Design Thinking Isn't Dead. Our Needs Have Changed.

Conference rooms are littered with the detritus of endless brainstorm sessions; forests have been felled to create the Post-Its covered in inspiring customer insights, breakthrough ideas, and bold provocations. We’ve all hesitantly interviewed strangers, “walked a mile” in our customers’ shoes, and done things that initially felt awkward and bizarre, but which have become part of our corporate vernacular.

But what has all that achieved? After two decades of popularity, leaders (and a recent MIT article) are rightly asking, “Why hasn’t Design Thinking made a greater impact within our organisations?” 

The short answer is that organisations aren’t suffering from a shortage of good ideas. If anything, Design Thinking is a victim of its own success. When it was first introduced, organisations needed a framework for sharing ideas and encouraging creativity. Teams readily took to the “Empathise/Define/Ideate” phases of Design Thinking, and now, organisations are inundated with ideas. 

The real problem is that organisations are simply not set up to turn nascent ideas into reality. If anything, they’re designed to reduce risk, rather than support the risk-taking that’s required for any form of innovation. In particular, employees struggle with the “Prototype/Test/Iterate” phases of Design Thinking, believing, rightly or wrongly, that they need approval and budget to move forward, regardless of the size or scope of the experiment. This brings the “rapid” part of rapid prototyping to a screeching halt, and is particularly painful in highly regulated industries and those with complex non-physical products, like Financial Services. 

On the rare occasion when a new idea does make it through the prototyping phase,  organisations all too often fail to implement it at scale. But that’s not necessarily Design Thinking’s fault—it was never designed to solve that particular challenge. It’s just one tool in the innovation toolbelt, and other tools, like change management, agile, and lean, are better suited for making change, depending on the organisation's specific context, needs, and challenges. 

Some of the lessons of Design Thinking still can (and should) be applied to the organisation itself—and as leaders, it's our responsibility to effect change, not extinguish sparks of innovation, or let red tape, regulation, and bureaucracy be an excuse for the status quo. By creating space, rituals, and systems that encourage experimentation and iteration, we can achieve real, meaningful change, creating teams with a greater capacity for change going forward and a more fertile environment for ideas to flourish. Here’s what we’ve seen be effective:

Evaluate what’s “Safe to Fail” versus “Fail Safe”

First, determine what activities in your organisation are “fail-safe”—that is, any failure or disruption would have an immediate, negative, and lasting impact on the organisation. (These might be related to security, for instance, or an org restructure.) Set these as off-limits for innovation, and instead, look for activities that are “safe-to-fail”—things like process improvements and product development that benefit from iteration. Determine limits for teams (like containing experiments to one region or customer segment) so that if something does go wrong, its impact is limited and easily recovered from. Remember, most activities are actually safe-to-fail, so there’s plenty for your employees to improve upon.

Trust and empower your teams

Your employees already have extensive expertise in both the organisation and their customers—after all, they work with them every day. They probably already have dozens of ideas that they’re dying to implement. These ideas may or may not work, but there’s as good a starting place as any. Give them the opportunity to test their ideas in a safe environment before looking to outsiders or outside inspiration. 

In one NOBL engagement with a global food chain, we worked alongside restaurant servers for a week, and interviewed them about changes they were seeing in customers. They were concerned that customers were ordering less of the restaurant’s famous dishes, and more of the limited-time specials. When we reported this back to HQ, they said, “oh, we wish we’d done that. We just spent six months and millions of dollars to have a big consultancy tell us the same thing.” 

Think small

When employees are struggling to think of how to test an idea without investing significant time and money, we encourage them to think of a skateboard. A skateboard and a car will both get you from Point A to B, but anyone could build a rudimentary skateboard in an afternoon with $20 in materials—whereas a car would take years and thousands of dollars. Prompt the team with questions like “How could you test this idea with your target audience this afternoon? What could you build if you only had $100? Where could you test this safely?” High-performing teams with high standards may find this frustrating initially, wanting to “perfect” the prototype first. Instead, encourage them to sit with the discomfort, and prioritise real, though imperfect, solutions over ideal hypotheticals.    

Reframe “failure” as learning

If people are trying new things, they’re going to fail. Build psychological safety so that your team knows that they won’t be punished for taking a risk or making a mistake. (And since they will mostly be operating in the “Safe to Fail” category, it won’t harm the business in the long term.) Note that “punishment” doesn’t have to mean anything as official as a write-up or demotion—it could look like someone rolling their eyes or sighing when a new idea is brought up, or missing out on a career opportunity in the future. As a leader, be sensitive to how you’re showing up in front of your team, and share your own mistakes and frustrations to show that it’s ok to fail, and that others can learn from the experience.

Measure the impact of these initiatives in the form of learning, experiments, and problems solved

It’s not enough to design new processes—you must also re-evaluate how you measure and reward “success.” First, focus on outcomes, not outputs (e.g., “increased sales” not “more social ads”)—there may be many ways to reach a goal, and teams won’t know which is best until they’ve had a chance to experiment with a variety of options. Second, make sure you’re measuring the types of behaviour you want to encourage, like more frequent customer interaction or increased internal collaboration. Lastly, don’t forget to review existing incentives and performance metrics for conflict—employees won’t work against their own interests. 

Apply a similar process for scaling change throughout the organisation

Unfortunately, change doesn’t usually spread “naturally” through organisations. You need to have a process for rolling out changes or scaling products and services—and if it’s not already well-established within your organisation, you may have to prototype that as well. The good news is that you can once again use the principles of Design Thinking: find a “safe to fail” opportunity, start small, and set up metrics and a culture that encourages learning as teams iterate. 

The future of Design Thinking

By adopting a mindset that values empathy, creativity, and experimentation, organisations can leverage principles from Design Thinking to gain a competitive edge and make a positive impact. The key is to approach design thinking as a way to help drive execution and turn ideas into reality.

Philippa Huxley is the Managing Director of NOBL in the APAC region, and an accomplished transformation leader with over 15 years of experience driving innovation and change in Financial Services in-house and as a consultant.  

Lani Beer is an award-winning changemaker, passionate about empowering and coaching people and teams to achieve great things. With over 20 years’ experience in the field,  Lani is currently an innovation leader at a top-tier law firm where she is a catalyst for positive change and delivers value for colleagues and clients through her innovation expertise.