In the 1990s, David Kelley and Tim Brown of the global design and innovation company IDEO, along with strategy exponent Roger Martin, brought together principles, concepts and methods that had been brewing for many years and distilled them into a unified concept, which they named design thinking.
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Overview
Design thinking has been widely adopted in the organisational world, but design firms and end-user organisations report recurring shortcomings, especially once it moves from workshops into real operating contexts.
Superficial adoption (design thinking theatre)
Design thinking is often reduced to Post-its, canvases and workshops, creating performative signals of innovation without structural change. This leads to cynicism and limited lasting impact.
Weak link to strategy and decision-making
Design thinking projects tend to be untethered from the organisation’s overarching strategy, and their fit with other programmes of work is often poor or unconsidered.
Over-emphasis on empathy, under-emphasis on power and constraints
While empathy is prioritised, organisational politics, regulatory constraints, legacy systems, and economics are often ignored, resulting in impractical solutions.
Poor handling of complexity and systemic problems
Design thinking struggles with multi-stakeholder systems, long time horizons, and systemic interdependencies, leading to oversimplified outcomes.
To improve your innovations’ odds of success, demand that they increase total value for the company’s full system of stakeholders: the groups that most impact and are most impacted by the company’s activities. Innovations fail when innovators fail to think in terms of complex systems of interdependent stakeholders. As a result, they neglect or even extract value from at least one group of stakeholders as they overfocus on others.
Darrell Rigby, Zach First, and Mikaela Boyd, How Corporate Purpose Leads to Innovation, on Harvard Business Review website (subscription required)
Workshop bias and short-termism
The method often prioritises fast workshops over deep, longitudinal understanding, resulting in shallow insights.
Ambiguous ownership after the idea phase
Downstream from idea conception, responsibility for implementation is often unclear, causing promising concepts to stall.
Talent dilution and deskilling
The spread of simplified design thinking tools can undervalue deep design expertise and reduce designers to facilitators.
Cultural misfit in some organisations
Design thinking assumes psychological safety and understanding of ambiguity, which many hierarchical or regulated organisations lack.
Measurement and ROI ambiguity
It is difficult to directly measure the impact of design thinking, making it vulnerable during budget scrutiny.
Moral and ethical blind spots
By focusing narrowly on users without considering the entire stakeholder system and broader ethical factors, design thinking may give rise to degenerative outcomes.
Core critique
Design thinking is strong at generating insight and creativity but weak at addressing power, scale and long-term systemic change.
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Making the transition from design thinker to Now-to-New wayfarer
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