Design Thinking from a Organization Context
By: Kumar A
Tags: Desing Thinking, Agile, Organization

In last decade, companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Disney, and IBM have imbibed “design thinking” and has proven that its a competitive advantage that drivers the business growth and increase ROI over time. Its shifting business centered solution (mostly technical) to a Customer-Centric solution ie explore cultural , behavior , thinking , insights and and design a product around that.

Strategic/Board Engagement: According to the Design Thinking proponent , Companies should have design thinkers in the corporate boards, providing strategic inputs and involved in R&D efforts. This ensures that elements of design thinking, ideas , tools are leveraged at the outset during exploration of any product strategy. Design Thinker are must at the beginning of conceptualization of an innovation or at the early stages of Product Development.

Human-Centered Approach: Design thinkers observe how people behave, how the product experience affects the company products/services. They explore people needs , wants, intrinsic desires etc and connect these behavior to the product/services. Its not only valuable to explore the human behavior but for company its a new models of business value, potentially new business themselves that could generate revenue, On the flip side , human-centered design thinking increases the customers acceptance rate. There are 2 approaches to this:

1) Default Approach : By Default , the company/BU, starts with existing business constraints ie budgets, product line etc. They also factor global Market treads and try extrapolation which leads to incremental ideas . The drawback is that they are easily copied.

2) Technology Approach: Starting with Emerging technology is the second most common approach but is risky but are used by the “start ups” with high risk. Using tools for social media and Session based Mystery Shopping are examples of technical approach

Fail Fast, Fail Often : This might be the stupidest of the matra of current time, but its true for corporations those who wishes to fails and learn than follow a flawed process. The idea is to have first prototype asap and how it can be tested and improved. The expectation from the strategic leaders are experimentation and accepting it. A success leads to funding and support and failure leads to learning. Ensure that the prototype is tested in the real world and with intended users.

Effective Collaboration: The Organization BUs are encouraged for continued experimentation but they work in silos since they are limited with ideas within their product/services. But this undermines ineffectiveness of design principle and other BUs may miss on the opportunities that lies ahead. A collaborative effort across multiple BUs/Regions and “common thinking” should be encouraged

Agile Budgeting : Since Design Thinking is fast paced , the strategic leadership should expect releasing funds for projects based on milestones. But in reality the milestones cannot be always achieved and thus should change with times. Key is to review the budget with judgement . Some companies uses venture capitalist or venture funds and could be tapped for projects where success rate is potentially high. Agile Resource alignment and allocation is a challenge but could be managed with resources from other projects/departments with a core team in place.

Design E2E : This entails following design thinking build into all the operations in order to bring the customer and human insight for product/services and engaging, marketing materials, user interfaces , websites , apps , employee communications , manufacturing operations, sales engagement , on boarding and developing employees or anything that has to do with new product/services offering .

Coaches: Where special support is required, training , leadership with implementation know-how of a coach supervision ensures Project/Services success in the day-to-day work The BU/Organization should engaging Design Thinking coaches or hire experts, who are technology specialists, software gurus , design consultants, video gamer etc.

Closing Notes : According to Citrix SVP of Customer Experience, Catherine Courage. “You need to make [design thinking] part of all processes and not just something you do on select projects. Starting by looking through the customer lens has to be ingrained in everything you do. Developing that foundation and creating that cultural change across all projects and initiatives is what it takes”