Sato Partners Blog

I’m writing an article with some colleagues that demonstrates synergies between Design Thinking and popular organization change and development approaches. This is an important issue for:
• innovators that take an active role as agents of change in their organizations to promote their innovations, or for
• design managers trying to position their teams more strategically.

However, I’ve not found a single list of attributes for Design Thinking that shows how it is complementary to business thinking yet is comprehensive [Roger Martin’s Validity vs. Reliability comparison is a good start]. So, I’ve developed this list of attributes/principles for Design Thinking, and am seeking comments on what’s missing or what changes I ought to consider. Thanks in advance for your comments – the post is from an early draft, please excuse typos and bad grammar.

Major Attributes of Design Thinking – That Complement Conventional Business Thinking

Finds Patterns and Relationships in Diverse Variables – Design Thinking employs a bottoms-up approach, more so than (but not to the exclusion of ) tops-down categorization or divide-and-conquer philosophies. Design thinking provides systematic ways to seek patterns and relationships in a broad number of diverse variables; including conflicting, ambiguous or paradoxical data.

Creates Principles or Guidelines from Patterns and Relationships [Martin] – Design Thinking’s unique contribution to business is to use the patterns and relationships found to generate a set of principles(rules, guidelines, imperatives, etc.) that increase the probability of success of addressing complex, dynamic, ambiguous challenges. Technically speaking, it is using Abductive reasoning to create heuristics. Perplexing dilemmas are often the nature of the challenges that change leaders and experts face daily.

Accommodates Intuition and Bias [Martin] – What is a good idea or bad idea is a decision. A growing body of research [Damasio, Lehrer] suggests that decisions on complex matters are primarily emotionally driven, not rationally driven. Design Thinking shapes what a decision-maker is aware of to inform their intuition, and hence their bias and judgment. Unlike in conventional business decision-making, factors that may play into a decision do not have to be defined, rationalized or even articulate-able before they are used. However, it is important that individuals are mindful of what they know and don’t know (that which informs their intuition) and biases throughout the Design Thinking cycle.

Balances Human-Centeredness with Company-Centricity [Owen] – Design Thinking seeks to balance benefit to company, with value to the customers, throughout the cycle whether in balancing perspectives or generating ideas. In a similar way, the balance that needs to be struck between employee needs and company needs is an everyday challenge for human resource professionals.

Relies on Actions, Reinforced with Words – Design Thinking relies on understanding actions and behaviors over what is said. Actions and behaviors require an investment of energy, time or resources, so reflect trade-off decisions a person made. In contrast what people say often reflects their ideal in abstract, without having had to make trade-off decisions or investments that arise in everyday life. Often the actions lead to questions about “why” a person or organization acted the way they did – this uncovers latent needs, relationships and meanings. Relying on actions applies to studying organizations too – one will often find a gap between what an organization claims its role is, and what it actually has resources to invest in.

Visualizes, Prototypes and Validates It; “Doing to Think” or “Playing” –Visualization reveals relationships that are not accessible in verbal-only representations [xxx]. Similarly, prototyping ideas make concepts concrete, so the concepts that embody the design principles can be shared and evaluated in “real world” settings.

Iterates Systematically and Scales – Design Thinking is scalable; it can be applied to messages, products, or strategies. It can be focused on a portion of a system simultaneous to being used for the whole system. Iteratively developing, prototyping and validating critical portions of system can be more cost and time effective, and less risky than doing an all-or-nothing full blown launch. Prototyping new policies, roles, processes and tools within a part of an organization, then making adjustments before launching more broadly has been a tactic long used in organization development.