Design is a deep and difficult skill, but "design thinking" is not a deep set of ideas. If you listen to amazing designers and mediocre designers speak about ho

Design is a deep and difficult skill, but "design thinking" is not a deep set of ideas. If you listen to amazing designers and mediocre designers speak about how they approach design problems, they sound very much the same. It's like listening to professional athletes: a Major League all-star might use exactly the same words to describe how they hit a baseball as your Little League coach used when they tried to teach you how to do it. Some designers are more poised and articulate, some are better at telling stories for an audience, but the best designers don't distinguish themselves by having different or better ideas about how to do design, any more than the best hitters have different and better ideas about how to hit a baseball. The fundamentals are well-established, encoded in a set of timeworn clichés, and it's important to be familiar with them, but the difficulty lies in picking the right cliché at the right time to focus your mind in the right direction.