The drive towards ‘design thinking’

The digital world in which companies operate calls for a radically different corporate culture — one that is obsessed with improving customer experience and encouraging a more open, collaborative approach to innovation.

Today, design thinking is being applied to improve products, services and processes, thus becoming a part of day-to-day operations in companies. Design thinking is a creative and systemic problem-solving process that can visualise or shape products, businesses and environment by driving user/context-sensitive innovations

The role of design thinking is globally being recognised as a competence in making organisations agile and adaptive in transforming businesses. Several Fortune 500 companies have incorporated design thinking to nurture innovation and gain competitive advantage. The world of management is moving to an era of complex and inter-dependent challenges. The complexity here is due to the changing aspirations of consumers, as society evolves with the rapid pace of globalisation and exponential growth of technology (ICT) in our daily lives. As our context continues to evolve, these challenges require managers to avoid working in silos. The answer lies in the integration of knowledge from various sources to seek solutions from ambiguous data and develop competitive strategies with holistic, integrated approaches.

The business landscape has changed rapidly over the years. Today, understanding the customer’s needs and driving problem-solving has become imperative for an organisation’s growth and sustainability. This ‘drive’ however, has to come from the leadership. Creative leadership is not just about being creative. It actually refers to an individual leading his team and subsequently organisation towards creativity! Therefore, any leader can actually lead design thinking by understanding the creative potential of their company to create, accept and execute new ideas.

Empathy is core principle Similar to its implementation in businesses, design thinking can bring about societal change, especially when injected into the education system from kindergarten all the way to training of administrative officers and civil servants. Design thinking can be applied to visualising new policies as well as re-framing existing policies, to make them human-centric, cohesive and to include multiple stakeholder needs and views, thus increasing their adaptability and efficiency in implementation.

As design thinking is humanising and human-centred, empathy is the core principle of design thinking. Design requires an understanding of the need and experience people are seeking to fulfil and how people will interact with the end product.

Unlike traditional analytical thinking, design thinking’s open-ended abductive approach to problems enables social innovators and change makers to take creative leaps to idea generation and the realms of possibilities. Design is less about the analysis of existing options than the creation of new options. At times, this means re-framing the problem and looking at existing options in new ways. Sometimes, it means creating from scratch.

One could talk about Uber as an excellent example of design thinking — who would have thought that a new ridesharing service launched in 2012 could be worth $50 billion by 2015? Uber has quickly transformed the market for taxicabs and limousines, and it did it by using user-centred design principles to ‘reimagine’ the taxi experience. Taxis became complacent and failed to understand or respond to the needs of their customers. Customers anxious, waiting for taxis to get to important appointments? Provide a visualisation of the taxi’s approach and a way to contact the driver directly. Drivers didn’t like the risk of fare-dodgers running from cabs without paying? Create a cashless payment service. Customers worried about safety? Improve safety through driver ratings and one-to-one mapping of customers to drivers. By focusing on the customer needs, both expressed and latent, Uber could disrupt a traditional business model by applying design thinking in its approach.

With an endeavour to “Make in India”, a holistic approach to design thinking can play a huge role in ensuring that initiatives such as Swachh Bharat Mission integrate a design thinking approach — they could do this by involving different stakeholders in understanding and identifying the key issues and looking at solutions from their point of view.

Indian educators too must look at design thinking-based pedagogy to help students gain insights from various perspectives, giving them the aptitude to solve world problems based on critical thinking and analysis.

A potent amalgamation Design thinking is an amalgamation of science, art and design that fosters innovation within an organisation or an economy and helps it achieve success step by step but we must not forget that there will always be problems that cannot be solved due to lack of technology.

Design thinking does not necessarily help to come up with better ideas. On the contrary, it helps you test your ideas to identify which idea holds the maximum promise.

For all my fellow colleagues looking to succeed in design thinking, I would like to iterate that sustainable growth through design thinking can be achieved if you follow the simple practice of integrating the customer experience with collaborative brainstorming. If you can solve a problem successfully, you are creative, in my view!

(Shanmugh Natarajan is Executive Director and Vice-President (Products), Adobe Systems)