Design thinking is becoming more and more mainstream and relevant, with many business and technology publications writing about it. This has included Wired, Forbes and Fast Company. The September 2015 Harvard Business Review is dedicated to design thinking. As with any idea that becomes mainstream, people jump on the bandwagon and start to wave their design thinking flag.
The mainstream adoption of design thinking poses the question that Tim Brown, the CEO, and president of the design consulting firm IDEO (and the champion of present-day design thinking) asked and posted on the HBR website on August 28th. “When Everyone Is Doing Design Thinking, Is It Still a Competitive Advantage?”
The answer to this is simple, every successful organization brings a unique value proposition. What makes one company different from the next one? Who is different and why? How do you connect to your core user and how does this correlate to dollars and cents?
To bring focus to Tim Brown’s question, I would like to present the following questions to ask yourself and your organization. Sometimes you can arrive at a different solution by asking a different question. These questions are specific to organizations, media, and marketing but can be adjusted for other industries.
DESIGN THINKING AT THE ORGANIZATION LEVEL:
• Does your organization understand the value of design thinking and are they willing to take the necessary steps and risks to implement it into the business model?
• What’s your organization’s value proposition?
• What are your priorities? Short term or long-term goals?
• Does your organization have a strong design leader that fully embraces the principles of design thinking and can fully articulate the value of design thinking? Can this person connect together the organization’s value chain to fully implement the practices?
• Is your organization flexible and open-minded?
• Is your organization afraid of failure?
• Do you reward people for sharing ideas and for actively seeking new opportunities?
• Do you have a business strategy in place?
• Are your business and marketing strategies representative of the work that you expect to create for your clients?
• Have you identified ways to operationalize design thinking within your organization?
• Does your business model follow triple bottom line practices (people, planet, profit)? This one needs some explaining. Although triple bottom line principles and design thinking are not necessarily connected, the values of empathy should be. You can get away with just the people and the profit part, but for long-term business sustainability and growth, you should care about the planet too. I believe for the full understanding of design thinking and human empathy, you need to carry the value of all three. This is an interesting topic to cover, but it’s outside the scope of this post. We’ll revisit this at a later date.
DESIGN THINKING AT THE SOLUTION LEVEL:
Both marketing and content solutions require an engagement and experiential ecosystem to be defined and designed. These are some questions to ask during the design process.
• Does your solution fully consider your client’s needs?
• How is the brand message portrayed over the ecosystem?
• What is the value of the ecosystem to the customer/user?
• Did you create an experience-based solution? One that connects creativity, a brand message, user needs, and technology? How do these parts come together and work with each other to build a better experience?
• Have you created a multi-channel engagement system? Single stream creative engagement is no longer effective. There are too many media channels out there these days.
• Does the solution use the engagement specifics of each media channel to strategically create a brand story or a narrative? For example, we engage with a website differently than a print ad. The brand message should work between these mediums.
• Does your solution or message incorporate a content system between physical and digital experiences? Remember, without a physical catalyst, there is no content for digital media such as Twitter or Snapchat.
• Have you partnered with your client to provide solutions that build off an existing business model to expand your client’s business?
• Did you research and incorporate parts or processes from an adjacent or peripheral industry in order to make a more unique and in-depth solution?
• Did you consider how the brand experience or campaign will end or how it will evolve into the next message or storyline?
• Are you collecting data at all the right points and can you monetize this information?
• Can you expand the product or brand message to new audiences or users?
• Have you created digital content that can strategically go viral?
• Do you have a workaround strategy for ad blockers?
I hope that these questions will help to shape and identify design thinking solutions.
Don’t get caught up with word “design.” Design thinking can be applied to any customer-facing experience or function. It’s not limited to product design, strategy or marketing. Design thinking can be applied to solutions for healthcare, finance, and home security as well. However, the goal is always the same, to build a human-centric ecosystem.
Did you notice that I didn’t use the word “innovation” once? Design thinking doesn’t have to be labeled “innovative.” It’s a framework of principles that will help solve modern business problems with user-centric solutions and experiences, bonus points if the solutions are good for the triple bottom line (people, plant and profit).
I tried to be as comprehensive as possible. Did I miss any questions? Put them in the comments below.
Good things to read:
“The Origins of Design Thinking”
“The Rapidly Disappearing Business of Design”
“Why Design Thinking Should Be At The Core Of Your Business Strategy Development”
“Silicon Valley is gunning for your business, now”