Are you now working in a design-centric environment? How can you benefit from having one?

This piece writes on the summary and a short reflection on the article “Design Thinking Comes of Ages” by Harvard Business School.

Design thinking is an essential tool for simplifying and humanizing. It can’t be extra; it needs to be a core competence.

Key summaries and ideas of the article:

1. Design thinking is originally a set of principles/ a toolkit for product development. But it has increasingly becoming the best tool to develop a responsive and flexible organisational culture.
2. Design thinking is intended to show empathy with users, focus on prototyping and tolerate for failure for testing. Applying to organisational culture, a design-centric culture should (1) focus onusers’ experiences,especially theiremotionalones, (2) create physical/ schematic modelsto examine complex problems, (3) use prototypingto explore potential solutions, (4) tolerate failure and (5) exhibit thoughtful restraint.
3. “There’s no longer any real distinction between business strategy and the design of the user experience,” said Bridget van Kralingen, SVP of IBM Global Business Services.
4. Every established company that chooses to compete on innovation rather than efficiency must be able t o define problems artfully and experiment its way to solutions.
5. Established company should work towards a design-centric culture through (1) accepting more ambiguity(on evaluating the return on capital expenditure for user experience improvement), (2) embracing riskassociated with experimenting with transformative innovation, and (3) resetting expectations on the roles of “designers” and “non-designers”.

An organisational focus on design offers unique opportunities for humanizing technology and for developing emotionally resonant products and services… because design is empathic, it implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.

Some reflection and discussion:

1. Instead of an innovative and prospective piece, this article mainly summarises how current companies strives for existence, and then excellence. Given the increasing complexity of the world and different products, companies have no choice but to innovate.
2. Applying “design thinking” to organisational culture has become more and more popular, and is an ongoing process for many well-established.
3. “Design thinking” could serve as a good framework/ reminder for company to stress focus on customers. However, putting customer as the top 1 priority is never a necessary nor sufficient criterion for success. Other organisational culture on prioritising on employees (e.g. Zappos) or operational efficiency could also bring success. That said, prioritising is all about trade-offs. Some mega-size companies like Amazon do good in both customer-first principle and operational excellence.
4. One of the best examples given in the article is the thermostat Nest, which is less publicised in my living area Hong Kong. Despite fewer “outward-facing” functions than other thermostat, Nest not only wins in its elegant and “less is more” design, but also its portrayal of a simple, streamlined and design culture of the company. It brings more value to customers than just a temperature sensor, but also a style of living and a desire of an art piece.