Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation: What They Can't Teach You at Business or Design School
By Idris Mootee
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About this ebook
A comprehensive playbook for applied design thinking in business and management, complete with concepts and toolkits
As many companies have lost confidence in the traditional ways of running a business, design thinking has entered the mix. Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation presents a framework for design thinking that is relevant to business management, marketing, and design strategies and also provides a toolkit to apply concepts for immediate use in everyday work. It explains how design thinking can bring about creative solutions to solve complex business problems. Organized into five sections, this book provides an introduction to the values and applications of design thinking, explains design thinking approaches for eight key challenges that most businesses face, and offers an application framework for these business challenges through exercises, activities, and resources.
- An essential guide for any business seeking to use design thinking as a problem-solving tool as well as a business method to transform companies and cultures
- The framework is based on work developed by the author for an executive program in Design Thinking taught in Harvard Graduate School of Design
- Author Idris Mootee is a management guru and a leading expert on applied design thinking
Revolutionize your approach to solving your business's greatest challenges through the power of Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation.
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Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation - Idris Mootee
Next Chapter | Table of Contents
Everything has changed, is changing, and will continue to change.
Ever since we figured out fire, stone tools, language, and the other great innovations of early humankind, change has been upon us. That’s why they call it evolution. That the rate of change today is arguably faster than it has ever been before is probably true. Cultural theorist Paul Virilio refers to that rate—and our pursuit of a science and logic of speed—as dromology, from the Greek dromos, meaning to race.
For him, the speed at which change is occurring is as much about a dramatic shrinkage in space as it is of time. As our technology, transportation, communication, and other ways of being in the world become increasingly fast and efficient, the old traditions around which cultures, economies, and politics have been organized are upended.
One result of that speed is disruption. And few, if any, of the old traditions have been more disrupted in recent years than big business. In response to constant cultural turbulence and its effect on their reputation, growth, and bottom line, some large companies have turned to design thinking as a way to help them make sense of disruption and sustain competitiveness.
The sources of disruption are many, but one is obvious. As technological innovation accelerates, people, communities, organizations, and objects are more interconnected than ever before. Thanks to everything Internet, our world has shrunk and we are now very close. As a result, we talk more, share more, complain more, celebrate more, ideate more, and expect more.
This disruption has not been kind to businesses used to operating by the rules of the old model. We don’t have to watch their TV ads anymore. We don’t believe their marketing hype anymore. We don’t want to eat their junk ingredients anymore. We don’t have to buy from stores anymore. And we don’t want the best of them to just be profit machines anymore. We want more, when we want it, how we want it, and at the price we want.
It is a vibrant and definite sea change from the way business was always done, when financial profit was a driving force. Today, people are not afraid to say, Screw business as usual!—and show they mean it.
—Richard Branson
For businesses that have been most affected by recent disruptions in technology and social communication, the challenge is one of management. Originally, management was designed for a very different set of business needs: ensuring that repetitive tasks were completed, improving economic efficiency, and maximizing labor and machine productivity. Today those needs are vastly different. Why? Because we’re facing a crisis. Actually, we’re facing many crises. There are crises of competition, economy, disruptive technology, job creation, social development, and sustainability. Some are more pressing than others. The natural resources crisis is certainly more pressing than the economic crisis, and it’s getting worse as populations and their level of consumption keep growing faster than human and technological innovation can find ways of expanding what can be extracted from or produced in the natural world.
But there is also a crisis of trust and credibility. The management solutions that many leaders apply in case of emergency no longer cut it. With most overwhelmed by the complexity and scale of the problems that confront them, the true risk exposure of any organization is very difficult to assess. As a result, proven management tools and techniques are being questioned for their validity and effectiveness. Most were designed for a very different world and operate based on organizational designs well beyond their best-before date, like those pointless mission statements that are supposed to align employees. If you’ve ever wondered where such inspirational tomes originated from and what we’re supposed to do with them, now might be the time to hang them on a wall and call them antiques. Or just have a laugh with Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who defined a mission statement as a long, awkward sentence that demonstrates management’s inability to think properly.
We need a new way, one that’s smart, human, cultural, social, and agile and that puts innovation at the core of every move it makes. That way could be design thinking. They won’t teach you this at B-school or D-school, largely because these organizations suffer from the same strain of anticomplexity that haunts many big businesses. And that’s what this book is all about.
We want more, when we want it, how we want it, and the price we want.
The Butterfly Effect and Long-Range Planning
We agree that our world is changing rapidly. The future is not like the past. The way we do business today will not be the way we do it in the future. And it’s as difficult to predict the weather over the next 12 months as to predict the performance of a business.
Of course, we know that we can’t really predict the weather. Meteorologists predict changes in weather patterns by studying atmospheric patterns, compiling data, and applying what they see to predict what they think will occur. But their record of accuracy is poor beyond the short term, largely because they are relying on the present to imagine the future. In the 1960s MIT professor, mathematician, and meteorologist Edward Lorenz formulated a model of the way air moves around the atmosphere, measuring changes in temperature, pressure, and velocity. Stripping the weather down to 12 differential equations, working through reams of printed numbers, and plotting simple charts, he discovered that slight differences in one variable could have a profound impact on the outcome of an entire system. By modeling weather, Lorenz discovered not only the fundamental mechanism of deterministic chaos—sensitive dependence on initial conditions or the butterfly effect
—but also that long-term weather forecasting was impossible.
Similarly, much of what we do in business strategy and planning is an attempt to predict the future based on the present and the past. Despite pouring millions of dollars into enterprise resource planning systems, however, we can only project three to six months into the future at best with any reasonable accuracy. Why? Because most business leaders are averse to chaos, are overly linear, and are disconnected from global ripples not directly related to the world of business.
We are all more connected than we know. Whether it’s business or any other systems-level organizational challenge, design thinking helps us appreciate and make sense of the complex connections between people, places, objects, events, and ideas. This is the most powerful driver of innovation. It’s what guides long-range strategic planning. It’s what shapes business decisions that have to be based on future opportunities rather than past events. It’s what sparks the imagination. And it’s what reveals true