10 Reasons to use Design Thinking in your Business

Design Thinking helps structure team interactions to cultivate greater inclusiveness, foster creativity, deepen empathy, and align participants around specific goals and results.

Humankind has survived thus far because we can work well together, communicate, empathize, anticipate, understand, and exchange. Design Thinking is a reflection of these abilities. The culture behind its practices, principles, and processes is potentially more empathetic, human-centered, and courageous than business management.

The 10 reasons to use Design Thinking in your business are:

01) DESIGN THINKING IS ACTION ORIENTED

It proposes a cross-disciplinary learning-by-doing approach to problem solving. It allows us to accommodate varied interests and abilities through hands-on and applied learning experiences between individuals. A big part of Design Thinking is design doing. It´s getting your hands dirty and experimenting instead of being an armchair strategist.

02) DESIGN THINKING IS COMFORTABLE WITH CHANGE

It is disruptive and provocative by nature because it promotes new ways of looking problems. The strategic framing of complex and ambiguous issues requires an approach free from organizational dogmas, codified limitations, and old assumptions. A large part of Design Thinking process is stepping out of conventional roles and escaping from existing dogmas to explore new approaches to problem solving.

03) DESIGN THINKING IS HUMAN – CENTRIC –

It is always focused on the customer or end user´s needs, including unarticulated, unmet, and unknown needs. To do this, Design Thinking employs various observational and listening-based research techniques to systematically learn about the needs, tasks, steps, and milestones of a person´s process.

04) DESIGN THINKING INTEGRATES FORESIGHT

Without an anticipatory, disciplined imagination of the future, the strategic planning process is dead in the water. Foresight opens up the future and invites us to explore uncertainties. It encourages us to be comfortable with working with unknowns and expects us to cope with inadequate information in the process of discovering and creating a tangible outcome.

05) DESIGN THINKING IS A DYNAMIC CONSTRUCTIVE PROCESS

It is iterative. It requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation, assessment, and visualization. It is a continuous learning experience arising out of a need to obtain and apply insights to shifting goals. Here, prototyping, creating of tangible sharable artifacts, becomes an important piece of the Design Thinking toolkit.

06) DESIGN THINKING PROMOTES EMPATHY

It puts users at the core of everything. It encourages the use of tools to help us communicate with people in order to better understand their behaviors, expectations, values, motivations, and the needs that drive them and will improve their lives. We use these insights to develop new knowledge through creative learning and experimentation.

07) DESIGN THINKING REDUCES RISKS

Whether it´s developing and launching a new product or a service, there are many benefits in learning from small and smart failures. This will always happen, but applied Design Thinking practices helps reduce risks by considering all the factors in the development ecosystem, including technology, the market, competitors, customers, and the supply chain.

08) DESIGN THINKING CREATE MEANING

PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheets are limited in their ability to communicate insights or ideas. Creating meaning is the hardest part of the design process, and the communication tools used in Design Thinking – maps, models, sketches, and stories – help capture and express the information required to form and socialize meaning. Arriving at this takes time and emerges through multiple iterations and conversations.

09) DESIGN THINKING BRING ENTERPRISE CREATIVITY TO NEXT LEVEL

It fosters a culture that embraces questioning, inspires frequent reflection in action, celebrates creativity, embraces ambiguity, and creates visual sense making through interactions with visualizations, physical objects, and people. A Design Thinking organization creates strong “inspirationalization” and “sensibility” to give tangibility to the emotional contract that employees have with organizations.

10) DESIGN THINKING IS THE NEW COMPETITIVE LOGIC OF BUSINESS STRATEGY

Design Thinking is the most complementary practice that can be applied side by side with Michael Porter´s theory of competitive strategy. It allows companies to create new products, experiences, processes, and business models beyond simply what works. It turns them into desirable products, which is a truly sustainable competitive advantage through innovation.

Fuente: Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation - Idris - Wiley