The association asked respondents what they found the most difficult thing about Design Thinking in our July 2020 Survey. 11% of respondents replied that convincing their bosses/CEO/Executive Management was the most difficult thing. However, reading between the lines many other people responded that they did not have enough time and or resources to run the methodology successfully, leading us to believe that the actual number who had not managed to convince their seniors of the value of the process is actually more like 20%. The most responses, 42% where about integrating Design Thinking into a corporation's existing processes, which is really an effect rather than a root cause. The root cause points to the methodology not been well understood or valued by the corporations stakeholders. Clearly Executive Management buy-in is a major problem for Design Thinking practitioners.

How do you convince your boss or CEO/Executive team that Design Thinking is necessary and valuable for them to support and invest in?

I found one answer I really appreciate from Tim Ogilvie of Peer Insight. Turns out that the more I research, the more I appreciate his answer. Tim, an innovation consulting firm leader, writes very eloquently about it by using the analogy of how to feed a kid vegetables. Read it, you'll enjoy it! Tim essentially advises that you don't mention Design Thinking or any of its jargon, but simply implement it and prove its effectiveness. That way you don't have to be defensive, you can be proactive in showing how much more effective it is than the corporations methodologies. And if it is not, well, then you still have the time to stealthily work on improving how you use design thinking out of the limelight.

Tim offers 5 tips for selling Design Thinking to your boss:

1. To sell design thinking, BE design thinking - Empathize with him/her's point of view.
2. Curb your enthusiasm (and jargon) - Instead of hyperbole and hubris, we need to bring empathy and humility.
3. In the ROI, focus on little “i” instead of BIG “R” - Don't over promise, focus on time and cost reduction and speed to market, things they will resonate with.
4. Emphasize the similarities, not the differences. 
5. Tell a makeover story.

Here is the opposite point of view from Luke Brodie, a Lead Design Facilitator at Accenture, a business trained consultant who advocates for the business case approach. However, his advice is that business leaders are not concerned as much with process as they are about results. In his article "How To Get Your Manager’s Support For Adopting Design Thinking In Your Company", Luke offers 4 steps to convince your boss:

1. Start with the business impact design thinking will have.
2. Explain how you will get there.
3. Share stories.
4. Be brief.

The McKinsey study "Are you asking enough from your design leaders?" is far more nuanced than the two articles above and I feel addresses the core issue with the role and acceptance of Design and Design Thinking within a corporation. In this article McKinsey asks what is design responsible for and where does it fit into the corporate structure. You can use the research data to open up a discussion with your Executive team and to have a good conversation with your CEO about your role and his/her expectations for your contribution to the corporation.

Some of the key findings of the report were:

1. 90 percent of companies weren’t reaching the full potential of design, even as, in the past five years, double the number of companies have added senior design roles to their organization.
2. Of the four areas tied directly to improved revenue growth and shareholder return—which include design leadership, cross-functional talent, iterative processes, and end-to-end user experiences—CEOs must address design leadership first if their companies are to capture the full business value of design.
3. To elevate the organization’s design ambition, and to clarify the leadership needed to deliver it, top executives must make three interconnected interventions:
   1. Embrace user-centric strategies
   2. Embed your senior designer into the C-suite
   3. Make the most of user data
4. Another finding was that Senior Design leaderships position lacks clarity and ambition - addressing the above three points will provide Design leadership with a powerfully ambitious mandate
5. They also ask "How strategic is Design?"
   1. Research shows that bold, user-centric strategies correlate strongly with higher financial results.
   2. At their best, user centric strategies touch every aspect of the organization.
   3. Design leaders can offer two unique perspectives
      1. Design leaders frame strategic questions. Senior design leaders can complement the hypothesis- and framework-based approaches to strategy on which top executives have long (and perhaps overly) relied.
      2. Senior Designers bring unique user insights. That said, design leadership sits in a unique position to see the pain points that customers encounter across the entire user journey—a view into which marketing or R&D, for example, have only a partial window. 
6. The report goes into detail about selecting the right reporting structure with pro's and con's for each of the different ways that design can be positioned. With over 30 years of experience in design, my personal observation is that there are relatively few design leaders willing to take on the financial and other responsibilities of senior leadership, however, that is a requirement if you want to be in the C-Suite.
7. Defining the responsibilities of the design leader. Regardless of the reporting structure, many CDOs are doomed to fail because their role lacks enough authority. For almost all design-led companies, the success of the top designer requires a CEO who is supportive of design’s ability to contribute strategically and who has made a public commitment to it.
8. Senior Design leaderships efforts must be tied to the traditional Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) but in addition it it really helps to add customer-service and -satisfaction performance indicators for all of the senior team in order to make the design function important for all executives.

Also read McKinsey's "The Business Value of Design" article for further information for your discussions with the CEO.

The way to sell your boss on design thinking could be to come at the problem from the perspective of culture change.Design Thinking practitioners know that what they do differs quite substantially from the traditional risk reduction, logical processes encountered in organizations. Coonoor Behal, in her article "Design Thinking: A Key to Improving Organizational Culture" has this to say about design thinking as it engages with a corporation. "No matter how pragmatic the original motivation for exploring design thinking, we quickly learn what the client (and organization) really needs and wants: a change in organizational culture." Changing organizational culture is not easy, but if you want to integrate better and gain more influence, perhaps taking on the role of change agent for the CEO could be a fast track way to get design more firmly entrenched in the organization.

The best example of Design supporting culture change is Claudia Kotchka's work with P&G. watch the video, it is really worth the time to hear how she, along with the support of A.G. Laffley (CEO), went through the journey of changing P&G's very strong internal culture to become more design led. To understand the perspective from P&G's CEO,A.G. Laffley, watch this Video interview.

There is no single answer to the question "how to sell or convince your boss about using design thinking." In this article I have tried to provide different perspectives as a way to help you think about what the correct approach is going to be for you to solve this problem. Who is your CEO? How does he think? What does he think about design? How can you convince him that design thinking is going to improve his results and those of the corporation? Do you approach it stealthily? With a fact based assault? Through culture change?

Good luck and let us know what worked for you.