Innovation by Design: How Any Organization Can Leverage Design Thinking to Produce Change, Drive New Ideas, and Deliver Meaningful Solutions

by Thomas Lockwood

Empathy at the outset provides for the insight into the emotional aspects of the customer experience, and that leads to the discovery of meaning, an understanding and appreciation of the importance of the human experience. The

Every story has five main elements: theme, context, characters, conflict, and a resolution.

The visualization of information and storytelling of problems and solutions are paramount to design thinking success.

The level of commitment and support shown by leaders

is the key factor to success.

“Inclusiveness isn’t about you, it’s about making space for others to be themselves.”

how leaders role-model is a critical factor. This is a key ingredient to how well leaders support design and the use of design thinking through their organizations, as well as how they empower others to set and influence strategy, and make decisions.

Leaders must have the ability to understand the key characteristics and traits of culture, and recognize what leadership behavior is aligned and what behavior is not. And if they choose to use behaviors that are inconsistent with the expectations set by the culture, they are best advised to clearly articulate the reasoning behind their choices and actions. If they don’t, they run the risk of losing the trust of others.

Success requires leaders to gain intimate knowledge of the culture and choose behaviors that allow them to integrate and align to what is expected by the culture.

The Attributes of Design Thinking Leaders: Uses empathy to understand the experiences of others. Focuses on creating a benefit for the customer. Listens with mutual respect and fearless exploration to understand others. Openly expresses their ideas and what they think, see, and feel. Pursues knowledge by being curious, inquiring, and asking questions. Demonstrates the ability to be vulnerable, including accepting of their mistakes and incompetence. Coaches others, rather than sharing viewpoint and competing with others. Relies on the knowledge and insight of others, and not acting as the lone genius. Strives for self-knowledge and uses the personal power of choice. Uses curious confrontation to effectively manage disagreement and conflict. Aligns their personal purpose in contribution to the organization’s mission.

Attributes of design thinking leaders

“Passion is caring deeply about something. Purpose is doing something about what you deeply care about.” —Edgar Papke

They show the ability to successfully integrate two key aspects of innovative success: the external focus on the customer, and the internal focus on their cultures and how they do things.

The approach to design at J&J is defined as Care-Centered Design.

There is a new generation of consumers creating a big shift.

more than seven out of 10 younger consumers want to be engaged in the creation of the products and services they are shopping for. More than seven out of 10 are more willing to pay for products and services that are seen in a positive social and environmental light.

we cannot predict the future, but we can predict future alternatives, and we can strive for our desired future alternative.

Having the ability and methods to design innovative cultures allows us to explore potential organization models of the future that we have not yet uncovered, and probe into how they may affect the broader spectrum of social and global creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

Ten reasons why we believe design thinking will last: Design thinking is occupation independent. It works. It links to our basic needs as humans. It helps fill some big gaps in education. It helps solve any kind of problem. It works great with many other business processes, like Agile, Lean, and waterfall. It works great for customer experience and digital transformation. The results can be measured. It can be applied company-wide. It’s pretty cheap to do, and can save lots of money too.

#conclusion

Seven reasons why design thinking could fade away: It’s not part of STEM education, and education is stuck anyhow. Little accreditation, few, if any, degrees in design thinking. It’s hard to measure empathy, collaboration, curiosity, change. It can be hard to do; it takes time and effort. It takes executive support to build out large employee training programs. It challenges people and status quo it rocks the boat. It is still in prototype stage.

is the consideration of the Fifth Order that will bring about the human-centered changes and trends of the future.

This research has led to our development of many new models, tools, and techniques, such as a Design Thinking At Scale™ Framework, a Cultural Innovation Readiness™ Framework, a Design Thinking Maturity™ Model, and updates to many of our Culture Alignment tools.

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