HBR's 10 Must Reads on Design Thinking (with featured article "Design Thinking" By Tim Brown)

by Harvard Business Review

Design thinking is a method of meeting people’s needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way.

The dehumanizing potential of technology has become only more apparent with the rise of AI. Ubiquitous social networks have fractured society as much as they have connected it. Online advertising and targeted marketing have raised rates of consumption just as the planetary damage caused by overconsumption is becoming all too clear.

Design thinking, like any powerful tool, comes with a duty to use it responsibly.

To be successful, an innovation process must deliver three things: superior solutions, lower risks and costs of change, and employee buy-in.

“Anytime you’re trying to change people’s behavior, you need to start them off with a lot of structure, so they don’t have to think. A lot of what we do is habit, and it’s hard to change those habits, but having very clear guardrails can help us.”

(All too often, good ideas die on the vine in the absence of people with a personal commitment to making them happen.)

Recognizing organizations as collections of human beings who are motivated by varying perspectives and emotions, design thinking emphasizes engagement, dialogue, and learning.

This is the classic path of intellectual progress. Each design process is more complicated and sophisticated than the one before it.

Instead of letting thoughts run through your head and down the drain, capture them systematically in some form of idea notebook. Keep a whiteboard and marker in the shower. Schedule daily “white space” in your calendar, where your only task is to think or take a walk and daydream. When you try to generate ideas, shoot for 100 instead of 10. Defer your own judgment and you’ll be surprised at how many ideas you have—and like—by the end of the week.