Design thinking

The skills required today to stay relevant are way more complex than needed before. And Design Thinking is one of the mainstays here. Design thinking is an amalgamation of analytic and creative processes that allows a person to experiment, create, build prototype models, gather feedback, and redesign. Visualization and creativity are the main tools that a good designer should possess. The design of products and services is a major component of business competitiveness, to the extent that many known companies have committed themselves to become design leaders.

The steps involved in the design thinking process are easy to implement. The Design Facilitator has to fully understand the problem, explore a wide range of possible solutions and then iterate extensively via prototyping and testing.

Enterprise Design Thinking is an approach to applying design thinking at the speed and scale the modern enterprise demands. It’s a framework for teaming and action. It helps teams not only form intent but deliver outcomes.

Enterprise Design Thinking: The Loop

Enterprise Design Thinking is a continuous loop of observing, reflecting, and making.

Source: IBM Research

Agile and Enterprise Design Thinking

There’s a great deal of synchronization between Agile and Enterprise Design Thinking. Enterprise Design Thinking helps you identify what problem to solve, while Agile helps you in the how part of it. When people across disciplines see the backlog through the dual lenses of experience and functionality, then Agile and Enterprise Design Thinking truly become one. Leaders across the domains meet regularly, restructure the backlog and update the priorities. Together, they bring expertise to solve complex problems for users with creativity and empirical adaptation.

Design thinking facilitation:

Design thinking leaders initiate and lead design thinking activities in their teams. Over time facilitation can be learned. Enterprise Design Thinking is designed as a framework for individuals and teams to use even bits and pieces to simplify the whole process. A design thinking facilitator helps ensure that conversations and activities are centered on the user, how they work, and what market they occupy.

Creative deliberations are necessary for developing possible solutions but people often fail to do it well. Throughout the process, it is important to engage in modeling, analysis, prototyping, and testing.

The MIT Sloan Design Model:

Coming up with a new idea is relatively easy. Coming up with the right idea takes some effort. In Design Thinking throwing what you know and then starting from scratch opens up a host of possibilities.

In the Design Thinking arena, anybody who has a challenge that requires creative problem solving can be benefitted from this skill. Managers, leaders can use it, not only to design a new product or service but anytime they’ve got a challenge or a problem to solve.

There isn’t an industry that can’t use design thinking. Applying design thinking techniques to critical business problems enables facilitators across industries re-think their product offerings, grow their business, offer greater value to customers. It helps in innovating and in staying relevant.

Advance Agility not only is a lean and Agile-enabled team, our constant pursuit towards Design Thinking to make it simpler for our clients emboldens us to push the envelope further.