Overview of Article:

Thoughts on this Article: Matthew is one of the important voices in the Design Thinking community.  His views and recommendations are worth listening to.

Original Post HERE: From Open Forum/ Idea Hub

This is the year that Design Thinking tipped as a full-fledged management approach. The wave has been building for a few years and now seems to be cresting, as indicated by the spate of new books on the subject. Of the many books coming out, here’s my list of picks to round out your D-Think library. (While all are new this year, not all are out yet.)

• A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business by Harmut Esslinger (Jossey-Bass, June 29, 2009). Hartmut Esslinger is the founder of frog design, a leading global innovation firm. He is also one of the most respected designers and business consultants in the world, having spent forty years helping build the world’s most recognizable brands, such as Sony, Louis Vuitton, Lufthansa, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Microsoft, and Apple. Most consider him one of the key catalysts of the design revolution. His book shows how he and his firm build creative design into the framework of an organization’s competitive strategy and gives the reader a step-by-step overview of the innovation process. Esslinger reveals how to arrive at a design that reflects an intense human experience that will connect strongly with consumers.
• Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean by Roberto Verganti (Harvard Business School Press, August 3, 2009). Roberto Verganti is Professor of Management at Innovationat Politecnico di Milano and the founder of Project Science, a consulting institute that advises global corporations on the management of strategic innovation. Roberto authored the popular article “Innovating Through Design,” published in the Harvard Business Review December 2006 issue.
• Change By Design: How Design Thinking Tranforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown (HarperBusiness, September 29, 2009). Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO. According to Stanford professor and author Bob Sutton, “Tim Brown has written the definitive book on design thinking. Brown’s wit, experience, and compelling stories create a delightful journey. His masterpiece captures the emotions, mindset, and methods required for designing everything from a product, to an experience, to a strategy in entirely different ways.”
• The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger Martin (Harvard Business School Press, November 9, 2009). Roger Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a professor of strategic management at the school. He has written widely on the intersection of design and business. You can download a free PDF of his Rotman Journal article here.
• Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value, edited by Thomas Lockwood (Allworth Press, 3rd edition, November 10, 2009). Thomas Lockwood is president of the Design Management Institute (DMI), as well as being the publisher of DMI’s Design Management Review and Design Management Journal. This book is an anthology of essays, intriguing case studies, and practical advice from industry experts. It’s organized into three sections which focus on the use of design for innovation and brand-building, the emerging role of service design, and the design of meaningful customer experiences.

I also suggest two more titles that aren’t about Design Thinking but focus on two critical ingredients of good design process management: collaboration and motivation.

• Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results by Morten Hansen (Harvard Business School Press, May 11, 2009). Morten Hansen is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and INSEAD in France, as well as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. According to Jim Collins, “This book represents the culmination of fifteen years of some of the best research on the topic of effective collaboration. It does not matter whether you lead a business, conduct an orchestra, guide a school, operate a hospital, command a brigade, run for public office, direct a government agency, or coach a sports team—every complex enterprise requires collaboration.”
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink (Riverhead Hardcover, December 29, 2009). Just in time for the New Year, this book by Dan Pink promises some great new insights into the drivers of creativity—namely autonomy, purpose, and mastery. Dan’s bestselling book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future is probably the first widely-read and accepted take on design thinking, before the concept actually had a label. To get a sneak peak at Drive, take a look at Dan’s recent TED talk.

Matthew E. May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and blogs here. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Overview of this Article: Matthew May gives a quick definition of what Design Thinking is and how it is becoming more mainstream.

Thoughts on this Article: I don’t really agree with Matthew’s conclusions on what is currently driving the attention to Design Thinking.  It is more about the effectiveness of results than a stretching of resources.

Original Post Aug 03, 2009 -

Matthew E. May (How to Change the World)

“Design Thinking” has rapidly moved to the forefront of the current management zeitgeist as a fresh take not just on how to rethink key products and services, but also how to reframe everyday processes and projects. In an effort to create a cross-company culture of innovation and collaboration, businesses all over the world are taking a page from design firms, and realizing the rewards.

Graduate schools including Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka d. school) and the Rotman School of Management are helping to lead the way, taking the broad view that the designer’s approach to solving problems goes far beyond the traditional role of design in “making pretty.” Rather, they believe the designer’s blend of creativity and logic is applicable to all aspects of business, and that irrespective of job title, everyone can be a designer of sorts.

What’s driving the move is the very real pressure to innovate in a fiercely competitive marketplace, fueled by a down economy. That pressure falls on the individual, who is asked for higher commitment, more adaptability, quicker progress, better execution, stronger decision-making, and freer thinking. At the same time, they’re told to manage risk, meet short-term objectives, and only bet on sure things. All within the confines of environments that are often anything but free: powerful systems, rigid structures, conflicting agendas, privileged information, political posturing, and limiting rules. The truth is that uncertainty, risk and failure are all part of innovation, and the ability to meet business objectives doesn’t always square with the personal capabilities needed to innovate as required.

The solution? Think like a designer, work like a designer.

Great design is a result of a clear and thorough understanding of the user, creative resolution of competing tensions, multi-discipline collaboration, rapid experimentation via prototyping, with continuous modification and enhancement of ideas and solutions. The best designers leverage their expertise, pursue possibility, reject the status quo as a matter of course, view opposition to their ideas as an inventive challenge, refuse to let bureaucracy and hierarchy stifle their creativity, and use cutbacks and resource constraints drive new ideas and methods.

So what is “Design Thinking”?

Citing a 1969 book by Herbert Simon called The Sciences of the Artificial, Wikipedia defines it this way:

Design thinking is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result. It is the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success. Unlike analytical thinking, design thinking is a creative process based around the “building up” of ideas.

This raises the question of just what that process looks like. When design firm IDEO agreed in early 2005 to help Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City make their chemotherapy process more patient-friendly, the first thing the IDEO design team did was to take Sloan-Kettering staffers along with them as they followed patients throughout the entire treatment process, including the round trip from home to clinic. That allowed the discovery of a patient stress point: anxiety over treatment, the cause of which was the fact that patients didn’t know what to ask, and the huge information binder was far too daunting.

Understanding the situation allowed designers to ofer up a number of possible solutions, some of which were then carried out in much the same fashion as a scientific experiment. In design lingo, that meant “rapid prototyping.” One pilot entailed simply handing out index cards with “frequently asked questions,” such as “Where can I fill my prescription?” A few trial runs indicated that reviewing the cards during a quick guided tour of the clinic eased patient anxiety tremendously. The experiment quicly became standard operating procedure.

That’s a pretty clear strategy: Investigate, Design, Experiment, Adjust. What a great I.D.E.A.

For more insights from Matthew E. May, visit his past blog posts at here and follow him on Twitter here.