How Design Thinking Helps You Deliver the Right Things for Your Customers

The Pillars of Design Thinking

"Design thinking is essential." We hear this phrase often these days. But what does it actually mean - and why does it matter when it comes to achieving success?

At its core, design thinking is a problem-solving framework centered around understanding users, challenging assumptions, redefining problems, creating innovative solutions, and testing prototypes. First developed in the world of product design, it has since spread as a philosophy for approaching all kinds of complex challenges.

Design thinking combines an empathy-driven, human-centric approach with rapid experimentation and iteration to arrive at innovative solutions tailored to end user needs and desires. It is:

• Human-centered - Design thinking revolves around developing deep empathy and understanding of the end user's needs, pains, and motivations. The problem being solved is viewed through the lens of the human experience.
• Collaborative - Design thinking relies on the collective perspectives and ideas of a multidisciplinary team. Different backgrounds and expertise are leveraged through activities like brainstorming, user interviews, and co-creation.
• Experimental - Prototyping and rapid testing of ideas is central to design thinking. There is a bias towards action and iteration rather than extensive planning. The mindset is to build fast, test, fail early, and evolve concepts quickly.
• Visual - Design thinking utilizes visual mediums to explore challenges, generate ideas, and engage teams. Sketching, diagramming, storyboarding, and mood boards help ideas emerge and take shape. Visual artifacts enhance creative collaboration.
• Holistic - Design thinking aims to arrive at systemic solutions by considering products, services, processes, business models and consumer experiences as parts of an interconnected ecosystem. The goal is holistic, human-centric solutions.
• Optimistic - Design thinking maintains an optimistic outlook that the most wicked problems can be solved through human-centered design. Creative confidence fuels out-of-the-box solutions.
• Open-ended - Questions and exploration are sustained for as long as possible during the design process to unearth unexpected insights and possibilities. The problem definition evolves with learning.

When applied thoughtfully, design thinking's human-centric lens can transform how we work - leading to better results, higher engagement, and deeper meaning.

The journey starts with cultivating three key mindsets:

1. Empathy: Design thinking lives and dies by understanding the person at the other end of your work. Channel your inner anthropologist - resist assumptions, seek insights about struggles and aspirations, and approach challenges from their reality. The solutions we create are only as good as our comprehension of the people affected.
2. Optimism: Believe better outcomes exist. Maintain high aspirations tempered with pragmatism. Remind yourself of past progress in the face of major challenges. Draw energy from envisioning an uplifted future state. Optimism is a muscle that activates creativity needed to get to new solutions.
3. Experimentation: Prototyping is power. Design thinking calls us off the sidelines and into the arena of doing. Avoid getting stuck in analysis paralysis. Launch simple experiments to gather learnings. View failures as data not self-judgements. Maintain focus on meaningful progress vs. perfection. Testing unlocks breakthrough innovation.

With these mindsets infused into your days, design thinking offers four tangible phases for impact:

The Four Phases of Applying Design Thinking

1. Empathize

Start your design thinking process by gathering inspiration from your intended beneficiaries. Set aside your own perspectives and immerse yourself in understanding their realities. Get as close to the experiences as possible through engaging interviews, observations, and interactions that reveal emotional and functional needs. Identify where the most meaning might emerge.

2. Define

Process your inspiration into an actionable problem statement that frames the challenge ahead. Synthesize your observations of people into insights about their unmet needs. Capture the tensions, contradictions, and barriers getting in their way. Boil down the complexity into a compelling challenge statement to orient your efforts. Use words that speak to the human dimension vs. abstract concepts.

3. Ideate

Unleash your creativity to generate ideas addressing your defined problem. Diverge widely to explore a broad solution space before you converge. Employ techniques like worst possible idea, harnessing analogies, role-playing solutions, and reversing assumptions that spark new neural connections. Create quick prototypes to make the ideas tangible for evaluation. While you ideate, cycle rapidly between going wide and going deep.

4. Prototype

Learning starts when vision becomes reality. Transform your ideas into simple prototypes for stakeholder testing rather than overly polished end solutions. Prototyping unlocks key insights from raw experience vs. theoretical discussion. Invest only needed time to capture the essence and learn if you are on the right track. The goal is progress not perfection. Gather feedback, refine based on learnings, and keep advancing prototypes iteratively.

In these four connected phases - empathize, define, ideate, prototype - design thinking establishes guide rails for impact. Turning the philosophy into reality though rests on our ability to embed new practices into everything from leadership to project work.

Cultivating Design Thinking Practices

While design thinking offers an invaluable compass for navigating problems, transforming this mindset into tangible impact requires weaving new practices into our days. What daily habits, team rhythms, and organizational systems enshrine human-centric experimentation?

Here are several high-leverage ways to bake design thinking into your work culture:

Anchor in User Journeys

Humanize challenges by detailing actual user journeys, not just dry concepts. When launching any project, map out a representative persona - give them a name, photo, background. Detail their emotional trajectory through a key experience you are tackling. Keep referring back to their journey at major milestones rather than getting lost in abstract tasks. Build solutions inspired by walking in their shoes.

Set Innovation Time

Carve out dedicated non-billable hours for experimentation. Like yoga keeps us flexible, innovation time expands ability to explore bold new ideas. Balance delivery pressures with the freedom to follow sparks. Continually reconnect teams to their North Star purpose to fuel out-of-the-box thinking. Setting aside focused creative sessions and prototyping days liberates breakthroughs.

Open Up Strategizing

Get more voices in the room when framing problems and shaping high-stakes decisions. Leverage techniques like design charrettes that enable broad brainstorming of diverse stakeholders early on. Avoid narrow siloed solutioning. Let go of the fallacy that seniority equals the best ideas. Allow fresh perspectives to reframe stale challenges. Reduce barriers between decision-makers and frontline implementers.

Fail Forward

Take measured risks in the name of learning over avoiding missteps. Cultivate psychological safety allowing smart failures in environments with accountability. Celebrate small experiments that produce progress. Share stories of failure-driven breakthroughs. Adopt velocity over perfection as the ultimate measuring stick. Learning fastest is often more important than being right. As Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn says, "if you are not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released it too late."

Prototyping over Presentations

Demonstrate ideas through tangible prototypes early on rather than overly polished presentations. Use role plays of new user experiences. Show mock website wireframes or app diagrams. Leverage quick videos explaining ideas. Prototyping brings concepts to life for others to react to and refine. Don't hide behind perfectionist documents that lack authentic feedback. Progress through doing rather than eloquent speaking.

Horizontal over Hierarchy

Flatten silos between functions, levels and teams for better collaboration and ideation. Loosen narrow decision rights that bottle up new proposals. Empower people to take promising ideas and run quick experiments without bureaucratic approval gauntlets. Hierarchy certainly has value in coordination and final calls. But it can also stifle the serendipitous potential of ideas bubbling up from all corners.

Questions over Answers

Lead through openly exploring obstacles rather than always providing solutions. Frame problems as design challenges, then facilitate creative collisions harvesting the collective intelligence in the room. Less telling speeds up learning for all. You often discover new insights just by vocalizing barriers you face. Bring together diverse stakeholders, map out dilemmas visually on the board, distill the right problem, ideate solutions.

Reflection over Reaction

Build in space for people to make sense of what they are doing not just check off tasks. Move off autopilot by using after-action reviews - pause work to analyze wins, gaps, patterns together. Reflect by writing or discussing barriers slowing progress. Regularly reconnect to the deeper human meaning and aspiration fueling daily jobs. Ask people, “how are we bringing values like empathy to life?” Purpose gets lost without reflection.

These new practices enshrine design thinking into the soul of your culture, unlocking innovation and engagement. But enacting them takes artful cultivation and commitment.

Leading the Design Thinking Journey

Embedding human-centric design thinking ultimately requires leadership. Executives and managers set the tone through how they frame challenges, ask questions, run meetings, handle failures, and evaluate impact.

Leading with design thinking means growing four personal capabilities:

Curiosity

Approach people and problems with intense openness and inquisitiveness. Often our first interpretations close down untapped potential. Listen without defending. Draw out new explanations through artful inquiry. Lean into tensions that awaken creativity. Model raw vulnerability in the face of uncertainty. Ask better questions before rushing to solutions.

Self-Awareness

Recognize your own assumptions, mental models and biases blind spotting breakthrough ideas. Examine how your fixed mindsets – perfectionism, risk avoidance, skimming not diving deep – might limit exploration. Question what accomplishments truly mean progress this quarter. Watch for outdated traditions instead of user-centricity steering decisions. Know thyself.

Catalyzing Convergence

Master dynamism between opening up explorations then closing down on focused solutions. Early on, encourage wide divergence building off one another’s sparks. Later synthesize key insights, make clear go/no-go decisions, and align collective efforts. Bring together right people and perspectives for meaningful synthesis. Balance the messiness of discovery with the clarity of choices.

Co-Elevation

Grow capability across teams through hands-on problem solving together, not just formal training. Guide groups in framing design challenges. Model asking powerful questions. Facilitate brainstorms harvesting insights from all levels. Show rather than tell practices like prototyping which build confidence through doing. Accelerate ability to take promising ideas and advance experiments.

This dance between new practices, cultural systems, and personal leadership makes design thinking stick. Mastering this elevates how we shape solutions and catalyze impact.

Injecting Design Thinking into Culture

The pressures of deliverables. The comfort of status quo. The habit of hierarchy. Many forces conspire to sap a culture’s creative problem solving muscle. But now more than ever, we need human-centered design thinking guiding our work.

How do you inject this mindset broadly across teams? Through high-visibility immersive workshops addressing real company problems. For example, kickoff a three day design thinking bootcamp by framing a strategic challenge facing your organization. Gather diverse stakeholders - product developers, customer service reps, salespeople - to collaborate on understanding needs, redefining problems and ideating creative solutions.

Lead participants through the design thinking stages of empathizing, defining, ideating and prototyping. Have groups conduct customer interviews to uncover pain points, distill key insights through an affinity mapping exercise, brainstorm solutions using techniques like worst possible idea then validating concepts through storyboards.

Keep executives highly visible throughout - not just opening and closing but actively modeling approaches like ethnographic questioning when interviewing customers and leaning into failures when initial ideas flop. Have leadership spotlight insights they gained about the reality on the ground.

End the intense workshop with participants pitching prototypes of new solutions addressing the strategic challenge. Pick one idea to further develop through a small scale pilot test leveraging additional stakeholder input. Show commitment to experimentation through seeking rapid testing opportunities over endless analysis.

These immersive experiences build first-hand confidence in design thinking that scales across the organization. Participants become evangelists back with their teams - modeling new ways to frame problems, raising human-centered questions, running brainstorms.

Beyond one-off events, reinforce the practices by establishing clear KPIs - from innovation hours to customer interview learning – that signal progress on design thinking metrics. Build the approaches into formal processes - ensuring user journeys shape planning, inclusion of customer advocates in strategy meetings, mandating prototyping stage gates.

Designate innovation guides across the organization to reinforce adoption. Have them demonstrate empathy interviewing skills or run lunch-and learns on rapid prototyping using tools like Marvel. Celebrate stories of frontline teams employing user-centric techniques to overcome obstacles and achieve results.

Leading with design thinking is not a one and done effort – but rather a continuous journey of embedding human centeredness, optimistic problem solving and experimentation into how work gets approached. The payoff? More empowered teams, resonant solutions and memorable customer experiences.