Change by Design

Human-centred approach to problem-solving. Moves design backward to the earliest stages of a product’s
conception and forward to the last stages of its implementation – and beyond.

There is no “one best way” to move through the design thinking process. There are useful starting points and
helpful landmarks along the way, but the continuum of innovation is a system of overlapping spaces rather than a
sequence of orderly steps:

 Inspiration, the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions
 Ideation, the process of generating, developing and testing ideas
 Implementation, the path that leads from the project room to the market. Communicating an idea with
sufficient clarity to gain acceptance across the organisation, proving it and showing that it will work in its
intended market.

The first stage of the design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a
framework for evaluating them. Constraints can best be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for
successful ideas:

 Feasibility, what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future

 Viability, what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model
 Desirability, what makes sense to people and for people

The starting point of any project is the brief – a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework
from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized: price
point, available technology, market segment etc. A well-constructed brief allows for serendipity, unpredictability
and capricious whims of fate. It has enough flexibility to release the imagination of the team, while providing
enough specificity to ground its ideas in the lives of their intended beneficiaries.

The real goal of design thinking is not so much fulfilling manifest needs but to help people articulate the latent
needs they may not even know they have.

Three mutually reinforcing elements of any successful design program: insight, observation, empathy.

The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that
will improve lives.

Insight: learning from the lives of others, observing actual people as they improvise their way through their daily
lives, especially those who flourish on the margins of the bell curve.

Observation: watching what people do/don’t do, listening to what they say/don’t say. It makes sense for a
company to familiarize itself with the buying habits of people who inhabit the centre of its current market, for they
are the ones who will verify that an idea is valid on a large scale. By concentrating solely on the bulge at the centre
of the bell curve, however, we are more likely to confirm what we already know than learn something new and
surprising. For insights at that level we need to head for the edges, the places where we expect to find “extreme”
users who live differently, think differently and consume differently. The objective is not so much to design for
these marginal, outlying populations as to gain inspiration from their passion, knowledge, or the extremity of their
circumstances.

Empathy: standing in the shoes of others. Layers of experience – physical/functional, cognitive, emotional.
Physical – what we can see and touch. Insights lead to new insights as seemingly insignificant physical details

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accumulate. Cognitive – latent needs, needs that may be acute but that people may not be able to articulate.
Emotional – what do the people in your target population feel, what touches, them, what motivates them.

Not enough to study individuals. Markets are aggregates of many individuals. For design thinkers, the whole is
greater than the sum of its parts. The “wisdom of the crowds” or collective intelligence needs to be tapped to
unleash the full power of design thinking. A new form of collaboration is needed that blurs the boundaries
between creators and consumers.

Convergent thinking takes a series of inputs, analyses them and then converges upon a single answer. It is a
practical way of deciding among existing alternatives. It drives towards solutions but is not good at probing the
future and creating new possibilities.

The objective of divergent thinking is to multiply options to create choices – different insights into consumer
behaviour, alternative visions of new product offerings, choices among alternative ways of creating interactive
experiences. It is the route of innovation.

Design thinking looks like a rhythmic exchange between the divergent and convergent phases, with each
subsequent iteration less broad and more detailed than the previous ones. In the divergent phase, new options
emerge. In the convergent phase, options are eliminated, and choices made.

Designers use analytical tools break apart complex problems to understand them better. However, the creative
process relies on synthesis, the collective act of putting the pieces together to create whole ideas. Synthesis is the
act of extracting meaningful patterns from masses of raw information.

Individuals, teams and organisations that have mastered the mental matrix of design thinking share a basic
attitude of experimentation. They are open to new possibilities, alert to new directions, and always willing to
propose new solutions. To view failed experiments as wasteful, inefficient or redundant may be a symptom of a
culture focused on efficiency over innovation and a company at risk of collapsing into a downward spiral of
incrementalism. An excess of experimental zeal would be risky, since companies do not enjoy the luxurious time
frames needed for it. A judicious blend of bottom-up experimentation and guidance from above is needed. Rules
for this approach:

1. The best ideas emerge when the whole organisational ecosystem – not just its designers and engineers
and certainly not just management – has room to experiment.
2. Those most exposed to changing externalities (new technology, shifting consumer base, strategic threats
or opportunities) are the ones bet placed to respond and mot motivated to do so.
3. Ideas should not be favoured based on who creates them.
4. Ideas that create a buzz should be favoured. Ideas should gain a vocal following, however small, before
being given organisational support.
5. The “gardening” skills of senior leadership should be used to tend, prune and harvest ideas.
6. An overarching purpose should be articulated so that the organisation has a sense of direction and
innovators don’t feel the need for constant supervision.

The results of bottom-up experimentation must not be allowed to dissipate into unstructured ideas and
unresolved plans. A serious commitment from the top of the corporate pyramid will be repaid by better ideas
from the base.

The obvious counterpart to an attitude of experimentation is a climate of optimism. Without optimism, the will to
experiment will be continually frustrated until it withers. It remains the responsibility of leadership to make
discerning judgements, which will inspire confidence if people feel that their ideas have been given a fair hearing.
Optimism requires confidence, confidence is built on trust and trust flows in both directions.

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Brainstorming is one of the most useful approaches for generating choices, and an important rule of brainstorming
is to build on the ideas of others.

Visual thinking through drawing is another critical aspect of design thinking, not so much to “illustrate” ideas, but
to “express” ideas.

The single most powerful tool of design thinking is the human ability to construct complex concepts that are both
functionally relevant and emotionally resonant that sets humans apart from the ever more sophisticated
machines. As long as there is no algorithm to tell us how to bring divergent possibilities not a convergent reality or
analytical details into a synthetic whole, this talent will guarantee that accomplished design thinkers have a place
in the world. Design thinking is neither art nor science nor religion. It is the capacity, ultimately for integrative
thinking. Integrative thinkers know how to widen the scope of issues salient to the problem. They resist the
“either/or” in favour of the “both/and” and see nonlinear and multidirectional relationships as a source of
inspiration, not contradiction. The most successful leaders allow complexity to exist, al least as they search for
solutions, because complexity is the most reliable source of creative opportunities.

Prototyping is the best evidence of experimentation. It generates results faster. Most problems worth worrying
about are complex, and a series of early experiments is often the best way to decide among competing directions.
The faster we make our ideas tangible, the sooner we will be able to evaluate them, refine them and zero in on the
best solution. Prototyping allows the exploration of many ideas in parallel.

Early prototypes should be fast, rough and cheap. Overinvestment in a refined prototype has two undesirable
consequences. First, a mediocre idea may go too far toward realization, or in the worst case, all the way. Second,
the prototyping process itself creates the opportunity to discover new and better ideas at minimal cost.
Prototypes should command only as much time, effort and investment as is necessary to generate useful feedback
and drive an idea forward. The goal is not to create a working model, but to give form to an idea to learn about its
strengths and weaknesses and to identify new directions for the next generation of more detailed, more refined
prototypes.

Techniques – physical prototypes, storyboards, scenarios, acting out (improvisation), walkthrough experience.

A customer journey is a scenario structure that charts the stages through which an imagined customer passes
from the beginning of a service experience to the end. It clarifies where the customer and customer and the
service or brand interact. Every one of these touchpoints is an opportunity to provide value.

Prototypes of complex ideas may require them to be “released into the wild” to see how they survive and adapt.

All approaches to prototyping slow us down to speed us up. They help avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too
complex too early and sticking with a week idea for too long. Prototyping allows design thinkers to occupy all
three spaces of innovation simultaneously. It is always inspirational because it inspires new ideas. In the ideation
space, they develop our ideas to ensure that they incorporate the functional and emotional elements necessary to
meet the demands of the market. In the implementation space, it may serve to validate a subassembly of a
subassembly, a graphics on a screen, a detail of an interaction between people etc.

Design of experiences: People have shifted from passive consumption to active participation; the best experiences
are delivered on the spot by service providers; an experience must be finely crafted and precision-engineered. In
the experience economy, thee is a fundamental shift in how we experience the world, from the primarily
functional to the primarily emotional. Just as the shift to participatory design is becoming the norm in the
development of new products, the same is true of experiences. Design has the power to enrich our lives by
engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, colour, sound and smell. The intrinsically human-centred
nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design
experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation.

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If a new product requires customers to change their behaviour, then one way to get people to try something new
is to build on behaviours that are familiar to them. By grafting a new service onto existing behaviour, an
experience can be designed that is both reassuringly familiar and invitingly new.

Great experience brands rely on people to a great degree. Creating an experience culture requires going beyond
the generic to design experiences perceived as uniquely tailored to each customer. An experience comes to life
when it feels personalised and customised. Sometime this feeling can be achieved through technology but most
often it comes from the ability of experience providers to add something special or appropriate at just the right
moment. This sense of timing cannot be developed by marketing executives who are distant in space and time. It
requires improvisation y the staff. A real experience culture is a culture of spontaneity. Transforming the culture
of an organisation is as important as designing the service. Empowering employees to seize opportunities when
and where they see them and giving them the tools to crate unscripted experiences is an essential element of that
transformation. Rather than delivering a set of instruction created for them by a bunch of designers somewhere,
they should be encouraged to become design thinkers themselves.

For an idea to become an experience, it must be implemented with the same care in which it is conceived. A one-
off experience is a bit like a piece of fine woodworking: it works with the grain and bears the mark of the
craftsman, and imperfections are part of its charm. When the experience is repeated many times, however, each
of these elements must be precision-engineered to deliver the desired experience consistently and reliably.
Designers like Frank Lloyd Wright were motivated by the belief that design and execution must work together if
the architect is to deliver not just the house but the experience of it.

A blueprint reveals on a single page both the general plan and the specific detail, the final objective and the
practical means of implementation. Just as a product begins with an engineering blueprint and a building with an
architectural blueprint, an experience blueprint provides the framework for working out the details of a human
interaction. An experience blueprint also describes the emotive elements. It captures how people travel through
an experience in time. Its function is to identify the most meaningful points and turn them into opportunities. The
experience blueprint takes the form of a physical document that guides the building of an experience. Unlike a
prepared script or an operations manual, it connects the customer experience and the business opportunity. Every
detail holds the potential to sour a relationship but only a few offer possibilities for an experience that is
distinctive, emotionally gratifying and memorable. The blueprint is at one and the same time a high-level strategy
document and a fine-grained analysis of the details that matter.

Experiences are complex; they vary from place to place, they change over time, and they are hard to get right.
Although the design of an experience may involve products, services, spaces and technology, an experience carries
us beyond the comfortable world of measurable utility and into the hazy zone of emotional value. The best and
most successful experience brands have several things in common:

1. A successful experience requires active consumer participation.

2. A customer experience that feels authentic, genuine and compelling is likely to be delivered by
employees operating within an experience culture themselves.
3. Every touchpoint must be executed with thoughtfulness and precision.

The ability of human beings to tell stories is one of the factors that differentiates us from other species.
Consciousness, language and society have developed an intimate relationship with technologies of storytelling
throughout the forty-thousand-year history of human society. Stories put our ideas into context and give them
meaning. The human capacity for storytelling plays an important role in the intrinsically human-centred approach
to problem solving, design thinking. To design an interaction is to allow a story to unfold over time. Time-based
narrative techniques have entered every field of design. In any time-based design project, each person’s journey
the process will be unique, and it will be far more effective to engage individuals as active participants in their own

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stories. Designing with time means thinking of people as living, growing, thinking organisms who can help write
their own stories.

An experience that unfolds over time, engages participants and allows them to tell their own stories will have
resolved two of the biggest obstacles in the part of every new idea: gaining acceptance in one’s own organisation
and getting it out into the world. At the heart of any good story is a central narrative about the way an idea
satisfies a need in some powerful way. As it unfolds, the story will give every character represented in it a sense of
purpose and will unfold in a way that involves every participant in the action. It will be convincing but not
overwhelm with unnecessary details. It will include plenty of detail to ground it to some plausible reality. It will
leave the audience with no doubt that the organisation narrating it has what it takes to make it real. For an idea
that survives the perilous journey through an organisation and out into the market, storytelling can play the role of
communicating its value to its intended audience in such a way that some of them, at least, want to go out and buy
it.

Effective storytelling relies on two critical moments: the beginning and the end. At the front end, it is essential
that storytelling begin early in the life of a project and be woven into every aspect of the innovation effort. At the
far end, a story gains traction when it is picked up by its intended audience, who feel motivated to carry it forward
long after the design team has disbanded.

Small technology-driven companies and innovation-minded start-ups often have an advantage over larger, more
established businesses. A company that comes at innovation from the direction of technical feasibility will have to
adjust the other factors in response to whatever discoveries it makes. The ultimate business model for a new
company may not be obvious at the outset, and in such a case flexibility and adaptability are an enormous asset.
Large companies are better positioned to look for breakthroughs from within their existing markets, where
technical virtuosity provides no assurance of success. It may make better sense to drive innovation from a
consumer-centred perspective that allows them to exploit assets they already possess: a large customer base,
recognised and trusted brands, experienced customer service and support systems, wide distribution and supply
chain. This is the human-centred, desirability-based approach that design thinking is ideally suited to enhance.

Business thinking is integral to design thinking. A design solution benefits from the sophisticated analytical tools –
discovery-driven planning, option and portfolio theory, prospect theory, customer lifetime value – that have
evolved in the business sector. The world of business can help design teams think responsibly about constraints,
even as designer test those constraints as a project moves along. E.g., in prototyping an e-banking concept, an
interaction designer might observe that the assumed source of revenue, advertising, would compromise the
quality of user experience. A business-oriented designer might respond by evaluating alternatives to advertising,
such as subscriptions or referral fees. This allows everyone to assess the viability component of the innovation
equation in creative ways, not merely as an after-the-fact market analysis.

Ways to Grow matrix:

NEW OFFERINGS EXTEND CREATE

(evolutionary) (revolutionary)
EXISTING OFFERINGS MANAGE ADAPT
(incremental) (evolutionary)
EXISTING USERS NEW USERS

MANAGE – Important, and the majority of a company’s effort is likely to be put into this type of innovation, which
might be the extension of a successful brand or the next iteration of a current product. E.g., different flavours of a
toothpaste.

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EXTEND and ADAPT – Vital to pursue these projects that stretch the base in new directions. Extend existing
offerings to solve the unmet needs of current customer or adapting them to meet the needs of new customers or
markets. E.g., Toyota Prius, not just with its hybrid electric motor but the large, colourful information display that
gives drivers a minute-by-minute indication of fuel economy, constantly challenging them to improve the fuel
efficiency of their driving. Evolutionary innovation along the user axis might involve adapting an existing product
so that it can be manufactured at a lower cot and thus marketed to a wider population. E.g., Tata Nano.

CREATE – Most challenging and riskiest type of innovation. Creates entirely new markets. Happens only rarely.
E.g., Sony with Walkman, Apple with iPod.

This matrix is a tool of design thinking that companies can use to mange their innovation portfolios and remain
competitive in a constantly changing world. Although the imagination may be drawn to the once-in-a-lifetime
smash hits, these are few and far between. And though it may be tempting to focus on incremental projects in
which business forecasts are easy to make, this short-sighted approach leaves companies vulnerable to the
unforeseeable Black Swan events. Game-changing events may occur at any moment and will upend the most
cautious business plan. A company’s best defence is to diversify its portfolio by investing across all four
quadrants of the innovation matrix.

The paired challenges that companies face: how to incorporate designers’ creative problem-solving skills into their
larger strategic initiatives and how to engage a far greater percentage of their workforce in design thinking itself. A
steady flow of innovative products rests upon an underlying culture of innovation. Companies that make products
and manage brands have a head start when it comes to transforming their internal cultures because they already
have designers, and even some design thinkers, on their payrolls. Thought it may be difficult to convince
management of the merits of a more strategic role for design, once they are convinced that there is often a base of
talent already in place. In service organisations, or even manufacturing companies where design has traditionally
been outsourced, that base may not exist and the challenge is greater.

The transformation of a business-as-usual culture into one focused on innovation and driven by design involves
activities, decisions and attitudes. Workshops help expose people to design thinking as a new approach. Pilot
projects help market the benefits of design thinking within the organisation. Leadership focuses the program of
change and gives people permission to learn and experiment. Assembling interdisciplinary teams ensure that the
effort is broadly based. Dedicated spaces provided a resource for longer-term thinking and ensure that the effort
will be sustained. Measurement of impacts, both quantitative and qualitative, helps make the business case and
ensures that resources are appropriately allocated. Incentives may be established for business units to collaborate
in new ways so that younger talent sees innovation as a path to success rather than as a career risk.

In reality, individual business units are focused on immediate concerns, and it can be hard to persuade them to
participate in systemwide innovation initiatives. It is difficult to keep faith in a volatile business environment in
which short-term obstacles seem more demanding than long-term objectives. Too many executives panic at the
first sign of bad news. Innovation is not something to be turned on and off like a faucet. Breakthrough ideas take
longer to germinate than it takes for all but the longest and deepest recessions to pass. Companies that sustain
innovation efforts, lay off staff and kill projects as they enter a downturn will only weaken their innovation
pipeline. They may need to refocus their efforts and run their projects with fewer resources, but cutting them off
altogether leaves them at risk of being blindsided when markets recover. An idea incubated in a downturn may
have massive impact when times improve. New needs are easier to spot in a downturn than in a boom, where
there is a surfeit of great ideas chasing needs that have already been met. Design thinking may be one of the
most profitable practices a corporation can adopt during a recession.

Design thinking is unlikely to become an exact science, but as with the quality movement (of W. Edwards Deming),
there is an opportunity to transform it from a black art into a systematically applied management approach. The
trick is to do this without sucking the life out of the creative process – to balance management’s legitimate

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requirement for stability, efficiency and predictability with the design thinker’s need for spontaneity, serendipity
and experimentation. The objective should be integration: holding these conflicting demands in tension.

There is a far-reaching shift in the dynamic between sellers of good and providers of services, and those who
purchase them. Consumers are making new and different demands: they relate differently to brands; expect to
participate in determining what will be offered; expect their relationship with manufacturers and sellers to
continue beyond the point of purchase. Companies have to yield some of their sovereign authority over the
market and enter into a two-way conversation with their customers. This shift is happening at three levels:

1. There is a seemingly inexorable blurring of the line between products and services as consumers shift
from the expectation of functional performance to a more broadly satisfying experience. In some sense,
every product is already a service; it implies a prior association with the brand that stands behind it and
carries the expectation of the maintenance, repair or upgrade that will follow. Few services do not
include something tangible.

Some companies have been quicker to recognize this than their competitors and have been rewarded by a
loyal customer following. Service businesses, however, have been much slower to innovate. Few of them
have built strong research and development cultures. Their business operations are rarely informed by
the strategies that have proven so successful elsewhere.

Industrialization was driven by sweeping innovation in technology. Companies competed based on their
technological prowess and adopted practices designed to increase their capacity for technological
innovation. As small start-ups grew into industrial empires, they established research labs, design studios,
university affiliations and new forms of intellectual property (patents, copyrights, licensing arrangements)
to grow into megacompanies. Investing in a future stream of technical innovation became part of the
management of most large industrial companies, who assume that the way to ensure a stream of
products tomorrow is to invest in technological research today.

Among service companies, there is rarely a culture built around investing in future innovations. Where it
does exist, it tends to be concentrated on the infrastructure that makes a service possible rather than the
service itself. Prior to the computer and the internet, almost every service relied on direct interaction
between the service provider and the service recipient. The more premium a service, the more people
were generally involved in delivering it. As long as it was people who determined the quality of the
service customers received, there was little incentive to think about the sort of breakthrough service
innovations that could redefine a market.

By the end of the 1990s, many companies acknowledged that technology was destined to replace, or at
least significantly augment the role of people in defining the customer experience. Competitiveness
became dependent on innovation. But technology alone does not necessarily result in a better customer
experience. Service companies that use innovative technology but do not innovate to improve the quality
of people’s experience will find out that past innovation is no guarantee of future performance.

Just as products become more like services, services are becoming more like experiences. Underlying this
evolution is an understanding of the importance of investing in systematic, design-based innovation that
engaged employees and customers at the deepest level.

2. Design thinking is being applied at new scales in the move from discrete products and services to
complex systems.

The guiding principle of any large-scale project is to ensure that the objectives of different participants are

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 aligned. Otherwise, the result is a vicious circle of inefficiency and unpleasantness that creates an
adversarial climate of unnecessary distractions and impedes the achievement of the common goal.

In complex non-hierarchical systems, the behaviour of the system is the result not of centralized
command and control, but of a set of individual behaviours that, when repeated thousands of times,
achieves predictable results. In human-based systems, one has to reckon with the additional factors of
individual intelligence and free will. Instead of an inflexible, hierarchical process that is designed once and
executed many times, one must imagine how to create highly flexible, constantly evolving systems in
which each exchange between participants is an opportunity for empathy, insight, innovation and
implementation, thereby making that exchange more valuable to and meaningful for all participants. One
way to adapt and evolve in order to be successful is to empower individuals with some degree of control
over the end result.

Too many of our large-scale systems fail to deliver a respectful, efficient, participatory experience. We
might resign ourselves to the ponderous workings of government bureaucracies, but we should not
forgive the companies we patronize for their decided lack of imagination. Every media company that
resists the digitization of content, every mobile service provider that forces us to buy services from a
single source, every bank that exacts outrageous fees opens up opportunities for more agile and
imaginative competitors. Design is about delivering a satisfying experience. Design thinking is about
creating a multipolar experience in which everyone has the opportunity to participate in the conversation.

3. There is a dawning recognition among manufacturers, consumers, and everyone in between that we are
entering an era of limits; the cycle of mass production and mindless consumption that defined the
industrial age is no longer sustainable.

Designers and people who aspire to think like designers are in a position to make important decisions
about what resources society uses and where they end up. Three significant area where design thinking
can promote the massive change that is called for today:
a. Informing ourselves about what is at stake and making visible the true costs of the choices we
make. E.g. Drivers of Change cards from the engineering firm Arup.
b. A fundamental reassessment of the systems and processes we use to create new things. If we
take time to examine the whole cycle of creation and use of a product – from the extraction of
raw materials used in manufacturing to disposal at the end of its useful life – we may be able to
find new opportunities for innovation that reduce environmental impact while enhancing rather
than diminishing our quality of life. By thinking in terms of the whole system, companies can
capture bigger opportunities.
c. Find ways to encourage individuals to move toward more sustainable behaviours. People should
be encouraged to see energy conservation as more of an investment than a sacrifice.

These trends converge around a single, inescapable point: design thinking needs to be turned toward the
formulation of a new participatory social contract. Every contact has two parties. If people do not wish
companies to treat them like passive consumers, they must assume their fair share of responsibility, and
commit to the principles of design thinking.

Finding ways to apply the principles of design thinking to the problems of society is attracting the most
ambitious designers, entrepreneurs and students today. They are motivated not by an altruistic desire to give
something back for a few months after graduation or upon retirement but by the fact that the greatest
challenges are always the source of the greatest opportunities.

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Design thinking and the organisation:

 Begin at the beginning – Design thinking starts with divergence, the deliberate attempt to expand the
range of options. Design thinkers should be on corporate boards, participating in strategic marketing
decisions, and taking part in the early stages of R&D efforts. This will use the tools of design thinking
as a means of exploring strategy. Design thinkers will connect the upstream with the downstream.
 Take a human-centred approach – It informs new offerings and increase the likelihood of their
acceptance by connecting them to existing behaviours. Starting with prevailing business constraints
and extrapolating from there leads to incremental ideas that are easily copied. Starting with
technology is risky and best left to agile start-ups. Starting with humans increases the likelihood of
developing a breakthrough idea and finding a receptive market. The first step is to ensure that those
involved in the innovation efforts get as close as they can to their intended customers.
 Fail early, fail often – Time to first prototype is a good measure of the vitality of an innovation
culture. Leaders should encourage experimentation and accept that there is nothing wrong with
failure as long as it happens early and becomes a source of learning. A vibrant design-thinking culture
will encourage prototyping as part of the creative process and not just as a way of validating finished
ideas. Prototypes need to be testable, but they do not need to be physical.
 Get professional help – Sometimes it may make more sense to go outside the organisation and look
for opportunities to expand the innovation ecosystem. This may include cocreation with customers
or new partners, hiring experts like technology specialists, software geeks, design consults or teenage
video gamers. The active participation of customers and partners is not only likely to yield more ideas
but will create a web of loyalty that will be hard for competitors to erode.
 Share the inspiration – The knowledge networks should support inspiration and stimulate the
emergence of new ideas. How can you connect like-minded folks to leverage their common
passions? What is the typical fate of new ideas within your organisation? How can you leverage
insights about consumers to inspire multiple projects? Are you using digital tools to document your
project outcomes in a way that deepens the knowledge base of your organisation and allows
individuals to learn from it and to grow?
 Blend big and small projects – Manage a diversified portfolio of innovation that stretches from
shorter-term incremental ideas to longer-term revolutionary ones. The downside: fewer projects
may go to market. The upside: those that do are likely to have a lasting impact. Encouraging
experimentation is easy in the incremental zone. Business units should be encouraged to drive
innovation around existing markets and offerings. The creative leader must also be willing to support
the search for more breakthrough ideas from the top.
 Budget to the pace of innovation – Be prepared to rethink funding schedules as projects unfold
according to their own internal logic and teams learn more about the opportunities before them. It
has to be accepted that milestones cannot be predicted with certainty. Budgeting guidelines must be
expected to change many times over. The key to agile budgeting is a review process that relies upon
the judgement of senior leadership rather than some kind of algorithmic process mechanically
applied.
 Find talent any way you can – Design thinkers exist inside every organisation. The trick is spotting
them, nurturing them and freeing them to do what they do best. Hire budding design thinkers from
schools that “get it”, and bring in interns and team them up with the more seasoned designed
thinkers.
 Design for the cycle – Individuals should be allowed to go through the entire cycle of a project.
Otherwise, both the core team members and the project will suffer. The guiding idea behind a
project is likely to be diluted, attenuated or lost. Individuals will feel that their learning curves have
been wasted and may be left with a lasting sense of frustration.

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Design thinking and you:

 Don’t ask what? ask why? – Asking “Why?” is an opportunity to reframe a problem, redefine the
constraints, and open the field to a more innovative answer. Instead of accepting a given constraint, ask
whether this is even the right problem to be solving. It annoys colleagues I the short run, but in the long
run it will improve the chances of spending energy on the right problems, instead of coming up with the
right answer to the wrong question.
 Open your eyes – Good design thinkers observe. Great design thinkers observe the ordinary. Observing
the ordinary can give uncanny insights into the unwritten rules that guide us through life.
 Make it visual – Record observations and ideas visually, even as rough sketches or pictures. Being visual
allows us to look at a problem differently than if we rely only on words or numbers.
 Build on the ideas of others – An idea that migrates throughout an organisation, undergoing continual
permutations, combinations and mutations is likely to flourish. Corporations need a culture of competing
ideas.
 Demand options – The pursuit of new options takes time and makes things more complicated, but it is
the route to more creative and satisfying solutions.
 Balance your portfolio – Document the process as it unfolds. Shoot videos, preserve drawings and
sketches, hold on to presentation documents, and find somewhere to store physical prototypes.

Living design involves optimism, openness to experimentation, a love of storytelling, a need to collaborate, and an
instinct to think with hands – to build, to prototype and to communicate complex ideas with masterful simplicity.

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