Design Thinking is a method designers from all over the world use in ideation and development of the things they create. However, this method today also has applications in many other areas besides design. Additionally, some of the world’s biggest companies and top brands are using design thinking to drive innovation and impact, such as Google, Apple, IBM and many others.
Here are five tips for bringing Design Thinking into your organisation too:
Understand the ideology
Although an ideology, Design Thinking is a strong framework too, with plenty of variations on how companies and organisations use Design Thinking process. However, the fundamentals are the same since it describes a human-centered, iterative design process consisting of 5 steps:
➔ Empathize
➔ Define
➔ Ideate
➔ Prototype
➔ Test
Take it seriously
If your organisation wants to adopt Design Thinking long-term, you need to take it seriously. This most certainly does not mean hiring expensive experts on the subject. It is rather about avoiding taking shortcuts, implementing with structure in mind and without wasting precious resources.
Start small
The framework differs from typical projects in many different ways. That’s why it is important to start small and experiment for a while. Starting small can mean doing experiments that allow your team to practice gathering data, testing frequently, and iterating quickly.
Measure success
Introducing Design Thinking to your team and implementing its principles into your day to day activities is not an easy task. While spending that much effort and resources on it, you need to make sure you have a way to track progress – whether it is tracking the number of projects that apply design thinking or conducting different interviews, polls and meeting in order to measure the effect that design had on employee satisfaction.
Reverse your thinking
Seeing your problems in a new light can often help you decide what to prioritize. So, instead of getting discouraged about major challenges and what can be wrong, think about your problem in reverse.
As it is an often case with any other change, it will also take time to fully embed design thinking into your organisation. We hope this article would be helpful along the way.
We would love to hear what is your process of embedding design thinking into your organisation, what are the deciding factors or what tools are in your toolkit. Comment or Get in touch with our team.