On Design Thinking

Design in the business world

I’ve started my journey this year in an IT consultancy firm. A place I’d never expected to be a part of. Coming from a humanistic, to be more precisely, art and culture background, corporate is another world that I think it has nothing to do with what I studied. At least a few years ago while I was stepping out of the contemporary art circle, I told myself that art matters are something for me to do in my free time or for my retirement.

Few weeks ago, while I was sitting in the training workshop of my company, I wondered, is it true that I am spending a full day learning how to draw a stick figure as if I was 10 years old in an art studio? I expected my company would have sent me to some IT boot camp to learn a programming language, instead of handing me a handful of permanent markers, a bunch of post-its, and a booklet of white drawing papers. They often called this kind of methodology visual thinking or design thinking, a methodology that was originated from the design circle.

Working with your clients

Design thinking was originated from the (industrial) design circle of the 60’s. It’s gaining its importance in the business world nowadays through its interactive and playful approach. In my experience, a consulting group aims to spot a problem, generate solution, and implement it to get business outcome. Design thinking empowers the cooperation between business and its clients in this process. It keeps its clients in the center.

At a design thinking workshop, you will see less presentation slides but more colorful markers and post-it’s. Less speeches are given but more discussions are invited. Business consultants and their clients work together on a solution. They work together, instead of one working for the other.

The design thinking approach invites the clients into an interactive context and make them work side by side with the business solution provider. After all, the client knows their business context the best, while the external business consultant might only be knowledgeable for a specific technology or offering. The consultants need the help from their clients. Design thinking facilitates this working-together mechanism in a friendly, creative and playful way.

Real life example

One time I was at a third party’s training workshop organized by my company. We were learning how to visually present our ideas through drawing. During the workshop, we needed to use some design thinking methods to come up with a solution of how to promote the visual presentation skills in our company context. It seemed to be a very straightforward assignment and a genuine question for the training purpose.

For a few hours, we drained our creativity and tried to sell the visual presentation skills we learned to our own employer. We were transformed into the best sales agents for that external training party. We were even proud of being in the process. It was a very nice course, I still recalled. I like the technique and enjoyed the exercise throughout the workshop.

A few days later during a relevant conversation, there was a light bulb brightened up in my head. I suddenly realized that I was making the sales pitch for that third-party company towards my own company. With my contextual knowledge as an employee, that external training provider can easily spot the need (or the pain point) of my company and provide her with their business solution.

That’s the trick of design thinking. It’s about working together in a subtle way that one sometimes forgets who is the client and who is the solution provider. It blurs the boundary between the seller and the buyer.

Finding the root-cause

The design thinking process is iterative, or call it agile if you like, and thus creates room for creativity. Its 5 stages (emphasize, define, ideate, test, and prototype) in design thinking are parallel to an either divergent or convergent thinking process. The thinking process continues expanding the range of possibilities and narrowing it down to the “real, underlying problem”. By asking the “5 Whys” (emphasize the continuation of questioning a presumption or conclusion), design thinking aims to identify the root cause and allow us to find the right product or solution design.

This explains why a company is willing to spend seemingly time-consuming design thinking workshops to discover and re-frame a problem statement, ideate various scenarios and follow up with endless group discussion. All of this is devoted to finding the root cause, or more often, a suitable business solution in a “fast-changing” world.

Thinking like a designer

Last but not least, the core principle of Design thinking is Human-Centered. The Human-Centered Design is the key for a design to be lovable and a business solution to be successful.

It all comes down to if we know whom we are designing the product or solution for. Namely, who our client or target user is. Human-Centered Design is eventually asking if we know who we are serving, and how do we define the human needs in the 21st century when the technology and intelligence are all over the place.