Met up with my old friend, Wickie, today and discussed approaches to business and organizational transformation and progress. One of the hot approaches these days is 'design thinking'. I've always had an issue with the term because:
- Like so many other specifically coined terms, it becomes a buzz word that covers everything and nothing, and in the end no one understands what it is. Like 'experience economy', 'social media' and 'user-driven innovation' which have become very misunderstood (see my posts about the latter two 'It's the mindset, not the media' and 'What is user-driven innovation - and what is not').
- The spokespeople for design thinking tend to - as with all buzz things - describe it in long, very unconcrete terms that leave me none the wiser about what exactly design thinking is and why I should care.
- Design thinking fundamentally consists of elements that are very well-known from disciplines like brand management and web/IT development, so what's new?
I prefer to call a spade a spade. Tell me in brief layman's terms what it is. So Wickie, who is trained as a designer and works with design as a mindset, and I tried to sum up in the simplest possible way the core elements of design thinking:
- A holistic, cross-disciplinary approach to problem-solving that uses
- ... a prototyping, iterative process in order make stuff (change, processes, things, plans)
- ... tangible very quickly.
See, now I get what design thinking is. I hope you do, too.
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