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Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works resources

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Preface Spurred by burgeoning attention to the topic in the popular business press, we set out to assess the actual impact that design thinking was having. We wondered: Was the increasingly promi- nent role for design in business just talk, or could we observe it in action? To what extent was design thinking just the latest fad, destined to fade away as quickly as it had arrived, or was it really driving some fundamental changes in the way managers saw and interacted with their world? But since design has been around in organizations as long as there have been products, we wondered to what extent design—and designers—had been embraced by corporations beyond the traditional design functions? By gathering information about the pace and process of the adoption of design thinking in business organizations, we hoped to inform designers and practicing managers about how to improve their collaboration and elevate and accelerate the recognition of design’s capability to enhance innovation within their organizations. We began Phase 1 of the study by conducting a series of inter- views with design and innovation executives across a variety of industries. The idea was to start with design advocates who occu- pied roles at the interface between designers and managers and who, we felt, would be best positioned to help us understand the relationship between the two and how it was evolving in their organizations. A fascinating thing happened as we progressed through the Phase 1 interviews: Our conversations with the design executives surfaced a different set of issues than those we had anticipated (perhaps not a surprise at all to designers), which sometimes seemed to have little to do with our hypotheses and more to do with organizational politics. Rather than talking about the preva- lence of design thinking per se, interviewees wanted to talk about questions such as, Who owns design? How much design thinking should managers be encouraged to do? How do you sell design to business executives? Even the definition of design thinking itself emerged as a contentious issue. We heard neither inspiring stories x

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