What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a methodology for problem-solving. The problems could be commercial, personal, institutional, or individual. It can be adapted and applied to everything, from creating national policies to planning a family holiday or organising your fitness regimen.

Design Thinking is a method that uses critical and creative thinking, ethnography, experimentation and empirical observation. It encourages lateral thinking to come up with solutions to existing problems and focuses on empathy to identify human problems that might have been misunderstood or missed altogether. It has the potential to enlist the wisdom of crowds and so harness the benefits of diversity.

Of course, we all do many of the things above regularly. What Design Thinking does is that it brings these elements together in a structured way, it’s a flexible structure, but nevertheless a deliberate structure, which creates a powerful “social technology”, as Jeanne Liedtka, one of the leaders in the field, once described it.

Design Thinking brings Creative and Critical Thinking together so that imaginative ideas can become reality. This is innovation.

What is Critical Thinking, and what is creative thinking? Critical thinking is the analysis and creation of arguments, which are reasons for believing something that is logically structured and probably true in the real world. Probably here means that good empirical evidence supports the key logical steps in an argument’s premises and conclusions.

Creative Thinking is the capacity to generate something new. In our context of Design Thinking, this might be a new solution to existing problems or a new understanding that identifies issues that were not perceived before.

What kinds of problems are best approached with Design Thinking? Design thinking is most valuable when dealing with complex systems, particularly when those systems have people – and sometimes animals! – at their centre. That is why it is sometimes called “empathy-centred” thinking.

Design Thinking is not a substitute for business metrics or other forms of data. Rather, it uses metrics and data to understand and validate but seeks to work beyond the existing facts to develop something new. If data itself could solve the problem in front of us, we’d be better off using traditional problem-solving rather than Design Thinking. But in the modern world, many of our challenges are dynamic and human-centred, and that’s where Design Thinking offers a uniquely valuable approach.

Design Thinking has a proven track record. At OCNUS, we’ve taken a syncretic approach, learning from others and combining what works in our own way.

THE THREE STAGES AND NINE ELEMENTS OF DESIGN THINKING

 There are three stages to the Design Thinking process: Exploration, Ideation, and Creation. In each stage, relevant techniques and approaches, which we refer to as Elements, give the method its problem-solving power.

While there is a value in following the sequence below, this schema is not seen as, or used as, a rigid structure to be slavishly adhered to. Often, the opposite will be true: a key concept in Design Thinking is Iteration, and it is common practice for Design Thinkers to repeat stages and loop back and forth between stages, even though the journey has an overall intentionality and direction.

EXPLORATION

  1. DETAILS – What do we know? What do we need to know?

  2. DISCOVERY – Empathy: how do the people involved feel?

  3. DEFINE – What is it we want to create? What are the component parts?

IDEATION

  1. DIVERGE – Brainstorm in an unconstrained way.

  2. DISCUSS – Collaborate with the team to choose good ideas.

  3. DECIDE – What are you going to test first?

CREATION

  1. DEVELOP – Create a prototype and take it out into the world.

  2. DATA – Collect and process quantitative and qualitative information.

  3. DELIVER – Create a “learning launch” and a “beta” test.

Design Thinking does not aim to be a substitute for business analytics and other concrete measures. Its purpose is to provide new ways of working that improve performance in quantitative and qualitative ways.

To achieve this, Design Thinking helps to liberate new mindsets, create a sense of discovery, and facilitate innovation. OCNUS, we aim to help people and organisations make their work more productive, fulfilling, and meaningful. We believe that when individuals and teams are empowered with the right tools and mindsets, they can achieve extraordinary results while finding greater satisfaction in their work.