How Design Thinking Fosters Innovation

There’s a term that keeps popping up during many of the discussions hosted by IX Network: design thinking.

In our recent, Connected Worker for Manufacturing event, for instance, Alice de Casanove, Culture Evolution, Intrapreneurship Director at Airbus mentioned that her company took a design thinking approach to create a roadmap for digital transformation.

In the same discussion, Marcos Paganini, VP of Global Manufacturing Strategy and Deployment Consumer Segment at Johnson & Johnson observes that “design thinking results in hundreds of good ideas from all across the organization.” (Although, he also added that the downside was that there are too many good ideas to act on them all).

Maybe you’ve heard of it. Maybe your organization is using it. Or, maybe you’re using the principles of it without even knowing it.

So, just what is design thinking and why is everybody talking about it?

What Design Thinking Is

Design thinking has been employed in the design community for decades, according to an MIT article, but only widely known outside the development world after IDEO CEO Tim Brown wrote an article on it in 2008 for the Harvard Business Review. 

At its heart, Design Thinking is a problem solving and idea generation tool. It focuses on understanding a problem, developing empathy with the users, and then prototyping and iterating solutions.

As the MIT article explains, “at a high level, the steps involved in the design thinking process are simple: first, fully understand the problem; second, explore a wide range of possible solutions; third, iterate extensively through prototyping and testing; and finally, implement through the customary deployment mechanisms.”

Manufacturers are no strangers to the need to create a problem-solving culture and understand the root cause of problems that may lead to subpar quality and efficiency. Widely employed manufacturing management techniques and tools aim to uncover and address problems.

Six Sigma, for instance, offers a set of statistical tools to get to root causes and identify ways to reduce variation in a process. Lean, a set of management tools that aims to reduce waste in processes and foster continuous improvement, offers a set of tools that allow problems to be identified and addressed.

Meanwhile, Total Quality Management (TQM), often considered a predecessor to Six Sigma, gives all employees the tools to identify problems and suggest opportunities for process improvement.

While the techniques may differ, these methods are all based on the idea that the way things are done can be improved and that ideas of the people closest to the process offer most insight.

“There's Agile. There's Design Thinking. There's Deming’s system’s Plan, Do, Study, Act,” says David Crawley in a soon to be published interview with IX Network. “These are all approaches to building a transition culture of innovation.”

What Makes Design Thinking Different

One difference between design thinking and many of established manufacturing management techniques is their approach to variation and improvement.

Six Sigma, Lean and TQM are all, generally, based on the idea that gradual, incremental improvements reduce process waste and variation (thereby improving quality and efficiency).

In other words, you take what you’re already doing and tweak it to make it better.

In design thinking, the shift can be more radical. The approach encourages a true understanding of problems, empathy with the end users, idea generation, and prototyping (in partnership with end users). No ideas are dismissed as too crazy in the idea generation phase.

Netflix didn’t just get better at mail order DVDs, they completely reinvented the concept of home content delivery.

“Design thinking, has the potential to do for innovation exactly what TQM did for manufacturing: unleash people’s full creative energies, win their commitment, and radically improve processes,” wrote Jeanne Liedtka, a Darden professor, in a 2018 Harvard Business article, "Why Design Thinking Works".

Liedtka studied over 50 projects in a variety of industries over a seven-year time span and found that design thinking offered tools and clear steps to overcoming barriers to innovation and harnessing the talent and energy of the workforce.

“What people may not understand is the subtler way that design thinking gets around the human biases (for example, rootedness in the status quo) or attachments to specific behavioral norms (“That’s how we do things here”) that time and again block the exercise of imagination,” she observes in her article.

That’s important because the demands on the workforce are increasing. The pace of change – and problems - has accelerated at manufacturers. Technological advancements are changing the nature of manufacturing work and the required skills. Supply chain issues show no sign of going away. The aging of the workforce and resulting labor crunch demands new solutions.

“In a stable environment, efficiency is achieved by driving variation out of the organization. But in an unstable world, variation becomes the organization’s friend, because it opens new paths to success,” adds Jeanne Liedtka.

For manufacturers looking to engage the workforce in problem solving and identify new solutions in a rapidly changing market, design thinking may offer a path to success.

What do you think? Are you using Design Thinking at your company?