Design Thinking Comes Of Age

The approach, once used primarily in product design, is now infusing corporate culture.

- Jon Kolko

There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the Centre of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work.

This new approach is in large part a response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern business. That complexity takes many forms. Sometimes software is at the Centre of a product and needs to be integrated with hardware (itself a complex task) and made intuitive and simple from the user’s point of view (another difficult challenge). Sometimes the problem being tackled is itself multifaceted: Think about how much tougher it is to reinvent a health care delivery system than to design a shoe. And sometimes the business environment is so volatile that a company must experiment with multiple paths in order to survive.

I could list a dozen other types of complexity that businesses grapple with every day. But here’s what they all have in common: People need help making sense of them. Specifically, people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.

A set of principles collectively known as design thinking empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure chief among them is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of interactions and developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture.

What Is a Design-centric Culture?