How people managers can adopt Design Thinking to re-engage their distressed workforce

How can we craft differentiated and enduring employee experiences at a time when scores of employees are under greater pressure than ever before? Design thinking may offer some fresh solutions

- DR. PAVAN SONI

Design Thinking has become the dominant approach of designing clever new products and differentiated customer experiences. From its roots in industrial and product design and architecture, the method of design thinking is finding applications in solving technical and behavioral problems in an array of scenarios, in both business to business and business to consumer settings. Thanks to Jeff Bezos and his relentless pursuit of customer obsession, the notion of “customer-centricity” has come to the mainstream ethos of running organizations. What Steve Jobs brought to design, Taiichi Ohno brought to quality, and Andy Grove lent to operations, Jeff Bezos infused in customer service: passion with purpose. However, a customer-centric organization has to be foremost an employee-centric organization, or else how would your front-end, customer-facing employees go far and beyond the “script” to delight your customers with memorable experiences? And why only the customer facing executives? The entire organization must rally around the “True North”.