Nurturing Design Thinking
Fast Company recently asserted that the era of design thinking has ended. Far from the end of the era, companies increasingly realize the need to build their internal design thinking capabilities to enhance their innovation capacity. As we move into a new era of nurturing in-house design thinking, companies must make long-term commitments to supporting the conditions for design thinking to thrive and be patient enough for innovation efforts to take root and bear fruit.
Nurturing a New Methodology
It takes time for new methodologies to be adopted across a company. It takes time for people to understand fresh approaches and for changes in how teams work to lead to tangible successes. It takes time for a movement to change how companies operate. Indeed, it takes time to transform a company. Design thinking has the potential to do just that, and for it to take hold within a company, it benefits from the mindset of a gardener. Consultancies have worked closely with companies seeking to learn and apply design thinking for decades. Most are engagements involving multi-year journeys, onboarding new hires, and the persistent involvement of CEOs.
Company leaders must set the conditions essential to adopting design thinking. First, they must set expectations and plan for several years of growing a design thinking capacity. Efforts often start by working in areas relevant to the company but not so significant as to cause undue risk. Using this approach, even with small victories, others within the organization can see how the process applies to them. This approach also allows for experimentation and the kind of trial and error that occurs when onboarding new design-thinking practitioners. In addition to transforming how existing employees innovate, hiring colleagues with new design research capabilities, unique outlooks on business, and the ability to quickly prototype with technology is often needed. All of this takes time. Several tiers of leadership within the company must be involved to ensure that the focus on design thinking can persist beyond leadership changes.
“Being mindful of how deeply the roots of design thinking are reaching within a company is essential to ensure that the movement can persist even if fundamental leadership changes occur or a company pivots strategically.”