[originally published 27th November 2015]
The tearcher of Design Thinking Innovation course (Jeanne Liedtka) had write a book as a design thinking toolkit for managers. If you’re interested the name of it is "Designing for Growth".
She analyze design thinking as a problem solving aproach. That ask four questions, and that it is human centered, possibility driven, option focused and iterative.
It is a bridge which connect the two sides of the thread.
There are two types of problems: mysteries and puzzles.
Puzzle are these problems when you have the right level of data disclosure, when you have that absolute number, the problem can be solved.
Mysteries are where there is no single piece of data disclosure that will actually solve the problem. In fact, there might be too much data, and it’s about interpreting all of the data that’s there. And that’s really where the designers are. They are often more adapt at playing, is within a situation like that. It’s just about trying different things and experimenting, and trying to move forward towards a solution.
We’re never going to have enough information. We’re never going to have the right information. We just have to interpret what we have now and do the best that we can. And I think that when we start to resolve those. Is when good things happen. But certainly it’s the mysteries that get designers excited. – Jeremy Alexis (Professor of Design Illinois Institute of Technology)
Design thinking is a way of approaching a challenge that offers just another skill set and another approach. That’s complementary to other forms of thinking, other forms of product development. […] It’s too much to say that it’s the answer to every problem. It also isn’t accurate to portray it as the only way of thinking, doing, managing, leading, etc. It really is one half of, or one part of this holistic approach to management and leadership that has been missing for a long time.
So, by integrating design thinking into management, into leadership. By all means it has a tremendous amount of promise to integrate and balance out a full set of skills. But it only because it’s been missing all along, not because there’s something inherently incredible about it.– Nathan Shedroff (Chair, MBA in Design Startegy Program California College of the Arts)
What design thinking gives us is curiosity. The ability to look out into the world and find new solutions to traditional problems, it also gives us the power of observation. Which takes data and puts it into context of a given situation. -Andre Martin (Global Leadership Development Director Mars, Inc.)
[…] Understanding how somebody uses a product or a service getting in that person’s head. That’s really about how do you understand the product from the user’s point of view. And that can involve not giving people literal questions […] but actually going into their homes and seeing how they use toothpaste, how did they use shaving cream.
That’s what P&G and others have done. They made design thinking essentially making it part of what it means to be at that company. Now at the same time they haven’t abandoned serious business metrics. I mean, the company still gotta make money, still gotta hit their numbers, still have to the products still have to perform. I like that as an example because it’s such a behemoth of a company. And, a lot of times when we see size, we say there’s no way any of this will work in a place like this. It’s only for really small operations. – Dan Pink (Authour, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future”)
I do think that even the word “design” in some people’s heads is freighted with the meaning of sort of ornamentation or prettifying things. – Dan Pink (Authour, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future”)
Inefficiency and ambiguity are both conditions of the design process. There has to be time for reflection and disagreement, and these are the core to great new big ideas. But reflection and disagreement are the things that make processes inefficient. And it’s important to have time within your process just to take a step back and look at “what did we create, where are the connections that we’re not seeing, can we bring these two things together in ways that we hadn’t thought of before?”. That’s really where great ideas come from. You also have to have time to disagreement. Because good design think is about bringing very different points of view together. So that you have that diverse set of inputs. You know, if you want efficiency, you get everybody who thinks the same way, and they’ll get to a decision quickly. – Jeremy Alexis (Professor of Design Illinois Institute of Technology)
Now I invite you to watch the a real case: The story of the Good Kitchen Case Study:
But as you listened in the first video, not all the problems can be solve by design thinking. To identify the kinds of problems that design thinking is really suited for:
