Does the future of successful business innovation involve increasing literacy in design thinking principles?
According to the Boston Design Firm, Continuum, the answer is yes. In their article, "What good is Design Thinking if I am not a Designer", Peter Chapin discusses the outcomes and questions that Continuum received in their role teaching a 6 week course on design thinking to the MIT Sloan School of Management's MBA students.
Continuum believe the principles of design thinking can provide value for non designers using design thinking in a few specific ways:
- Help entrepreneurs get to the right idea faster
- Support leaders to foster innovation
- Assist companies to confidently execute the right solutions
Ultimately, Continuum believe design thinking can develop MBA students’ understanding of what it takes to guide companies of all sizes from idea to execution.
This makes a lot of sense as an understanding of the design thinking methodology/mindset will give MBA students a decent understanding of the design process and how designers work and think. This in turn would enable them to be more supportive of design and better enabled to contribute to the process in a very different way as compared to other business thinking processes.
In the article, "8 Design Thinking Skills for Leadership Development", xxx mentions 8 skills that design thinking brings for leadership development. These skills are:
- Empathy
- Systems thinking
- Feedback and Continuous Improvement
- Questioning Mindset
- Collaboration and Facilitation
- Customer Centricity
- Coaching
- Change Management
In his Forbes article, "Why Design Thinking should also serve as a leadership philosophy "Jesse Himsworth of Clearwater discusses why the collaborative nature of design thinking is a vital technique for leaders to develop."
He says that, "When you consider what's at the heart of your business problem and break down the barriers between your company and your customers, it quickly becomes clear that design thinking can alter your leadership approach for the better."
Design thinking teaches us to engage with end users by listening to their needs, cultivating empathy and brainstorming related solutions. As a leader, these skills will help you connect with the next generation of employees, inspiring them to do more innovative work on behalf of your whole business. Experience Point say that there are 5 things that design thinking will teach leaders
- Put customers first – knowing profits will follow
- Drive more productive collaborations
- Listen up
- Innovate and iterate
- push your people to excel
Like it or not, they say, the leaders who excel in today’s workplace look nothing like the bosses of days of yore; they need to be nurturing, intuitive and empathetic to employee needs.
If nothing else, design thinking forces leaders to look outside their organizations at their customers and through empathy, to see the world as they see it, not as the internal company portrays it. That shift in perspective in and of itself will create value for any corporation. Add t that the shift to a more collaborative way of thinking, a faster approach to testing when products and services are the right fit for the end user early on in the creation process ad it is very hard to see how design thinking will not bring value to leadership.