Design Thinking Unleashed
A recent issue of the Design Management Review (DMR) is focused on The Future of Design Leadership. You can access some of the content for free or read a review in BusinessWeek on Desgining the Future of Business.
One basic point is that design is beginning to play a much broader and long overdue role in business. Design is starting to be seen as a general approach to innovation, an important tool for managerial problem solving and even an essential element of leadership in the 21st century.
The DMR claims “Perhaps the ultimate leadership strategy, though, is to instill a design culture that pervades all dimensions of a business.”
We are moving from understanding design as a technique or speciality (e.g. graphic design) to a view of design as a mode of thinking – design thinking.
Cognitive design provides an important foundation for the emergence of design thinking.
In cognitive design we focus not so much on core functionality (product engineering), ease of use (usability) or look-and-feel (sensorial design) but go one step further to focus on creating a specific set of mental states for users or a “think-and-feel”. We design to create trust, stimulate reflection, defuse cravings, accelerated problem solving, engender connection, enable savoring, pump up self confidence, mitigate decision-making biases, create meaning and most importantly achieve sustained behavior change.
By putting mental states (thoughts, feelings, motivations, volition) at the center of design, the potential impact of design is extended tremendously. Understanding the hearts and minds of customers and employees is not only essential for product and service innovation but is critical for process improvement, IT deployments, implementing management innovations such as quality or knowledge management, successfully merging cultures, achieving a strong customer/market focus and really all forms of planned organizational change and performance improvement.
Cognitive design is necessarily human-centric but also recognizes that there are many types of minds including individual, extended (thinking through objects), group, emergent (e.g. prediction markets) and even machine minds or smart devices. This creates a natural tangle between marketing, product development, customer service, IT and organizational improvement the likes of which we have not seen before. We can re-imagine these basic business functions along the lines of design thinking because we are using a new unit of value – namely the mental state of customers and employees.
Said more directly, one way we can release the broader power of design thinking is to embrace the competitive imperative we have to (re-)design everything for how minds actually work.
My suggestion is that design thinking is much more than training managers and other business professional to think like designers. Instead it involves a refocusing of design itself away from an emphasis on the features and functions of artifacts to an emphasis on supporting and creating the mental states of those that will use the artifacts. This inverts the paradigm and allows us to design form the inside-out. We start with the cognitive science and end with the human factors and product engineering.
