Why Design Thinking became a thorn in company's side?

There was a time when Design Thinking was at its peak of popularity. At that time, people understood that Design Thinking brought a clear strategy of finding user-centric solutions to the problems presented to the participants, which result in great ideas, new products and innovations.

I led many Design Thinking processes in my career and at that time everything worked as expected: Plurality of perspectives (with engagement of people from different teams, customers, suppliers, among others), research and discussion to better understand the problem, many techniques and interactions to encourage all participants to speak up and express their opinions and experience, diversity of ideas to be evaluated and prioritized to generate insights and journeys that allow the product to follow its natural flow of building prototypes that result in a profitable business solution, everything with the blessing of the company's board and sponsorship.

Nevertheless, like everything that is successful in the corporate world, Design Thinking has been completely subverted and the results generated are inevitably poor and far from the great ideas and innovations we had in the past. It seems that Design Thinking has become a thorn in company's side. Something that everyone knows is important but that no one really wants to do

Some reasons for this scenario:

• First of all, design thinking is not something "new" anymore, so directors and board are usually not as interested as before;
• It generates a ripple effect and managers do not participate and do not engage their teams to participate in design thinking meetings and workshops (the old excuse that daily tasks need to be done: someone has to work);
• The plurality of perspectives is no longer a reality, and insights are more limited;
• Innovation and Design Thinking processes conflict with the company's processes and structures and solutions are usually discarded or almost entirely modified;
• As they no longer believe in the process, business people do not want to wait for the ideation and design thinking results;
• Covid forced the process to be done remotely. Even though there are techniques and tools to do this, remote design thinking will never allow the same level of interaction and collaboration between participants we have in face-to-face ones;
• Companies also do not invest in experienced professionals to lead this process anymore (which should be the opposite since it is more challenging now for the reasons discussed above)

As a professional who has been working with product management for over 10 years, I say without hesitation that no product or important feature can be released without going through all the exploration, ideation, prototyping and validation steps. How to deal with all this mistrust around design thinking today is the challenge.

I recently joked with a friend saying that we urgently need to disguise good old design thinking by giving it a new modern name so people can believe it's something new and start giving it importance again.

But while that doesn't happen, what I suggest is that you know the pitfalls and try to adapt design thinking to your reality to bring value to your business