Why Design Thinking Is an Attractive Path to Success

Scientists are taught analyze. From the beginning of their education, scientists are encouraged to break apart a situation and identify the root causes. Historical data is reliable. Artists, on the other hand, are taught to synthesize. Artists are expected to rely on their imagination and originality is prized. Are disciples of one school of thought more successful than the other?

Creativity is typically thought of as an abstract, sometimes elusive, force that drives imagination — one that cannot be taught. While creativity can be thought of as a gift that only a handful possess, design thinking upends this assumption. The underlying belief of design thinking is that creativity is a process that can be broken down and taught, that the creative process can be mimicked by any intellectual. Design thinking merges the way scientists and artists think, allowing anyone to be a creative problem solver.

With the growth of social media, customer satisfaction is becoming a more pressing measure of a company's performance. With many corporations struggling to compete in lucrative markets, whether or not customers are content with the services and products they receive can make or break a company. With growing pressure to maintain and grow their customer bases, corporations are eagerly founding innovation labs to foster a design thinking culture. By focusing on meeting their customers' needs, corporations can progress effortlessly. For example, IBM’s innovation lab, IBM Design Thinking, played a vital role in the identification of a need for flexible and scalable IT resources. This led to the development of Bluemix, a cloud-based platform that supports several programming languages and services and allows organizations to centralize this information.

The basis of design thinking is simple — identify customers' needs from the get-go, research those needs, and prototype possible solutions. These five basic steps illustrate the complete process:

1. Understand who is directly affected by the situation you are facing. Don't make any assumptions! Remember, design thinking is human-centered innovation. Gather as much information as possible about the general process that occurs before the end-user is involved, and how each step affects the consumer. Make sure this information is organized. It helps to draw out the process on a whiteboard.
2. Understand the problem. Analyze the information you gathered about the general process to understand what the core issue is. At each step in the process, identify potential issues and how they affect the end-user. Synthesize this analysis to come up with a problem statement. Keep the problem scope as narrow as possible.
3. Come up with as many ideas as possible. Don’t avoid mentioning an idea because you think it’s “too simple” or “too complex.” Sometimes simplicity is key, and sometimes aspects of complicated solutions can be adapted. The trick to successful ideation is to avoid being emotionally invested in any one idea early in the process. Keep your mind open and thoroughly examine every suggestion before investing resources.
4. Prototype the most viable ideas on a small scale. It is vital to have a method to prototype ideas quickly and efficiently. Thoroughly analyze each prototype and make any improvements as necessary. Design thinking is a process of continuous improvement and your solution will benefit from multiple iterations.
5. Test the best solutions from the prototyping step. Continue to make improvements and understand how the end-users are affected. Ensure that your solution allows for continual improvement through feedback.

The applications of human-centered innovation are endless, from hospital management to education to the fashion industry. I like to think of design thinking as the industrial revolution of management. Slowly, but surely, the design thinking revolution is reinventing the corporate world.