The human angle

With its focus on human stakeholders, as in behavioural economics, design thinking holds the potential to drive change in multiple contexts.

- RANDY SALZMAN AND JEANNE LIEDTKA, AUTHORS, DESIGN THINKING FOR THE GREATER GOOD

Dr Abhijit Banerjee’s 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics could put the final nail in the coffin in ‘rational actor’ economics. His work illustrating effective solutions for alleviating poverty emerge via observation, listening, and interaction with the local poor—piggybacking on Richard Thaler’s 2017 Nobel ‘nudging’ smarter human choices and Daniel Kahneman’s 2002 award for understanding real-world decision-making— demonstrates that the planet’s most quantitative thinkers—economists—are concluding that humans are not facts and figures, but rather flawed and often confused homo sapiens.

Together, these Economics Nobels underline the value of the design thinking problem-solving methodology.

Working from rigorous randomised controlled poverty testing on five continents, Banerjee and his co-author Esther Duflo (his wife and co-Nobel laureate) found that economic and social experts’ opinions and ideas, whether market-based or planned centrally, seldom get the context correct for actual men, women, and children. Experts must understand the humans caught in whatever the problem is—as design stresses constantly.

Behavioural factors, their research underlines, are the keys to real-world solutions, especially in problem conceptualisation. Behavioural economics is also the key to design thinking, a collaboratively creative problem-solving methodology which primarily requires empathy towards the people designers are attempting to serve, and then ideates and iterates towards emerging ever-better—and actually used—solutions.

Since change and innovation always require some humans to adopt new behaviours, encouraging and supporting choices which make human—not rational—sense to those specific homo sapiens is essential. People rarely act rationally, no matter how much planners wish we did.