an ethnographic study about our present-day society in a couple of decades, when (hopefully) we won't be so fixated anymore on selling stuff that presumably most of the people don't need.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jaabe 8y ago

I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, and I've seen design thinking work. A muniplacity wanted to do something about the high degree of long-term-sickness, with a goal of getting people back to health sooner. They set down a task force filled with design thinkers by education, with that goal, but no specific anything else (pretty unheard of in the public sector where everything is typically measured and weighed and only approved after the analysis and planning is over). After around 6 months, the task force changed a few things. One of them was the changing location of the waiting room. It had previously been in a pass-through corridor, making it very busy and noisy, something that wasn't good for people with long-term-sickness such as stress. In fact it was terrible, and such an obvious small fix, but nobody had thought about it before they asked people what could be improved. The biggest thing they did, was make a cardboard tool for your long-term-sickness plan and journal. In short terms, it's a plan with all the meetings and appointments you're required to go to filled in, with room for comments. Every time you go to an appointment, the case worker and you write down what you discuss and agree on during the meeting, and the case worker fills in the time and place for your next appointment before you leave. This muniplicity is now significantly better at getting people with long-term-sickness back to health (and work) than every other muniplicity in the country. I can't remember the exact numbers but it's somewhere around 30% which is an insane amount of life quality increased (and money saved). I've seen it in action and I think Design Thinking can be absolutely brilliant. In most cases it's not though. Successes like the one I just describe lead other people to want the same thing, in fact, there is a now national program to utilise Design Thinking in every muniplicity of Denmark. Which is all well and good, except change management isn't easy. Most muniplicities send one or two employees on a three day course to learn Design Thinking. It's employees who work with lean and other process/project management types, so they're certainly suited, but you don't really learn Design Thinking in three days. That the first problem, the far bigger problem is that nothing changes in the project models we utilise or the way management orders projects. I mean, sure, you can commit your citizens and do a few prototypes and that'll probably improve every project, but you're not really doing Design Thinking if you are still doing the full analysis, the full planning and the full requirement specification for what results you want from a project before you start doing your Design Thinking. This lack of commitment, ownership and focused change management is why Design Thinking is failing in most muniplacities. It's not just Design Thinking, it's also Enterprise Architecture, Digitisation, Benefit Realisation and a wide range of other brilliant tools that fail.

ThomPete 8y ago

Design Thinking doesn't "work" it works for those who sell it sure. But for everyone else its all based on whether the people who have the power in the organizations understands the value and is able to formulate that into useful tasks. One of the biggest differences between a person like Jack Dorsey who really do understand the value of design and is able to formulate at the C Level and then someone like McKinzey who might just claim they are (or parts of them are) design led but don't really mean it because they don't really understand it is the ability to use sesign as a strategic parameter. Design Thinking doesn't solve the fundamental issue which is transcendence between analysis and outcome. Someone have to be able to take the insights and turn them into something of value. The analysis is not the value in itself. Or put another way what Design Thinking doesn't solve is transcendence between idea and execution. So don't buy the BS and I say that as someone who consult companies on how to use design and design thinking strategically.

uxcolumbo 8y ago
Can you dive in a bit deeper... what do you mean with 'Don't buy the BS?' Design Thinking to me essentially is user centered design, I don't think you're saying UCD is BS. What I'm reading is that without getting buy-in from execs, engineering etc - 'design thinking' is useless. What did you do, so the 'design thinking' piece transcended into execution / desired outcome. Or did you only work on projects where the value of 'design thinking' was already understood, i.e. design was seen as an executive priority. EDIT: typos
- ThomPete 8y ago
  User Centered Design doesn't have to be BS but mostly is because it's used mostly as a get out of jail card more than as an actual tool. Here is a critique I made of UCD back in 2010, https://medium.com/@hello_world/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong-1c3845092575 https://medium.com/@hello_world/getting-to-the-customer-why-... UCD still have the same issue which is that it requires transcendence between insights and solution which is much less solid than what people suggest. So what I mean with don't buy the BS is don't think that design thinking as a process is going to improve anything for you if you don't have the right people at the right places implementing it and even then it's not actually clear how much value it provides.