matthew holloway design thinking

Applying of Design Thinking

It is important to note that Design Thinking is not a prescriptive process, or set of standards and templates. It is not meant as a replacement for your organization’s standard development tools or cross-functional processes. Design Thinking is meant to augment the use of these approaches. Unlike traditional analytical thinking, Design Thinking does not seek to break an idea into constituent parts; rather it is generative process that builds new ideas by combining or recombining elements, conditions and behaviors—even your organization’s standard processes. Design Thinking encourages diversity, seeking input and participation from a wide range of stakeholders and encourages the inclusion of each domains native tools and processes.

The Design Thinking approach can be introduced to projects which are well underway or at the beginning of new projects. The fluid nature of Design Thinking allows teams to find value in the approach regardless of when they begin applying Design Thinking. Projects using Design Thinking use standard project management methods for establishing project times and milestones; Design Thinking focuses on how the team members think about their deliverables and if they are maximizing their time it doesn’t offer a prescriptive structure.

From The New York Times, 5 October 2008:

“While definitions vary, design thinking usually involves a period of field research — usually close observation of people — to generate inspiration and a better understanding of what is needed, followed by open, nonjudgmental generation of ideas. After a brief analysis, a number of the more promising ideas are combined and expanded to go into “rapid prototyping,” which can vary from a simple drawing or text description to a three-dimensional mock-up. Feedback on the prototypes helps hone the ideas so that a select few can be used.”

It is important to understand that Design Thinking is not new. Over the past five years Design Thinking has gained momentum in the business press and is highly valued by industry leaders, the practice of Design Thinking been applied decades. Key to the Design Thinking approach is to start from the customer’s point of view, to see your offerings through their eyes. This new perspective will help to you identify and prioritize your development, not just features or functionality, but to rethink your approach to developing solutions. While a great deal of attention has recently been placed on Design Thinking for its ability to generate innovative solutions, its greatest value comes in helping teams more effectively combine their standard development tools and processes to greater affect.

Design Thinking is about Multiples.

Design Thinking is about generating multiple solutions to the problem. Rather than simply choosing between the current set of existing alternatives. Design Thinking generates many different tangible alternatives—prototypes, to explore and clearly explain the competitive advantages and implications of the solution. It is no surprise that the mantra of Design Thinking is "make to think". Design Thinking is also a simple way to leverage the collective power of multi-disciplinary teams in order to maximize the knowledge of each discipline. Design Thinking is about working with multiple stakeholders and customers to define comprehensive set of success criteria. Combined with multiple iterations of the prototypes Design Thinking teams can combine, refine and validate the desirability, viability and feasibility of a given solution.

Business success is dependent on the total product lifecycle, from strategy and technology to manufacturing and distribution, to sales, licensing, maintenance as well as identifying market adjacencies and emerging business models.

There are many frameworks for teamwork and problem solving, even understanding your customers. Often the greatest successes come from the combination of these methods, using them in conjunction with each other rather than selecting just one approach creates richer outcomes. Sustainable advantage requires separating preconceptions from re-conceptions in order to create solutions which offer not only customer value but innovative business value as well. However in today’s ever evolving market, the ability to achieve this success requires more problem solving capacity than one person can provide; it requires a team—with multiple disciplines and diverse experience, to collectively identify the opportunities, develop potential solutions and deliver value to the market. Design Thinking provides multidisciplinary teams with the tools and frameworks to successfully deliver value to your customers and your organization.

Design Thinking creates alternatives that incorporate both aspects of human thought; creating solutions that can be examined from a rational, business perspective with a lower cost of ownership, and improving time to value by ensuring the easy adoption and improved utilization of the solution. Design Thinking can be used for a variety of efforts, from defining strategy to improving processes, services and products.

Design Thinking helps to:

Discover how people, business and technology actually work together, revealing key insights and opportunities to enable breakthrough thinking
Prototype product, service and process innovations that express the possible and inspire the potential
Support cultural change in organizations and build team capabilities required to sustain innovation
The practice of Design Thinking into four distinct phases. They can be used collectively to help define and shape a project from end to end, or used as standalone sections to help frame a specific milestone within a project.