Design Thinking Facilitates Change

About three years ago, I started to run design thinking workshops and brought the topic closer to people in various companies and functions. As a change management practitioner, I immediately realised the attraction and the synergies between the two stream of thoughts.

Let's look at two of the traditional barriers to innovation and leadership: lack of speed in decision-making and lack of creativity. Both barriers are behavioural. While these are typical barriers to innovation, they are also holding up most change initiatives. And design thinking is a method to address both barriers in simple ways.

Speed - in design thinking we encourage to try things out; the focus is on learning by making mistakes. When we present prototypes early to the customer, we get early feedback on how we can get closer to create value for them. This early feedback facilitates decision-making. Design thinking also promotes to spend a significant amount on identifying the right problem; and still, this time is well invested and allows the team to create the right value for customers in a short period of time.

Creativity - here, design thinking brings many activities that allow people to use their inert creativity. The immersion into the customer's environment creates exposure to gain and pain points that trigger inspiration and critical thinking. During all my workshops we are spending time to prototype - to make the solution ideas tangible. With this activity, we are activating the creative brain and further facilitates the discover of new ideas and solutions. And finally, when we converge and digest the information by using gallery walks and journey maps, we extract the essence of the challenge which triggers further inspiration.

In addition to these two barriers, here are four points how I see design thinking is supporting your change initiatives:

• Change management is all about the people-side of transformations; and design thinking is foremost a human-centric problem solving method.
• We can overcome resistance to change when we allow the adopters to design their own solutions; with design thinking we have a great process to get people engaged and let them discover great, new solutions.
• Transformations in complex ecosystems require experimentation to uncover ways to address challenges; design thinking provides the tools and processes guide people in this trial & learning.
• Successful change happens when people adopt new routines and new behaviours; design thinking introduces a light structure that brings repeatability and facilitates new routines for continuous change.

How did you adopt design thinking for your change project?


Source: Why Design Thinking Works, Harvard Business Review, October 2018