Design Thinking Debuzzed

Too often, I've heard the phrase "design thinking" used to cloak a half-baked idea and dismissed it as a buzzword that is spoken by far more people than understand what the concept really means.  Martin's The Design of Business is not likely to solve the problem - people who use words they don't understand don't tend to be fond of reading - but it does at least help differentiate what is design thinking, and what is not, as a means of making discussions more productive.

A deeper problem is that the practice of design is much misunderstood to be an aesthetic or emotional reaction to the superficial sensory qualities of things.   To a non-designer, the word "design" is poorly understood: it is what "looks good" and nothing more - when in truth it pertains to a perspective that leads to more that superficial changes, and defines a highly effective approach to solving problems at a much more fundamental level.

Design thinking is a methodology that leads to innovation: it takes as its focus the individual who is experiencing difficulty in encountering a goal, and creates a solution that enables them to achieve it.   That functions on a much deeper level than the paint on a machine, but to the way in which the machine itself is designed.

When design thinking is applied to an organization, it considers the value-generating procedures rather than the operations of a physical object.  In this sense, an organization is a largely organic machine, as the components that generate the greatest value are the human resources rather than facilities and equipment.   Considered thus, commercial organizations lend themselves very well to design thinking: to recognizing the manner in which their current configuration is ill-suited to delivering solutions to customers' problems.

And in the same way that a designer can apply his creative processes to creating an object that enables a user to obtain value, Martin's book describes a plausible methodology in which the same sort of creating process that would structure an organization that enables a customer to gain value.

So in all, there's something to this, though it takes a few hundred pages to connect the dots, and it's far more profound than a label to be placed upon bad ideas, but a practice that leads to genuine innovation.