Design thinking is more than just crafting – it is culture!

The verrocchio Institute has been consulted several times in the past as a kind of expert witness by organisations on how resistance to Design Thinking has arisen.

The results of these investigations are the following Dos and Don’ts:

Dos
– Please identify the Design Thinking variant that suits you – there are about 15 to 20 known variants worldwide.

– Cognitive knowledge about Design Thinking is also important and should be taught before the first workshop – this does not have to take more than one day.

– Decide clearly whether you want to use Design Thinking only within a project or as a helping tool for a strategic transformation.

– Please be sure to follow the three essential principles: creative spaces, multidisciplinary teams and a truly agile iterative process.

– Every project should have a space where all work products can always remain visibly present. Constantly putting work results away and hanging them up again greatly reduces productivity. In particular, one also misses the opportunity of “in-between work”.

– Start an internal marketing campaign that accompanies the project and keeps the people in the organisation informed and involved who are not directly involved in the project. Otherwise resentment and envy can quickly arise, especially in more conservative traditional cultures.

Don’ts
– Bring people into ongoing Design Thinking phases without preparation. Many people, especially older employees, then often work without making sense of the situation or even with resistance, because they cannot categorise it.

– Disregard the essential factor of “multidisciplinary teams” and carry out Design Thinking only within one department – then the ideas generated are usually never more than improvements.

– Underestimating the first phase of “understanding”. Many teams underestimate this phase and give it far too little time in relation to the phase of idea generation or prototyping, for example.

– Design Thinking in the “normal” meeting room. Without rooms set up according to the findings, the method will hardly work at all.

– Only carry out prototyping and testing internally. Only those who really go to the outside world with their early prototypes and tests will win with Design Thinking. Many organisations think internal testing is enough and then postulate, “There’s no budget, time or courage for external testing.”

At this point we can recommend as the very first tools to get to know Design Thinking fundamentally:

  • The book “DESIGN THINKING – The Handbook”.
  • The info-fresco “Design Thinking”. This visualises the innovation method Design Thinking from its origin until today. In well over 200 aspects, it vividly presents Design Thinking and viewers quickly gain an overview of the method.

With inspiring greetings,
Benno van Aerssen