Design thinking Archives

Design is in the doldrums. Budgets have been squeezed, and for now, there are fewer jobs, projects, and career prospects. It’s a time to reflect and renew.

We need a clear-eyed diagnosis of how we got here. We need to be clear about the distinctive value design brings to business. But, if we have the grit to develop new know-how, design will flourish again.

Where we are

Design tends to be in a permanent state of flux. Designing today is barely recognisable compared to what it was when I entered the industry in the early 1990s. Back then, the only screens in our lives were TVs (and maybe a PC at work). And my presentation toolbox was full of markers, Conté crayons, lighter fluid and acetate! So, while the top-level design process hasn’t changed that much, what we design and how we design has changed massively. We’re currently in a state of high flux.

Over the years, we’ve adapted to economic shifts, such as globalisation, the 2008 crisis, the digitisation of business, and tech changes, such as digital modelling, visualisation and remote collaboration. We’ve integrated new approaches, such as Experience design, Business design, and Lean start-up methods. We’ve also adapted to social shifts, like sustainability and diversity agendas. In one way or another, all these changes brought design closer to business, which progressively brought its design activities in-house as its value was realised.

We’re now grappling with how to best use AI and adapt to a less forgiving business environment. To make headway, we must learn the lessons of the past and be creative about future opportunities.

How we got here

For two decades or more, we’ve been on a roll. By the late 1990s, design had moved from a cult to the mainstream, epitomised by the growth of IKEA and Target. In the new millennium, the phenomenal success of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive’s partnership at Apple turned the heads of boards towards design. By the 2010s, Design Thinking took the stage at Davos and was pitched as a magic five-step process, whether the challenge was a mobile app or a healthcare service. This coincided with the digitisation of the economy, as ‘software ate the world’ digital transformation work ballooned and corporations staffed up with huge UX teams.

The growth of design ground to a shuddering halt in late 2022, as swingeing layoffs made by Big Tech culled many designers. The big management consultancies soon followed; IDEO cut a third of its staff, while McKinsey shuttered its design team earlier this year.

It’s not just designers having a tough time, of course; the global economy is in the Doldrums, but some of design’s woes must be laid at its own door.

Design was often sold as a process centred on user research, journey mapping, ideation workshops, iterative prototyping and testing. This degraded definition of design was learned by enterprising non-designers.

To a certain extent, design is suffering from some of the unintended consequences of its success. The most obvious one is that most businesses now have a working knowledge of design, and by definition, it has lost its ‘shiny new thing’ status of the 2010s

More consequentially, design was often sold as a process centred on user research, journey mapping, ideation workshops, iterative prototyping and testing. This is all well and good, but not only is this a degraded definition of design, but much of this can be learned by enterprising non-designers. And it was. This, in turn, led to the blurring of boundaries between designers and consumer researchers, engineers and product managers – so when the cost-cutting began, designers found themselves on shaky ground.

The most damaging consequences flowed from senior management’s perception that too many design leaders had over-claimed and under-delivered. This less palatable truth came through loud and clear in the results of a survey I ran in August 2024. It asked: ‘Why is Design in the Doldrums?’. Here are a few of the shorter answers I received:

‘We haven’t delivered the expected value.’

‘Design leaders have failed to create the expected value for their function.’

‘Too much talking the talk and not enough walking the walk. Verbose justifications for samey designs.’

‘Disillusionment with design as a competitive advantage.’

‘Design Thinking packaged creativity as a repeatable, staged process with guaranteed results. The reality of design is much messier and unpredictable.’

Too many walked through the doors that Design Thinking opened. Too many were high on their own supply. Too few realised that design needed to up its game to deliver on the inflated expectations that underpinned their generous salaries.

Routes forward

Getting back on our front foot will mean acknowledging past missteps, reframing our core expertise, and extending our skills.

Realism

If we accept that many execs believe that design over-claimed and under-delivered, reconnecting with reality would be a good place to start. For example, let’s drop the idea that we have a special gift for creativity and empathy. This design exceptionalism is delusional, naive and frankly demeaning to our non-designer colleagues. There are plenty of creative problem solvers and user/customer-centric people across companies. Designers would be well advised to focus their empathy on their colleagues to better understand their challenges and figure out if design might be able to help. As well as harnessing their colleagues’ creativity and insights.

Reframe core expertise

If I were to point to the most fundamental thing that designers can change, it’s how we articulate our distinctive value. Sure, our processes and tools are important, but they’re not what we spent our 10,000 hours honing. What good designers excel at is vision, judgement, and craft – primarily in the realm of experiences.

Vision

Designers see the future in higher resolution than our colleagues. We spend a lot of time thinking in detail about how the future could be better. We immerse ourselves in the latest social trends and technological innovations, and we have the visualisation and prototyping skills to make concepts tangible.

Envisioning potential futures and bringing them to life helps colleagues in strategy and engineering to picture and assess them. Vision projects are best co-created with other parts of the business and situated in a future context of informed foresight assumptions that give the vision credibility. This gives them more chance of making an impact on the future of the business – beyond becoming PR collateral.

Judgement

We have a finely honed sense of what ‘good’ looks like and know how to achieve it. Others might recognise quality when they see it, but we better understand why that perception is formed and how it could be made even stronger. We also discern if a design fits with a company’s brand, and if it is likely to capture the moment with particular target markets. We are experience connoisseurs with an expert vocabulary to match.

Craft

Great user experiences with high-performing products and services are made still greater by finely crafted details. These can remove friction, imbue character and harmonise different parts of the user’s experience into a coherent whole. Designers understand and sharpen the refinement of details, while others tend just to form overall impressions from of the end product.

These are our fundamental skills and much more important than processes and tools – but they are less tangible, much harder to explain and less easy to point at. Positive and negative case studies and other well-honed stories help bring to life and demonstrate the business value of vision, judgement and craft.

This is not to say that designers should retreat into a back-to-basics bubble. Quite the opposite. Designers need to lean into developing new skills – while being crystal clear about the distinctive core capabilities they are building on.

Renew skillsets

Vision, judgement and craft are not the whole deal, of course. To succeed, designers must add technical, interpersonal and business skills.

In tough and turbulent times, acquiring new skills will be more vital than ever. Squeezed teams value adaptable members with broader expertise. Beyond the Generative AI tools, there are less obvious but more consequential skills that many

designers would benefit from, such as influencing, workshop facilitation, data fluency and organisational acumen. All are general business skills that colleagues share in other business functions, but add value to our role. Most importantly, stay close to the business, be proactive and opportunistic, and focus on delivering value efficiently.

Design diffusion

For the foreseeable future, the advances of AI, a tough economic climate, and a less receptive business environment for design will all amount to significant headwinds. We may even have passed the peak number of designers in employment – in the West, anyway.

Some business-savvy design leaders are branching out into design-adjacent roles such as innovation consulting, change management, product management, and head of innovation. They’re still using many of their design skills, but ‘design’ or ‘designer’ often doesn’t appear in their job titles. To some who see design as a vocation or calling, this may sound like a sell-out or betrayal, but those who have made these transitions talk of growth, more impact, and better career prospects.

Another way to see this development is that it’s the start of a wider diffusion of designers into business, which will only deepen design’s impact – and open up more career tracks for designers.

Design can thrive again, but now is a time for realism, clarity and conviction. Yes, design is a critical element of success, but it’s not magical or special. It’s part of the business mix. There will be no recapturing of a past golden adolescence. Design will continue to evolve, specialisms will blur, and new roles will emerge – including those without ‘designer’ in the title. It sounds grown-up, doesn’t it?

The start of a wider diffusion of designers into business, which will only deepen design’s impact

I posted a poll in late August titled ‘Why is Design in the Doldrums?’ It was prompted by discussions over the past six months and by many of the comments on my recent article, in which I referred to those Doldrums in passing. That the poll racked up 100+ responses in the first 48 hours, while many were still on the beach, suggests the topic is also on the minds of many.

Symptoms of the Doldrums include:

Layoffs
Squeezed design budgets
Pay stagnation or deflation
Fewer Chief Design Officers
Design leaders reporting to more highly regarded functions
Lack of growth opportunities for senior designers and leaders

In my poll, I asked people to rate the significance of the six suggested factors and suggest any I’d missed. As you can see above, most thought that all but AI anxiety were significant factors. Many are, of course, interrelated; for example, the adoption of design methods and tools by other corporate functions makes Design’s offer to senior managers less distinctive and contributes to their focus shifting elsewhere.

Before I get to what I think is the dominant driver of Design’s discontents, here are some of the other factors people posited:

Political and economic uncertainty
A current low point in the technology-driven economic cycle
Global competition from low-cost economies
Decentralisation of design functions into business units
The impact of remote working on creativity and culture

None of these were mentioned more than two or three times, however.

Design has not delivered

Even though today’s downturn came out on top, I was most struck by the volume of comments relating to what I called ‘Peaked: Boardroom interest in design has waned’. There were three times as many comments on this than any other factor. Here is a selection:

‘We haven’t delivered the expected value.’

‘Design leaders have failed to create the expected value for their function within the companies they joined over the past 10 years.’

‘Too much talking the talk and not enough walking the walk. Verbose justifications for samey designs were only ever going to go so far, both in the boardroom and the marketplace.’

‘Disillusionment with Design as a competitive advantage.’

‘Design thinking packaged creativity as a repeatable, staged process with guaranteed results. The reality of Design is much messier and unpredictable. From a management point of view, Design has promised a lot and often delivered relatively little.’

‘There was an over-investment in Design over the past decade and especially in the UX kind. This resulted in the devaluation of creativity and a focus on rigid processes. That led to a lack of “bigger picture” thinking and a focus on using design tools for incremental improvement – “we have to AB test it”. As companies failed to achieve a return on their design investment, they’ve laid off teams and pivoted to the shiny new toy of AI. Design needs to get back to creativity and to systems-wide approaches rather than rote processes and incremental changes in order to get back to having the impact that designers promised.’

‘A lot of Design just hasn’t delivered any meaningful impact for the cost organisations have had to shell out for it. There is a rife lack of competence in a vastly scaled sector that has largely failed to deliver. It’s more a question of where to put the $ than if Design as a competence is waning. Our impact waned. We are paying the price for this.’

‘Design has always confused itself between “styling, aesthetics & craft” with “Superior problem solving” aka Design Thinking. Until it resolves its purpose in business, it is not surprising that the boardroom isn’t interested. MBA students are taught a similar helicopter view across all areas of business management, but they maintain their value by using that as diverse inputs to multifaceted leadership. Rather than reverting to focusing on the craft of any one specific area.’

‘By definition, Design is a team sport involving multiple disciplines. As we’ve evolved our thinking to broaden our impact and influence across multiple touchpoints in pursuit of holistic experiences, we need to be willing to embrace the responsibilities and ownership that come with this. The challenge can be that other functions have already staked a solid claim (CMO. CXO, CIO etc.) It may be OK to be seen as simply enabling or defining the desired experiences. But we should be explicit about our intentions and ensure that we are clearly held accountable for driving the desired outcomes and business impact. Let’s not forget our roots; we need to maintain our optimism, or relentless desire to make things better, and our belief in a humane and inclusive approach, that respects the needs of the planet. We can’t achieve this if we act as consultants, we need to be in the dance, inside organisations and businesses, showing how and where we can add value. Finally, lets not be afraid to hold our heads up and be proud of what we stand for. Now more than ever, we need to have confidence in our ability to fuse deep system thinking, with informed intuition built on the back of creative foresight.’

‘Designers had a chance to show serious business impact, but their strengths have never been able to quantify their effect on ROI. So they flubbed it, and others took their tools. Design was a cool band, whose demo tape got blagged by a major label.’

Long story short: we haven’t focused enough on business value. Design has been devalued through oversimplification, and partly, as a result, business is unclear about how its competence is distinct from that of parallel functions. Finally, there has been too much emphasis on incremental improvement, over big-picture thinking and leadership.

Overreach

The Downturn is real. Most economies are slowing, if not in recession, and R&D budgets have been squeezed as many companies focus on cost-cutting and efficiency. However, those with any hint of grey hair will remember that Design boomed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Apple had just launched the iPhone and was riding high on the Jobs-Ive double act. Design Thinking was in the ascendancy when Tim Brown first spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. In 2010, The Economist held a conference in London called The Big Rethink: Redesigning Business. Its premise was that after the economic crisis, ‘Business leaders were casting around for new ideas…design thinking is offering itself up as one of the new ideas’. So, if Design still had a compelling commercial offer, we could be faring better against the economic headwinds.

At the time, along with Don Norman, Roberto Verganti, Gadi Amit and James Woudhuysen, I added some concerns of my own. As businesses raised their expectations of Design, I cautioned that: ‘design thinkers run the risk of overstretching – not having the knowledge or capabilities to deliver at this new level. To win and consolidate a more strategic role for Design, we need more than good stories. We need to raise our game.’

In addition, too many were complicit in devaluing Design under the flag of ‘democratising’ it, by framing design as a simple process that anyone could be quickly trained in. Design and design thinking were often used interchangeably. Indeed, everyone can cook and design, but chefs and professional designers tend to do it at levels that delight – or at least improve people’s experience or the performance of the business.

As I put it in 2010, ‘while explaining Design as an algorithm goes down well with managers, this pitch skips over the pivotal importance of talent and craft’ – and, I might have added judgement too.

Design gained more exposure to business leaders over the past 10 years; but, too often, it was sold as a simple mindset, process or set of tools. The more difficult task of explaining how Design delivers value across organisations – was neglected. Some designers also underestimated how creative and empathetic their colleagues in other functions were, as well as being quick studies. As a result, fairly straightforward methods, such as user research and journey mapping, were adopted widely outside Design – including by management consultancies. That was great for users and organisations, but many designers kicked themselves for putting these methods front and centre in how they communicated Design’s value.

Designers pride themselves on their empathy and curiosity, but are we always better at these things than non-designers? And have they been empathic enough with our colleagues in other functions and curious enough about how our organisations actually work and grow – and about what role your product and experience play in driving that growth?

As the comments from the poll above testify, too many designers drank the Kool-Aid and gladly dipped into the new bountiful design budgets and growth opportunities that followed. But, few paused to work out what was required to operate at this level, and to take the necessary steps to meet or at least manage expectations.

Seize the moment

Design evolves in fits and starts. In the 1990s, it adapted to global markets, digital tools and the mainstreaming of Design with the public. The 2000s brought experience design and mass internet use. Sustainability and designing with data came to the fore in the 2010s. Now, AI fluency is the latest skill designers are adding to their stack of capabilities as we adapt to new developments. Design has grown from an artisan cottage industry to an established business function over the last few decades by gradually integrating itself with business. I hope the current period of introspection will result in a new era of Designers with a more based understanding of their distinctive strengths and role in business.

Now is the time to reflect on and renew Design. The world has moved on; it’s the job of Design Leaders to develop and articulate Design’s new value proposition for the 2030s.

Design Thinking was the most potent pitch of design to business in history. For all its woolliness [1] , the snappy message penetrated the C-suite like no other. In practice, design thinkers have struggled to deliver on their overblown promises, and former evangelists [2] have distanced themselves from the term, while former clients [3] warn of it becoming just another ‘fad that failed’.

‘Design Thinking is a failed experiment…The success rate for Design Thinking processes was very low.’

Bruce Nussbaum

Designers on the ground, many having been wary of the spin from the outset [4], are now turning their back on it entirely. But are we really going to throw the baby out with the bath water? For all its failings, Design Thinking uncovered real opportunities for design managers aiming to play a more strategic role in business. The problem stemmed from a naive combination of overreach and a lack of ambition to learn. It was unwise to claim that one simple approach could be the catch all solution to problems as disparate as climate change or the health care crisis.

It was vain not to recognise that new capabilities would have to be mastered to tackle more strategic challenges. For those who are still serious about stepping up, it’s time to take stock and brush up. Let’s begin with three fundamentals.

Not for everyone

Design thinkers are right that there is a more strategic role for designers – but only for some designers. For those with the potential and drive to step up, traditional design skills only gets them so far. To raise their game, they must acquire new know-how.

Design is not important

Design thinking offered “designing for nondesigners.” Let us be clear: Purposefully shaping our environment is what separates humanity from baboons—everyone can design. Exceptional design is what matters, and is much harder. To quote Jonathan Ive: “Design is not important. Good design is important.”

Process is not enough

Unwisely, design thinking sold a simple and snappy version of the product design process as a magic method that could be applied universally. In reality, process is nothing unless it begins within the right context (for example, with problem definition and vision) and with the right design talent.

Five capabilities to build on

Cross-silo communication

Working at the intersection of marketing and R&D, designers can play the role of translators or bridges between departments. Being able to talk people and technology enables them to facilitate effective cross-functional dialogue. This ability could be strengthened by learning the language of finance and supply chains.

Experience awareness

Many designers are good at grasping the subtleties of consumer perceptions and behaviors. Whether through observational research or more intuitive cultural interpretation, they situate and solve problems in a cultural context. As products and services become more complex, the ability to focus on experiences across touch-points is more highly valued.

Foresight and vision

Creating the future is part of every designer’s job description. While others seek data, designers spot ways to make tomorrow easier and more enjoyable than today. Fascinated by change, they excel at imagining future scenarios, anticipating new needs, and envisioning potential solutions. As businesses drown in data, clear-sighted vision is sorely needed.

Visualisation and prototyping

Making ideas tangible by sketching and prototyping is one of designers’ most obvious skills. As design solutions become more multifaceted, this ability will become more highly prized, but new techniques will need to be mastered—from infographics to Arduino prototyping.

Resolving and completing

One of designers’ most underrated abilities is pulling tangible stuff together for deadlines. While the alpha IQs wrestle with complexity and analysis paralysis, designers inch the ball forward by offering tangible solutions—in time for the key project review. Design strategists build on this discipline by producing objects of synthesis beyond design visuals.

Capabilities to brush up on

Macro-micro perspective

Situating problems within a big-picture context is a strategic fundamental. Design strategists earn their coin by adopting this helicopter view and zooming down to the fine details of the experience. This helps senior management engage with design effectively. It’s also the hardest capability to acquire, because it requires a sustained acquisition of contextual knowledge.

Analytical rigor

Designers are often criticised for their over-reliance on intuition and for their lack of any grasp of reality. [5] Analytical techniques and tools are relatively easy to pick up, but practice is required to wield them effectively. Rigor is a habit of mind that is developed through levels of systematic interrogation of data that are higher than usual in design. Analytical rigor fused with intuitive leaps is a rare and potent mix.

Opportunity framing

Strategic challenges tend to be fuzzy, multidimensional, and often wide in scope. Designers are not taught how to define opportunities in ways that are credible in a business context. Framing essentially consists of distilling a complex set of issues down to a few critical variables. These are then used to frame problem definitions, hypotheses, and points of view.

Guidance frameworks

There’s much truth in the maxim “Strategy is easy, execution is hard.” A sound strategy is a precursor to success, but no guarantee—quality of execution is critical. Strategists appreciate the craft and compromises of design, while finding ways to help designers focus on the ultimate objectives—by developing clear decision-making principles and tools.

Reasoning and communication

Strategies have a tendency to bounce off organisations, unless they are presented with impact and “socialised” through tailored one-to-one communication. To persuade, messages should be honed to be clear, concise, and cogent. Make them appeal to the head through sound rationale, and to the heart through well-chosen examples, metaphors, and stories.

As design thinking becomes associated with dilettantes and the backlash mounts, it’s worth drawing a distinction between its overblown claims and the real inroads some designers have made into more strategic roles.

This trajectory takes more than smart talk and ambition, however. Designers who have stepped up successfully have built on firm design foundations and acquired brand-new capabilities. As traditional definitions of design shift and stretch at the seams, these design strategists are charting new career tracks for designers in diverse areas and demonstrating real value to senior management.

Design thinking became a hot topic in the naughties. Just like the other contender for the hot spot, sustainability, the concept is big enough and hazy enough for almost everyone to declare its importance, while attaching very different meanings to it.

The broad consensus on design thinking began to break down in 2009. Some leading design thinkers published books that expanded on what they meant; business leaders started to pick up the idea, while at the same time many design managers started to drop it.

This raises two questions: Why is design thinking such a hot topic with executives yet leaves so many designers cold? And, does the demand for design thinking represent more of an opportunity than the thinking itself?

Hot topic

Design thinking was first discussed in design circles in the early noughties. Roger Martin’s concept of integrative thinking was an inspiration, but it was IDEO chief Tim Brown who brought it to life in stories about his firm’s ‘T-shaped’ designers. Shortly after, Bruce Nussbaum, then assistant managing editor of BusinessWeek, picked up the cause and ran with it. And although it was BusinessWeek that first used the term design thinking in 2003, Tim Brown’s star turn at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2006 made a big impact in high places. Never before had a designer strutted his stuff on such a high-profile platform and been taken so seriously.

The design thinkers had been drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid.

While Brown spoke near the peak of the naughties economic bubble, today’s era of austerity has, if anything, only increased the appetite for design thinking. In March 2010, The Economist held a conference in London called The Big Rethink: Redesigning Business. Its premise was that design thinking was in demand: After the economic crisis, corporate leaders had lost confidence in the old ways of doing things, and were casting around for new ideas.
Now, when the house journal of the global business elite holds a conference on how design thinking can save business, you might expect the design fraternity to step forward with both enthusiasm and new thinking. Yet while some design enthusiasts have jumped in, many design managers have stepped back.

Cold turkey

I first noticed a distinct cooling-off in April 2009, when I talked to a handful of design managers about the challenges they faced after the financial meltdown. One reflected on how well the design thinkers in his organization had fared in the design boom years; then, raising an eyebrow, he murmured, ‘Even turkeys can fly in a tornado.’ However, when the tailwind dropped, many who had talked their way into high-flying positions were left gliding. Greater exposure to senior management’s interrogation had left many… well, exposed. The design thinkers had been drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid.

While many seasoned design professionals were unsure of the term, most shared the design thinkers’ ambition to play a more strategic role in the world than making pretty; but it became obvious that design thinking meant different things to different people. For some, it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling bigger and more-strategic problems that used to be the preserve of management consultants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it was merely a new spin on design.

This is definitely not the case with Roger Martin. His book The Design of Business focuses on ways of thinking—and particularly on ways to combine analytical and intuitive thought. However, Martin readily accepts that most designers do not think this way, relying too heavily on intuition. Indeed, he jokes about needing to find a new name for his concept.

“Design thinkers over-simplify by presenting design to business as a clear and codified process of methods, tools, and steps that can be learned by nondesigners.”

Although Martin’s definition does not tally with current design practice, other versions suffer from being indistinguishable from it. IDEO has done designland a great service by articulating what it does in a clear and compelling way for nondesigners. However, its description of design thinking is notably similar to the way it used to describe the design process. As Bill Moggridge acknowledged at an event in 2007, “Design thinking is a new story, not a new process.” Because the design process was not developed for the big problems that design thinkers wish to tackle, this really amounts to old thinking—for new times.

It’s not just world-weary designers who have spotted holes in the hype. In her review of the 2010 Aspen Design Summit, Helen Walters, the former editor of innovation and design at BusinessWeek, cautioned:

“Those looking for a prescribed way to implement design thinking are destined to be disappointed. It’s a messy, opaque process that depends as much on group dynamics as intellect or insight… The process was more important than the product…. the idea that people need a way to engage in multiple places within their community.”

Walters puts her finger on a new role for designers that many will not be happy with—as facilitators of an engagement process in which the quality of new products and services comes second to stakeholder involvement. This emphasis on process over outcomes could well lead to design correctness being given privileges over design effectiveness.

Stepping up

As business raises its expectations of what design can do, design thinkers run the risk of overstretching—not having the knowledge or capabilities to deliver at this new level. To win and consolidate a more strategic role for design, we need more than good stories. We need to raise our game. From my perspective, here are three priorities for design managers who want to step up to the plate:

Quality over quantity

Today, design by itself provides no competitive advantage. Only great design does that. In his book Design- Driven Innovation, Roberto Verganti convincingly argues that creativity is not in short supply, and that the key question is how to deliver high quality design. He is dismissive of one-size-fits-all processes, such as design thinking, and instead underlines the importance of broad and long-view perspectives, close working relationships with an ‘elite circle’ of genuinely insightful ‘interpreters’ and wise executive judgement.

Design thinkers over-simplify by presenting design to business as a clear and codified process of methods, tools, and steps that can be learned by nondesigners. While explaining design as an algorithm goes down well with managers, this pitch skips over the pivotal importance of talent and craft.

Designers learn by doing, not by practicing a theory. There is a process, but it is wielded tacitly. Professional designers have survived a brutally Darwinian selection process (there are far more graduates than jobs) and have clocked up well over Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000 hours of practice on projects. The small pool of talent that really adds competitive advantage combines creativity with a high degree of problem-solving and aesthetic craft.
Design thinkers have a tendency to look down on the craft component of design as a low-end commodity, but Apple’s success is just as much due to the quality of its design execution as it is to its strategic clarity. It’s therefore hard to believe that many senior managers can pick up any meaningful design skills after a workshop or two. And, to be frank, suggesting as much devalues what designers do.

We’ve had a decade of talk about co-creation and open innovation now. Results have been largely mediocre. It’s time for design managers to put together the business case for exceptional design—the kind that really makes a difference.

Analytical and intuitive thinking

While few designers (or design thinkers) currently live up to Martin’s ideal of a balance between analytical and intuitive thinking, it is a fine goal for the profession to aspire to, both individually and organizationally. Designers have traditionally excused their lack of analytical rigor by nonchalantly counterpoising it to their intuition, but this is a false and lazy dichotomy. Just as there are many creative mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, why can’t there be analytically cogent designers? This is all the more achievable with the new intake of academically gifted designers who previously would not have considered the profession. While not every talented designer is blessed with the gift of reason, design managers should ensure that their work is situated in an analytically robust context. Not only should they insist that other members of their teams are strong at analyzing, structuring and building coherent business cases, but they should also create a culture in which these skills are valued.

Vision over user insight

User-centered design became a dogma in the noughties, to the extent that every idea had to be backed by a user insight. Although these can inspire innovation (though usually of the incremental variety), an appreciation of consumers’ contexts, behaviors, needs, and preferences have begun to take preference over other drivers of innovation, including technical progress and wisdom from other sectors and markets. Verganti argues that ‘radical innovation does not come from users’; and Don Norman, an early champion of the user-centered design that design thinking bases itself on, has recently recanted and concurs with a new maxim: ‘Technology first, invention second, needs last.’ He even goes as far as to argue that ‘design thinking is a nonsensical phrase that deserves to die.’
Verganti presses his point home further with a tough truth: ‘Designers have become less visionary. They have spent the last 10 years getting close to consumers and trying to become businessmen, and have lost their visions.’
The biggest challenge for design managers is putting vision back into design. This will involve making a confident case for it in what Martin calls reliability-driven corporate cultures that demand predictable outcomes. Time and space must also be made to think big thoughts and envision new futures. After a period of nurturing what will still be a fragile big idea, careful thought should be put into how to bring it to life in clear and compelling ways.

Balancing process, talent and context

As ever, the challenge for design managers is to manage the mix between process, talent, and context. Design thinking tends to overly focus on process. Now that competitors have established design capabilities, it’s clear that finding, nurturing, and motivating talent is more critical than ever. Processes do need to be in place; but too much emphasis on process can turn off talented designers.

Processes do need to be in place; but too much emphasis on process can turn off talented designers.

Getting the context right is never a straightforward business. Framing fuzzy and complex problems, setting goals that get the balance right between ambition and constraints, and configuring the right mix of talent and resources has become a lot more difficult. The business world’s demand for design thinking has transformed the context in which we operate. Bigger and more wicked problems test our capacities, and our work is being judged against new criteria for success, while the recession brings new priorities.

All of this amounts to a great opportunity. But to seize that opportunity, designers need to be less pleased with themselves, and to put more effort into innovating how and what they do. The challenge is to match our raised ambitions with a higherlevel game. Another workshop just won’t cut it!

It’s a sign of the times when The Economist, the house journal of the global business elite, holds a conference in London on ‘design thinking’ (official Big Rethink site here). Having attended the conference, produced in association with The Design Council and held over 11-12 March, I was left wondering one thing: why is design thinking such a hot topic with business leaders, given that it leaves so many designers cold?

The conference’s brilliant chair, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, a global correspondent for The Economist and author of Zoom, began by throwing down a hefty gauntlet to design.

He explained that the world faces crises on many different levels, not only economic and environmental: politicians and corporate leaders are also experiencing a profound crisis of trust and legitimacy. This, in turn, has triggered a loss of confidence in the old ways of doing things and has led business and governments to cast around for new ideas. As design thinking is offering itself up as a process to solve many of these problems, what has it got to offer? Gulp!

So, how well did the conference fare, given such a preamble? The short answer is that the speakers largely sidestepped the crises—and sidestepped, too, the subject of design thinking.

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran.

The big sidestep

The format didn’t help. There were too many rapid-fire sessions. Some were only 10 minutes long, leaving little time to develop much more than a sound bite or two. The Work Foundation’s Will Hutton took a few bad-tempered minutes to tackle the economic crisis and make the case for more investment in R&D. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Robin Bew concisely delineated all the crises, but, sadly, had been briefed not to show any graphs. Would that really scare the designers?

There’s something odd going on when business and political leaders flatter design with potentially holding the key to such big and pressing problems, and the design community looks the other way.

David Kester.

A number of speakers, mostly from outside the world of design, addressed sustainability. They rehearsed familiar themes (cutting waste, apparently, can also save you money!). Tellingly, they made few connections with design thinking, apart from Jeff Denby. He made a memorable presentation on his sustainable underwear brand, and its on-trend ethical marketing practices. Some of the case studies on innovation addressed traditional design themes, but most didn’t touch design thinking.

An exception was the speech by UK Design Council CEO David Kester. He showed how the Council and Richard Seymour had coordinated a range of interested parties and design agencies to develop staff- and patient-centred design concepts to improve hygiene in hospitals.

The main attempts to connect design thinking with the grand themes of the conference were the workshops in the afternoon of the first day. Here, we tackled some board-level leadership issues like purpose and the business models of struggling UK companies and institutions like Royal Bank of Scotland and the National Health Service. However, most delegates found these a frustratingly superficial exercise, doing the cause of design thinking little service.

There’s something odd going on when business and political leaders flatter design with potentially holding the key to such big and pressing problems, and the design community looks the other way.

To understand this paradox, we need to look back at why business and political leaders have become so enamoured with design, and why so many designers struggle with the concept of Design Thinking.

Leaders fall for designers

When I took my first design job in a consultancy back in the eighties, business leaders considered design an optional and mysterious activity practised by a small cult of polo necks in Milan, London and New York. Today, by contrast, design is global, rarely off the TV, and a popular subject at college. It has also expanded its scope from products and graphics into interactions, experiences, services and, more recently, ‘social change.’

Innovation came to be reduced to creativity—and the idea that scientists and technologists are themselves creative was completely lost.

In hindsight, the 10 years between 1997-2007 were the real boom years. Three events in 1997 set the scene for design’s rise. Steve Jobs returned to Apple, which soon became the totemic case study of how to out-innovate the competition through smart design. The days of putting the case for the importance of design were replaced by CEOs wanting to be the Apple of their category.

In 1997 Tony Blair’s New Labour was elected with a mandate to modernise Britain, and quickly elevated something called Creative Industries to the forefront of a policy focused on the shift to a service-based knowledge economy. This was a strategy that would be replicated around the world in the form of countless policies for the creative sector. In the process, innovation came to be reduced to creativity—and the idea that scientists and technologists are themselves creative was completely lost.

The third event was the death of Princess Diana (bear with me on this one). The public outpouring of grief for this global emblem of vulnerability marked the arrival of a new culture of emotions. Western societies now had more therapists than policemen, watched Oprah and encouraged its citizens to ‘express themselves.’ This cultural shift from the head to the heart provided a fertile context for designers to be re-conceived by leaders as the authentic points of connection with impulsive consumers and voters—who were losing trust in their leaders.

Participants of The Big Rethink’s workshops.

Rise of design thinking

The notion of design thinking, which began to be discussed in design circles in the mid-noughties, marked a high water mark of design euphoria. First, Roger Martin inspired it. His concept, ‘Integrative Thinking,’ suggested that the best leaders integrate left-brain, analytical thinking with right-brain intuition.

Then, design thinking was brought to life in stories about IDEO’s T-shaped designers by Tim Brown, the consultancy’s CEO and president. Brown triumphed at the Global Economic Forum in Davos in 2006. After that, the then assistant managing editor of Business Week, a design buff named Bruce Nussbaum, rallied for the cause.

The concern was that too much time has been spent trying to outsmart the MBAs, and that design managers had lost their focus on delivering great design. The most common response to this feeling of over-stretch was to regroup and get back to basics…

In fact, design thinking always meant different things to different players. For some it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling problems that used to be the preserve of managers and civil servants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it is was merely a new spin on design. All its proponents were, however, united by their ambition for design to play a more strategic role in the world than ‘making pretty.’ Who could argue with that?

Designers fall out with Design Thinking

Anna Rafferty of Penguin

The term was poorly defined, its proponents often implied that designers were merely unthinking doers, and it allowed smart talkers with little design talent to claim to represent the industry. Others worried about ‘overstretch’—the gap between design thinkers’ claims, and their knowledge, capabilities and ability to deliver on those promises.

Still, when design thinking began to get a name for itself, most seasoned designers merely considered it harmless hype. But as the hype gathered pace, attitudes began to change.

Today, as business and governments start to take design thinking seriously, many designers and design experts are distancing themselves from the term.

While I have often been dubbed a design thinker, and I’ve certainly dedicated my career to winning a more strategic role for design. But I was uncomfortable with the concept of design thinking from the outset. I was not the only member of the design community to have misgivings.