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This activity helps students to develop proficiency in using imagery to solve problems. By visualizing or drawing a problem, students are able to notice connections and patterns that can help guide them...

Anticipation guides consist of statements about themes from a text and ask students to evaluate their own thoughts about those themes. Anticipation guides help students build background when they think about...

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This activity helps students to develop proficiency in using imagery to solve problems. By visualizing or drawing a problem, students are able to notice connections and patterns that can help guide them... Anticipation guides consist of statements about themes from a text and ask students to evaluate their own thoughts about those themes.

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So as one of my main focus areas, I will start with Design Thinking. I will provide a definition, and overview of the 6 stages, and hopefully create the link from Design Thinking to Digital Transformation and how it can help you start or continue the journey.

What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a human-centric approach for solving problems by creating new ideas. Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients. A design mindset is not problem-focused, it's solution focused and action oriented towards creating a preferred future. Always thinking about the outcome.

Where does it work?
For any business challenges like defining new solutions, strategies and roadmaps, organizational structures and processes. I believe that design thinking is perfect for the first and seconds phases of your digital transformation but you will probably leverage the process throughout. I will explore all phases of Digital Transformation as I move through the posts. But at a high level and to wet your appetite a little, the 6 phases are Discover / Prepare / Explore / Realize / Deploy / Run. Can you already imagine where a new process to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients can help here?

Create INNOVATION by combining the right PEOPLE, the needed SPACE and a supporting PROCESS. I like to summarize this as People / Process / Platform. More on this in a later post.
What is Innovation?

DESIRABILITY - Create something which fits to your users need.

FEASIBILITY - Otherwise it is just science fiction.

VIABILITY - Because we would like to earn money with it.

INNOVATION = Desirability + Feasibility + Viability. Most companies would be happy to improve a product by 10%, win some market share (even if it is in a red ocean), and maybe crash some competitors. This is exactly why most companies decay little by little as they tend to mostly do what they have done before with a few changes, their 10%. A study from the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University estimates that 40% of today's Fortune 500 companies on the S&P 500 will no longer exist in 10 years. It is no surprise as 90% of Fortune 500 companies vanished since 1955, but the latest estimate is in 10 years, a fast decade away.

True innovation happens when you try to improve something by 10 times rather than 10%. Google talks about how sometimes it's actually easier to make something 10 times better than improve it to make it 10% better. The key is perspective. This is where Design Thinking can help you get to that point.

In the next posts I will cover the 6 phases of Design Thinking. Now there are a few different process models so find the one that woks for you, but I will be covering my 6.

Right lets go to Understand.

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INNOVATION = Desirability + Feasibility + Viability. Design Thinking is a human-centric approach for solving problems by creating new ideas.

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Design thinking is a mindset. It is the confidence that everyone can be part of creating a more desirable future, and a process to take action when faced with a difficult challenge. That kind of optimism is well needed in education.

Classrooms and schools across the world are facing design challenges every single day, from teacher feedback systems to daily schedules. Wherever they fall on the spectrum of scale - the challenges educators are confronted with are real, complex, and varied. And as such, they require new perspectives, new tools, and new approaches. Design thinking is one of them.

We have a new resource- The Co-Designing Schools Toolkit, which supports educators to collaboratively create equitable change in schools through a community-led, equity-centered, and design-driven process.

You can still download the classic Design Thinking for Educators toolkits + workbook here.

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Design thinking is a mindset. It is the confidence that everyone can be part of creating a more desirable future, and a process to take action when faced with a difficult challenge. That kind of optimism is well needed in education.

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Over the years the question of what makes some companies, and the people within, more or less creative than others has been studied ad nauseam. The idea of innovation within business has long been thrown around, it's a kind of catchall term used for everything a company must do continue to remain relevant. We are led to believe that without a strong amount of "innovation," your company is surely doomed. But the realities of innovation and creativity are much more complicated than simply a willingness to be more creative.

To help better understand where creativity comes from and more importantly if it can be taught, I recently had the opportunity to attend Stanford University " Design Thinking Boot Camp: From Insights to Innovation." The program is held at The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, affectionately called "the d.school." It's a 3 day immersive program tailored to executives, providing the opportunity to learn the concept of "design thinking" - a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation that can be applied to product, service, and business design.

Before I get into the program itself, first a little bit of history. Over the last 40 years or so, a number of strategies have been devised to help foster what can be best described as a formalized methodology for applying a systematic form of creativity/innovation with in business. Among the more popular are a group of cognitive processes for creativity that arose from Herbert A. Simon's 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial. He was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century, among his many claims to fame was his work as a founding father of several of today's important scientific domains, including artificial intelligence, information processing, attention economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery. One area of particular interest in terms of creativity and innovation is his research into decision-making and problem solving where he devised three stages in rational decision-making; Intelligence, Design, Choice (IDC).

Expanding on Herbert A. Simon's work, in 1973 Robert McKim wrote the book Experiences in Visual Thinking. The book focused on the ways in which perceptual thinking skills can be observed, utilized and improved, and how powerful these skills are in their "capacity to change your world of ideas and things."

Finally in the 1980's Stanford's Rolf Faste expanded on McKim's work defining and popularizing the concept of "Design Thinking" as a method of creative action. In the simplest terms, Design Thinking is "a formal method for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues, with the intent of an improved future result." It's a methodology for actualizing your concepts and ideas.

Design Thinking attempts to inspire the essential element of creativity, the ability to take an abstract idea and create something with it. It's based upon the fundamental belief that an unexecuted idea, one that is never realized, is a worthless proposition and that doing is equally as valuable as thinking.

A big part of the Design Thinking concept involves empathy for those you are designing for. It's often manifested through a series of activities, which attempt to create an experience of what or how your idea will ultimately be consumed. During the d.school bootcamp, this was done through a series of role-playing exercises where we played out different characters developed through joint brainstorming sessions. These role-playing games allowed for a rapid ideation (idea generation) with the ability to visualize and adapt the results in near real-time.

The interesting part of Design Thinking is like the creativity it attempts to foster, the very concept itself is continually evolving. One example of a design thinking process could have several stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Within these steps, problems can be framed, the right questions can be asked, more ideas can be created, and the best answers can be chosen. The steps aren't linear; they can occur simultaneously and can be repeated. The d.school offers a free a 90-minute video-led cruise through their methodology for anyone interested.

I admit I did enter this program a bit skeptical. Since joining Citrix last year, I've heard a lot of the Design Thinking term. But can't say I fully understood it until now. Design Thinking is a mantra that's been championed by our senior vice president of customer experience, Catherine Courage. Under her encouragement, (pun intended) I'm told more than 7500 Citrix employees have gone through our internal Design Thinking courses.

Citrix isn't alone in applying this way of thinking for inspiring innovation. The Designing Thinking bootcamp included executives (both to learn and teach) from a selection of the largest global corporations. Among the more interesting instructors was Evelyn Huang, Director of Design Thinking and Strategy at Capital One Labs. A Stanford / d.school Alum, Huang's mission at Capital One is to "reimagining the way 60 million people interact with their money." She's part of a growing trend within companies to reimagine what creativity is and how it can be fostered.

"We believe progress starts with a deep understanding of our customers. That's why Design Thinking is our go-to method for building the products and experiences that our customers need. This human-centered methodology, coupled with a "fail fast" attitude, allows us to quickly identify, build, and test our way to success. We spend less time planning, more time doing, and, above all else, challenge ourselves to see the world through the eyes of our customers every step of the way," says Huang.

The Design Thinking bootcamp is led by Perry Klebahn, who's claim to fame include being the inventor of the modern snowshoe at Atlas Snowshoes and former CEO at Timbuk2, the original messenger bag company. The consensus of Klebahn and the d.school team is that without implementing this systematic approach to innovation your business faces the certain risk of being disrupted or potentially worse.

The risk associated with a lack of innovation within some businesses has been deemed to be so dangerous, that recently it has led to the creation of a new executive role of "Chief Innovation Officer." The role is an attempt to create a leader responsible for managing the process of innovation in an organization.

So what do I think about the idea of Design Thinking now? Let's just say I have a lot more ideas and a pretty good idea of how I'm going to go about doing them.

Check out the course at http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exed/dtbc/

(Also, shout out to my d.school team Peter, Erica, Kyle, Vikas and Russell.)
Find Reuven on Twitter @rUv | Linkedin | Google+ | Facebook | Podcast

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Design Thinking: A Unified Framework For Innovation

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Over the years the question of what makes some companies, and the people within, more or less creative than others has been studied ad nauseam. The idea of innovation within business has long been thrown around, it's a kind of catchall term used for everything a company must do continue [...]

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Idea in Brief

The Change

Increasingly, corporations and professional services firms are working to create design-centric cultures.

The Reason

Many products, services, and processes are now technologically complex. People are not hardwired to deal well with high levels of complexity. They need help.

The Idea

People need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be intuitive and pleasurable. Empathy, experimentation, design smarts, and other qualities help create those kinds of interactions. Those qualities need to spread from the product design function to the whole organization.

There's a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn't about aesthetics. It's about applying the principles of design to the way people work.

This new approach is in large part a response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern business. That complexity takes many forms. Sometimes software is at the center of a product and needs to be integrated with hardware (itself a complex task) and made intuitive and simple from the user's point of view (another difficult challenge). Sometimes the problem being tackled is itself multi-faceted: Think about how much tougher it is to reinvent a health care delivery system than to design a shoe. And sometimes the business environment is so volatile that a company must experiment with multiple paths in order to survive.

I could list a dozen other types of complexity that businesses grapple with every day. But here's what they all have in common: People need help making sense of them. Specifically, people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.

A set of principles collectively known as design thinking -empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure chief among them-is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of interactions and developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture.

What Is a Design-Centric Culture?

If you were around during the late-1990s dot-com craze, you may think of designers as 20-somethings shooting Nerf darts across an office that looks more like a bar. Because design has historically been equated with aesthetics and craft, designers have been celebrated as artistic savants. But a design-centric culture transcends design as a role, imparting a set of principles to all people who help bring ideas to life. Let's consider those principles.

Focus on users' experiences, especially their emotional ones.

To build empathy with users, a design-centric organization empowers employees to observe behavior and draw conclusions about what people want and need. Those conclusions are tremendously hard to express in quantitative language. Instead, organizations that "get" design use emotional language (words that concern desires, aspirations, engagement, and experience) to describe products and users. Team members discuss the emotional resonance of a value proposition as much as they discuss utility and product requirements.

A traditional value proposition is a promise of utility: If you buy a Lexus, the automaker promises that you will receive safe and comfortable transportation in a well-designed high-performance vehicle. An emotional value proposition is a promise of feeling: If you buy a Lexus, the automaker promises that you will feel pampered, luxurious, and affluent. In design-centric organizations, emotionally charged language isn't denigrated as thin, silly, or biased. Strategic conversations in those companies frequently address how a business decision or a market trajectory will positively influence users' experiences and often acknowledge only implicitly that well-designed offerings contribute to financial success.

The focus on great experiences isn't limited to product designers, marketers, and strategists-it infuses every customer-facing function. Take finance. Typically, its only contact with users is through invoices and payment systems, which are designed for internal business optimization or predetermined "customer requirements." But those systems are touch points that shape a customer's impression of the company. In a culture focused on customer experience, financial touch points are designed around users' needs rather than internal operational efficiencies.

Create models to examine complex problems.

Design thinking, first used to make physical objects, is increasingly being applied to complex, intangible issues, such as how a customer experiences a service. Regardless of the context, design thinkers tend to use physical models, also known as design artifacts, to explore, define, and communicate. Those models-primarily diagrams and sketches-supplement and in some cases replace the spreadsheets, specifications, and other documents that have come to define the traditional organizational environment. They add a fluid dimension to the exploration of complexity, allowing for nonlinear thought when tackling nonlinear problems.

For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' Center for Innovation has used a design artifact called a customer journey map to understand veterans' emotional highs and lows in their interactions with the VA. "This form of artifact helped us better tell a story to various stakeholders," says Melissa Chapman, a designer who worked at the Center for Innovation. Even more important, she adds, it "helped us develop a strategic way to think about changing the entire organization and to communicate that emergent strategy." The customer journey map and other design models are tools for understanding. They present alternative ways of looking at a problem.

Use prototypes to explore potential solutions.

In design-centric organizations, you'll typically see prototypes of new ideas, new products, and new services scattered throughout offices and meeting rooms. Whereas diagrams such as customer journey maps explore the problem space, prototypes explore the solution space. They may be digital, physical, or diagrammatic, but in all cases they are a way to communicate ideas. The habit of publicly displaying rough prototypes hints at an open-minded culture, one that values exploration and experimentation over rule following. The MIT Media Lab formalizes this in its motto, "Demo or die," which recognizes that only the act of prototyping can transform an idea into something truly valuable-on their own, ideas are a dime a dozen. Design-centric companies aren't shy about tinkering with ideas in a public forum and tend to iterate quickly on prototypes-an activity that the innovation expert Michael Schrage refers to as "serious play." In his book of that title, he writes that innovation is "more social than personal." He adds, "Prototyping is probably the single most pragmatic behavior the innovative firm can practice."

Tolerate failure.

A design culture is nurturing. It doesn't encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it's rare to get things right the first time. Apple is celebrated for its successes, but a little digging uncovers the Newton tablet, the Pippin gaming system, and the Copland operating system-products that didn't fare so well. (Pippin and Copland were discontinued after only two years.) The company leverages failure as learning, viewing it as part of the cost of innovation.

Greg Petroff, the chief experience officer at GE Software, explains how the iterative process works at GE: "GE is moving away from a model of exhaustive product requirements. Teams learn what to do in the process of doing it, iterating, and pivoting." Employees in every aspect of the business must realize that they can take social risks-putting forth half-baked ideas, for instance-without losing face or experiencing punitive repercussions.

Exhibit thoughtful restraint.

Many products built on an emotional value proposition are simpler than competitors' offerings. This restraint grows out of deliberate decisions about what the product should do and, just as important, what it should not do. By removing features, a company offers customers a clear, simple experience. The thermostat Nest-inside, a complex piece of technology-provides fewer outward-facing functions than other thermostats, thus delivering an emotional experience that reflects the design culture of the company. As CEO Tony Fadell said in an interview published in Inc., "At the end of the day you have to espouse a feeling-in your advertisements, in your products. And that feeling comes from your gut."

Square's mobile app Cash lets you do one thing: send money to a friend. "I think I'm just an editor, and I think every CEO is an editor," wrote Jack Dorsey, Square's CEO. "We have all these inputs, we have all these places that we could go...but we need to present one cohesive story to the world." In organizations like Square, you'll find product leaders saying no much more than they say yes. Rather than chase the market with follow-on features, they lead the market with a constrained focus.

What Types of Companies Are Making This Change?

As industry giants such as IBM and GE realize that software is a fundamental part of their businesses, they are also recognizing the extraordinary levels of complexity they must manage. Design thinking is an essential tool for simplifying and humanizing. It can't be extra; it needs to be a core competence.

"There's no longer any real distinction between business strategy and the design of the user experience," said Bridget van Kralingen, the senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, in a statement to the press. In November 2013 IBM opened a design studio in Austin, Texas-part of the company's $100 million investment in building a massive design organization. As Phil Gilbert, the general manager of the effort, explained in a press release, "Quite simply, our goal-on a scale unmatched in the industry-is to modernize enterprise software for today's user, who demands great design everywhere, at home and at work." The company intends to hire 1,000 designers.

When I was at the company frog design, GE hired us to help formalize and disseminate language, tools, and success metrics to support its emergent design practice. Dave Cronin, GE's executive design director for industrial internet applications, describes how the company came to realize that it was not just in the business of making physical products but had become one of the largest software providers in the world. The complexity of this software was overwhelming, so his team turned to design. "Our mandate was to create products, but also to enable nimble innovation," Cronin says. "That's a pretty tall order-we were asked to perform design at scale and along the way create cultural change."

IBM and GE are hardly alone. Every established company that has moved from products to services, from hardware to software, or from physical to digital products needs to focus anew on user experience. Every established company that intends to globalize its business must invent processes that can adjust to different cultural contexts. And every established company that chooses to compete on innovation rather than efficiency must be able to define problems artfully and experiment its way to solutions. (For more on the last shift, see " How Samsung Became a Design Powerhouse " in this issue.)

The pursuit of design isn't limited to large brand-name corporations; the big strategy-consulting firms are also gearing up for this new world, often by acquiring leading providers of design services. In the past few years, Deloitte acquired Doblin, Accenture acquired Fjord, and McKinsey acquired Lunar. Olof Schybergson, the founder of Fjord, views design thinking's empathetic stance as fundamental to business success. As he told an interviewer, "Going direct to consumers is a big disruptor....There are new opportunities to gather data and insights about consumer behavior, likes, dislikes....Those who have data and an appetite for innovation will prevail." These acquisitions suggest that design is becoming table stakes for high-value corporate consulting-an expected part of a portfolio of business services.

What Are the Challenges?

Several years ago, I consulted for a large entertainment company that had tucked design away in a select group of "creatives." The company was excited about introducing technology into its theme parks and recognized that a successful visitor experience would hinge on good design. And so it became apparent that the entire organization needed to embrace design as a core competence. This shift is never an easy one. Like many organizations with entrenched cultures that have been successful for many years, the company faced several hurdles.

Accepting more ambiguity.

The entertainment company operates globally, so it values repeatable, predictable operational efficiency in support of quarterly profit reporting. Because the introduction of technology into the parks represented a massive capital expenditure, there was pressure for a guarantee of a healthy return. Design, however, doesn't conform easily to estimates. It's difficult if not impossible to understand how much value will be delivered through a better experience or to calculate the return on an investment in creativity.

Embracing risk.

Transformative innovation is inherently risky. It involves inferences and leaps of faith; if something hasn't been done before, there's no way to guarantee its outcome. The philosopher Charles Peirce said that insights come to us "like a flash"-in an epiphany-making them difficult to rationalize or defend. Leaders need to create a culture that allows people to take chances and move forward without a complete, logical understanding of a problem. Our partners at the entertainment company were empowered to hire a design consultancy, and the organization recognized that the undertaking was no sure thing.

Resetting expectations.

As corporate leaders become aware of the power of design, many view design thinking as a solution to all their woes. Designers, enjoying their new level of strategic influence, often reinforce that impression. When I worked with the entertainment company, I was part of that problem, primarily because my livelihood depended on selling design consulting. But design doesn't solve all problems. It helps people and organizations cut through complexity. It's great for innovation. It works extremely well for imagining the future. But it's not the right set of tools for optimizing, streamlining, or otherwise operating a stable business. Additionally, even if expectations are set appropriately, they must be aligned around a realistic timeline-culture changes slowly in large organizations.

An organizational focus on design offers unique opportunities for humanizing technology and for developing emotionally resonant products and services. Adopting this perspective isn't easy. But doing so helps create a workplace where people want to be, one that responds quickly to changing business dynamics and empowers individual contributors. And because design is empathetic, it implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.

A version of this article appeared in the September 2015 issue (pp.66-71) of Harvard Business Review.

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In large organizations, design is moving closer to the center of the enterprise. This shift isn't about aesthetics and product development, however. It's about imparting the principles of design-collectively known as design thinking-throughout the organization. The approach is in large part a response to the complexity of many products, services, and processes.

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Have you found yourself asking, "what is design?" Sometimes the best way to understand design is to just dive in and experience it! We've pulled together this collection to help you get started on your design journey. Scroll down to see our NEW introductory online workshop, a library of FAQs about how design works, and some goto tools.

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Have you found yourself asking, "what is design?" Sometimes the best way to understand design is to just dive in and experience it! We've pulled together this collection to help you get started on your design journey. Scroll down to see our NEW introductory online workshop, a library of FAQs about how design works, and some goto tools.

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Project Based Learning for all. We build the capacity of teachers and school leaders to design and facilitate quality Project Based Learning.

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By Linda Naiman

Design-led companies such as Apple, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble and SAP have outperformed the S&P 500 by an extraordinary 211%. This article highlights the distinctions between design and design thinking and how the latter, if executed properly and strategically, can impact business outcomes and result in real competitive advantages.

When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Design-led companies such as Apple, Pepsi, IBM, Nike, Procter & Gamble, and SAP have outperformed the S&P 500 over a 10-year period by an extraordinary 211% according to the 2015 Design Value Index created by the Design Management Institute and Motiv Strategies.

Great design has that "wow" factor that makes products more desirable and services more appealing to users.
Designing is more than creating products and services; it can be applied to systems, procedures, protocols, and customer experiences.
Design is transforming the way leading companies create value. The focus of innovation has shifted from being engineering-driven to design-driven, from product-centric to customer-centric, and from marketing-focused to user-experience-focused. For an increasing number of CEOs, design thinking is at the core of effective strategy development and organisational change.

Roger Martin, former Dean of Rotman School and author of The Design of Business, asserts, "Design-thinking firms stand apart in their willingness to engage in the task of continuously redesigning their business... to create advances in both innovation and efficiency - the combination that produces the most powerful competitive edge."

You can design the way you lead, manage, create and innovate. Moura Quayle, the author of Designed Leadership, says, "Great leaders aspire to manage 'by design', with a sense of purpose and foresight. Lessons learned from the world of design when applied to management, can turn leaders into collaborative, creative, deliberate, and accountable visionaries."

Despite what critics say, design thinking is not a fad (although if not managed well, it can result in failure). Consulting firms such as McKinsey, Accenture, PwC, and Deloitte have acquired design consultancies: evidence of design's increasing influence on business. Jeanne M. Liedtka, Strategy Professor at Darden School UVA and design thinking educator, views design thinking as a "social technology which 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".

Distinctions Between Design and Design Thinking

Steve Jobs famously said, "Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, the design company that popularised the term design thinking, says "Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity."

Thinking like a designer brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.

Design thinking draws on logic, imagination, intuition and systemic reasoning to explore the possibilities of what could be and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user (the customer).
A design mindset is not problem-focused, it's solution-focused and action-oriented. It involves both analysis and imagination.
Design thinking is linked to creating an improved future and seeks to build ideas up - unlike critical thinking, which breaks them down. Problem-solving is making something go away. Creating is bringing something into being. Design thinking informs human-centred innovation and begins with developing an understanding of customers' or users' unmet or unarticulated needs. The purpose of design, ultimately, in my view, is to improve the quality of life for people and the planet.

What is the driving force behind design thinking?

The biggest driving force is the accelerated rate of change in business and society caused by advances in technology. As companies become more software-driven, and the rate of change increases, so does complexity.

Most companies are optimised to execute and solve a stated problem. Creativity is about finding the problem worth solving. An absence of a scalable creative framework encourages incremental innovation in lieu of disruptive innovation. As companies strive for disruptive innovation, they must find ways to inject and scale creativity across their organisations.

Digital transformation is about the accelerated disruption of business models and requires a mind-set shift from problem solving to problem finding. CEOs need to be visionary leaders: from establishing an internal culture that encourages ideation, creation, and iteration, to building strategic partnerships to create new value propositions. - Sam Yen, Chief Design Officer and Dr. Chakib Bouhdary, Digital Transformation Officer, at SAP

Design thinking is our best tool for sense-making, meaning making, simplifying processes, and improving customer experiences. Additionally, design thinking minimises risk, reduces costs, improves speed, and energises employees. Design thinking provides leaders with a framework for addressing complex human-centred challenges and making the best possible decisions concerning:

* Redefining value* Re-inventing business models* Shifting markets and behaviours* Organisational culture change* Complex societal challenges such as health, education, food, water and climate change

* Problems affecting diverse stakeholders and multiple systems

Design thinking succeeds when it finds ideal solutions based on the real needs of real people. In a recent Harvard Business Review article on the evolution of design thinking, Jon Kolko noted,
People need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable. When done well, human-centred design enhances the user experience at every touch point and fuels the creation of products and services that deeply resonate with customers.Design is empathic, and thus implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.
When done well, human-centred design enhances the user experience at every touch point and fuels the creation of products and services that deeply resonate with customers.

Design thinking informs human-centred innovation. It begins with developing an understanding of customers' or users' unmet or unarticulated needs. "The most secure source of new ideas that have true competitive advantage, and hence, higher margins, is customers' unarticulated needs," says Jeanne Liedtka (Batten Briefings, 2014), "Customer intimacy - a deep knowledge of customers and their problems - helps to uncover those needs."

Design thinking minimises the uncertainty and risk of innovation by engaging customers or users through a series of prototypes to learn, test, and refine concepts. Design thinkers rely on customer insights gained from real-world experiments, not just historical data or market research. McKinsey reports the best results come from constantly blending user research -quantitative (such as conjoint analysis) and qualitative (such as ethnographic interviews) with market-analytics.

Creativity at Work Design Innovation Protocol
This framework integrates classic creative problem-solving (CPS)² with art and design methodologies. Design-Thinking Training, Workshops & Coaching
A Framework for Design Thinking

When you are facing uncertainty, it's essential to have a structured thinking process to guide your journey. Design thinking offers a structured framework for understanding complexity and pursuing innovation, which I see as being part scientific inquiry and part art. Jeanne Liedtka notes that a new business concept derived from observing customers is actually a hypothesis - a well-informed guess about what customers desire and what they will value. Rapid prototyping provides the means to place small bets on a hypothesis and test it out before investing in expensive resources.

Design thinking is also like jazz. The structure offers a basic melody from which you can improvise, but like any art-form, you need to master the basics first. Kaaren Hanson, head of Design Strategy at Intuit explains, "Anytime you're trying to change people's behaviour, you need to start them off with a lot of structure so they don't have to think. A lot of what we do is habit, and it's hard to change those habits. So, by having very clear guard rails, we help people to change their habits. And then once they've done it 20 or 30 times, then they can start to play jazz as opposed to learning how to play scales."

The framework I designed for Creativity at Work (see the diagram above) integrates design thinking principles with classic creative problem-solving (Osborne-Parnes, 1953). Creativity is central to design, so I include artistic processes to find aesthetic ways of knowing to stimulate the imagination and assist in sense-making and meaning-making.

The design thinking is an iterative non-linear cycle which involves developing a deep understanding of customers' or users' unmet needs within the context of a particular situation, making sense of data and discovering insights, questioning assumptions, exploring different perspectives, reframing problems into opportunities, generating creative ideas, critiquing and choosing ideas, testing through prototyping and experimentation, refining solutions, and finally implementing your innovation.

Implementing design thinking

Design Thinking is a journey of learning and discovery. It's also a way of being. If you are strategising, you are designing.

Start at the beginning. Learn how to be a design thinker/doer from a seasoned practitioner.Look for ways to add quality/value to your offerings.

Build your creative confidence by conducting low-risk experiments, such as designing a meeting with your team. Ask questions which you don't have answers for.

Learn how to coach and facilitate for creativity, co-creation and collaboration. This is crucial for creating a safe space for conceptual risk-taking.

Stay focused on the users' experience.

Help teams unlock provocative insights, reframe existing problems, and generate ideas in response to your research.

Encourage multiple perspectives. Reframe constraints into opportunities and check assumptions.

Stanford's Design Thinking Model

The five practices that enable innovation include: (1) the development of a deep empathic understanding of user needs and context; (2) the formation of heterogeneous teams; (3) dialogue-based conversations; (4) the generation of multiple solutions winnowed through experimentation; and (5) the use of a structured and facilitated process.

Scaling Design Thinking

SAP, P&G, IBM, and Cisco are integrating design and design thinking throughout the organisation, by creating their own frameworks, educating employees at all levels, hiring professional designers and design researchers, as well as acquiring design companies in order to operate at scale.

Cisco was the first company to launch non-tech HR hackathon in 2016. They used design thinking to "break" and then re-imagine HR solutions for 71,000 global Cisco employees. The "Breakathon" gave birth to 105 new HR solutions covering talent acquisition, new hire on-boarding, learning and development, team development, and leadership.

Charlie Hill, Chief Technology Officer of IBM Design, said "Our teams had a very engineering-centric culture, but in 2012, everything changed. We wanted to shift that culture towards a focus on users' outcomes." They made the pivot from standalone, siloed business units to a cloud-first and AI strategy. Karel Vredenburg, head of IBM Design said this enormous transformation wouldn't have been possible without embedding design thinking into the company culture - and innovating on the methodology to make it uniquely their own.

When Indra Nooyi was the Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo (2006-2018), she decided the company needed to rethink its innovation process and design experience. "It's much more than packaging," Nooyi told the Harvard Business Review. In 2012, she hired Mauro Porcini as Pepsi's first-ever Chief Design Officer, placing design thinking at the core of business strategy and leadership. "Now, our teams are pushing design through the entire system, from product creation to packaging and labelling, to how a product looks on the shelf, to how consumers interact with it."

During his tenure as CEO of Steelcase, Jim Haskett pioneered the team-oriented, open workspaces (with the help of anthropologists, sociologists and tech) and transformed the furniture company into a leader of the revolution in the way we work. Now, he is tasked with transforming General Motors by design, in his new role as CEO.

SAP describes its design thinking journey as one that develops from a set of tools, to a methodology, to a mind-set, and until finally becomes a culture.

SAP has identified four critical success factors when implementing design thinking:

1. Leadership: Link design thinking initiatives to your strategic goals.Provide direction, resources, and commitment.

2. People: Enable champions to lead the change through successful lighthouse projects. Build up an internal design thinking community where best practices are shared.

3. Process: Use the generic design thinking framework, but evolve the method and tools so they support your company's objectives.

4. Environment: Develop and create collaborative workspaces for your workforce. Use to co-innovate with your customers and partners.

Design thinking works because it is a collaborative co-creative process grounded in engagement, dialogue, and learning. When you involve customers and/or stakeholders in the process of defining the problem and in developing solutions, you have a much better chance of gaining commitment for change, and getting buy-in for your innovation.

Discover how the interplay of art, design, and technology can help you solve problems and inspire creative solutions desired by your customers.
This article was updated June 10, 2019, and published in The European Business Review May - June 2019
References

1. The Design Management Institute DMI Value Index 2015, retrieved from https://www.dmi.org/page/2015DVIandOTW2. Martin, R. (2009) 3. Quayle, M. (2017) 4. Liedtka, J. (2018, Sept-Oct) Why Design Thinking Works, 5. Walker, R. (2003, Nov 30) The Guts of a New Machine. 6. Brown. T. (2008) Design Thinking Thoughts: Definitions of Design Thinking retrieved from https://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=497. SAP (2016) Design Thinking and Digital Transformation. Retrieved from https://www.sap.com/documents/2016/12/4086a5d3-9d7c-00 10-82c7-eda71af511fa.html8. Kolko, J. (2015, Sep) The Evolution of Design Thinking. 9. Liedtka, J.(2014) Batten Briefing: Understanding the Power of Design Thinking. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/batteninstitute/docs/designthinking -121814-issuu10. Liedtka, J. et al (2013) 11. Osborn, A. (1953/2001) 12. Liedtka, J. (2017) Evaluating the Impact of Design Thinking in Action. Vol. 2017. No. 1. Academy of Management13. Meister, J. Cisco (2016, Mar 10) HR Breakathon: Reimagining The Employee Experience. Forbes. Retrieved https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2016/03/10/the-cisco-hr-breakathon/# 6866c535f5ee14. Stinson, L. (2016, Jan 21) IBM's Got a Plan to Bring Design Thinking to Big Business. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2016/01/ibms-got-a-plan-to-bring-design-thinking-to-big -business/15. Balmaekers, H.(2017, Oct 6) How Innovating On Design Thinking Itself Drives IBM's Transformation Journey. Techvibes. Retrieved https://techvibes.com/2017/10/06/design-thinking-at-ibm16. Useem, J. (2019, March) Why Ford Hired a Furniture Maker as CEO. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/ford-ceo-jim-hackett-ux-design-thinking/580438/* Cross, N. (2007) * Nelson, H.G. and Stolterman, E. (2012) * Jaw-Madson, K. (2018)
The Design of Business, Harvard Business School Press. Designed Leadership. Columbia University Press Harvard Business Review
New York Times Retrieved http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html

Harvard Business Review

Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works. Columbia University Press Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem Solving. Creative Education Foundation Press.

Designerly Ways of Knowing. Springer.The Design Way, Second Edition Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. MIT Press. Culture Your Culture: Innovating Experiences @Work. Emerald Publishing Limited

See also: How Design Thinking Adds Value to Inno vation
(Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases on blog posts)

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Design Thinking as a Strategy for Innovation | Creativity at Work

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By Linda Naiman Design-led companies such as Apple, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble and SAP have outperformed the S&P 500 by an extraordinary 211%. This article highlights the distinctions between design and design thinking and how the latter, if executed properly and strategically, can impact business outcomes and result in real competitive advantages.

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Design thinking is an approach to creative problem solving. It is a human-centered approach to innovation that will transform the way you develop products, services, and organizations.

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Great platform to share innovative ideas.

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Teaching and planning can get pretty isolating. Join our Collaborations and develop best-in-class solutions with fellow teachers across the country in our 14-week online challenges.

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Design thinking is a methodology which provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It's extremely useful when used to tackle complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown-because it serves to understand the human needs involved, reframe the problem in human-centric ways, create numerous ideas in brainstorming sessions and adopt a hands-on approach to prototyping and testing. Learning about the five stages of design thinking will empower you and allow you to apply the methodology to your work and solve complex problems that occur in our companies, our countries, and across the world.
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that can have anywhere from three to seven phases, depending on whom you talk to. We focus on the five-stage design thinking model proposed by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school) because they are world-renowned for the way they teach and apply design thinking.

What are the 5 Stages of the Design Thinking Process

The five stages of design thinking, according to the d.school, are:

Let's dive into each stage of the design thinking process.

Stage 1: Empathize-Research Your Users' Needs

Empathize: the first phase of design thinking, where you gain real insight into users and their needs.

The first stage of the design thinking process focuses on user-centric research. You want to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. Consult experts to find out more about the area of concern and conduct observations to engage and empathize with your users. You may also want to immerse yourself in your users' physical environment to gain a deeper, personal understanding of the issues involved-as well as their experiences and motivations. Empathy is crucial to problem solving and a human-centered design process as it allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world and gain real insight into users and their needs.

Depending on time constraints, you will gather a substantial amount of information to use during the next stage. The main aim of the Empathize stage is to develop the best possible understanding of your users, their needs and the problems that underlie the development of the product or service you want to create.

Stage 2: Define-State Your Users' Needs and Problems

Define: the second phase of design thinking, where you define the problem statement in a human-centered manner.

In the Define stage, you will organize the information you have gathered during the Empathize stage. You'll analyze your observations to define the core problems you and your team have identified up to this point. Defining the problem and problem statement must be done in a human-centered manner.

For example, you should not define the problem as your own wish or need of the company: "We need to increase our food-product market share among young teenage girls by 5%."

You should pitch the problem statement from your perception of the users' needs: "Teenage girls need to eat nutritious food in order to thrive, be healthy and grow."

The Define stage will help the design team collect great ideas to establish features, functions and other elements to solve the problem at hand-or, at the very least, allow real users to resolve issues themselves with minimal difficulty. In this stage, you will start to progress to the third stage, the ideation phase, where you ask questions to help you look for solutions: " How might we encourage teenage girls to perform an action that benefits them and also involves your company's food-related product or service?" for instance.

Stage 3: Ideate-Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas

Ideate: the third phase of design thinking, where you identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you've created.

During the third stage of the design thinking process, designers are ready to generate ideas. You've grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathize stage, and you've analyzed your observations in the Define stage to create a user centric problem statement. With this solid background, you and your team members can start to look at the problem from different perspectives and ideate innovative solutions to your problem statement.

There are hundreds of ideation techniques you can use-such as Brainstorm, Brainwrite, Worst Possible Idea and SCAMPER. Brainstorm and Worst Possible Idea techniques are typically used at the start of the ideation stage to stimulate free thinking and expand the problem space. This allows you to generate as many ideas as possible at the start of ideation. You should pick other ideation techniques towards the end of this stage to help you investigate and test your ideas, and choose the best ones to move forward with-either because they seem to solve the problem or provide the elements required to circumvent it.

Stage 4: Prototype-Start to Create Solutions

Prototype: the fourth phase of design thinking, where you identify the best possible solution.

The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the key solutions generated in the ideation phase. These prototypes can be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments or on a small group of people outside the design team.

This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. The solutions are implemented within the prototypes and, one by one, they are investigated and then accepted, improved or rejected based on the users' experiences.

By the end of the Prototype stage, the design team will have a better idea of the product's limitations and the problems it faces. They'll also have a clearer view of how real users would behave, think and feel when they interact with the end product.

Stage 5: Test-Try Your Solutions Out

Test: the fifth and final phase of the design thinking process, where you test solutions to derive a deep understanding of the product and its users.

Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified in the Prototype stage. This is the final stage of the five-stage model; however, in an iterative process such as design thinking, the results generated are often used to redefine one or more further problems. This increased level of understanding may help you investigate the conditions of use and how people think, behave and feel towards the product, and even lead you to loop back to a previous stage in the design thinking process. You can then proceed with further iterations and make alterations and refinements to rule out alternative solutions. The ultimate goal is to get as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.

Did You Know Design Thinking is a Non-Linear Process?

We've outlined a direct and linear design thinking process here, in which one stage seemingly leads to the next with a logical conclusion at user testing. However, in practice, the process is carried out in a more flexible and non-linear fashion. For example, different groups within the design team may conduct more than one stage concurrently, or designers may collect information and prototype throughout each stage of the project to bring their ideas to life and visualize the problem solutions as they go. What's more, results from the Test stage may reveal new insights about users which lead to another brainstorming session (Ideate) or the development of new prototypes (Prototype).

It is important to note the five stages of design thinking are not always sequential. They do not have to follow a specific order, and they can often occur in parallel or be repeated iteratively. The stages should be understood as different modes which contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps.

The design thinking process should not be seen as a concrete and inflexible approach to design; the component stages identified should serve as a guide to the activities you carry out. The stages might be switched, conducted concurrently or repeated several times to gain the most informative insights about your users, expand the solution space and hone in on innovative solutions.

This is one of the main benefits of the five-stage model. Knowledge acquired in the latter stages of the process can inform repeats of earlier stages. Information is continually used to inform the understanding of the problem and solution spaces, and to redefine the problem itself. This creates a perpetual loop, in which the designers continue to gain new insights, develop new ways to view the product (or service) and its possible uses and develop a far more profound understanding of their real users and the problems they face.

The Take Away

Design thinking is an iterative, non-linear process which focuses on a collaboration between designers and users. It brings innovative solutions to life based on how real users think, feel and behave.

This human-centered design process consists of five core stages Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

It's important to note that these stages are a guide. The iterative, non-linear nature of design thinking means you and your design team can carry these stages out simultaneously, repeat them and even circle back to previous stages at any point in the design thinking process.

References & Where to Learn More

Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd Edition), 1996.

d.school, An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE, 2010.

Gerd Waloszek, Introduction to Design Thinking, 2012.

Images

Hero Image: © Daniel Skrok and the Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

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The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

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The Design Thinking process is a human-centered, iterative methodology that designers use to solve problems. It has 5 steps-Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

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Educators across the nation have been using Design Thinking to solve challenges in their work. Projects range in scope and scale including design solutions- from curriculum, to space, to processes and to systems- addressing problems in the classroom and across entire districts.

How might my classroom be redesigned to better meet my students' needs?

Michael Schurr, a 2nd grade teacher in New York, realized that he never asked his students what would make them comfortable in the classroom. He decided to talk directly with his students to figure out the best design for their environment.

Based on his students' input, he was able to redesign his classroom to better address the needs and desires of his students. He lowered the bulletin boards so that his students could actually see the content he'd spent hours assembling, and created a more comfortable semi-private space for the students to study by rethinking the student cubby space. His students are more engaged, and move more fluidly in the classroom space. Now Michael consistently engages his students in helping him more effectively shape their learning experience.

Michael is using design to re-imagine his classroom through the lens of his students' needs.

How might we create a 21st century learning experience at our school?

The faculty at Ormondale Elementary School in California wondered if they were preparing their students well for the future. They decided it was time to corroboratively design an approach to teaching and learning that they felt was updated and relevant for the 21st century.

Collectively, they embarked on a design journey and came to an approach they call "Investigative Learning", which addresses students not as receivers of information, but as shapers of knowledge. The faculty continues to evolve and share this approach with new teachers through the creation of a Manual of Investigative Learning to keep track of their philosophy and methods. They have gained support from their school board, and have become recognized as a California Distinguished School.
The faculty at Ormondale Elementary School uses design to address the needs of their evolving student body.

How might we redesign our approach to curriculum development and delivery to center around the needs and desires of our teachers and students?

With a movement toward student-centered and personalized instruction, the Howard County Public School System in Maryland is using Design Thinking to tackle next generation curriculum redesign incorporating 21st Century skills. Currently, there is a disconnect between the existing paper-based curriculum and the interactive digital resources that are now available anytime, anywhere for teachers and students.

Tapping into teacher, parent, and student behaviors in and outside of school, the design team collected inspiration around the ways that people engage with information and interact with curricular materials. Understanding the desires of teachers, students, parents, and administrators has helped the team rethink curriculum delivery as well as develop resources to replace, augment, and enhance current curriculum documents.
Howard County is using design to re-conceptualize curriculum creation and delivery to meet the needs of all learners.

How might we redesign our high school to elevate student engagement and
academic outcomes?

Consistent low student achievement results at Castle High School in Hawaii demonstrated the need for a redesign and restructure of the school. Design Thinking Hawaii, a non-profit organization that engages volunteers to apply Design Thinking to big challenges, partnered with the Hawaii Department of Education to reimagine the Castle High experience.

Through a series of mini-charettes, Design Thinking Hawaii has collected the needs and interests of learners, teachers, and families and engaged the larger community to imagine new solutions that could help the school be more effective. The adopted plan captured the community's priorities in new content and structures, and Complex Area Superintendent Lea Albert is enabling the school and community to prototype and iterate core curriculum, character education, and support services. This is the first public-school model in Hawaii to co-design its offerings with community, targeting systemic educational problems.
Design Thinking Hawaii is using design to provide the state with input that will shape the redesign of Castle High and other schools in the community.

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What kind of challenges can be addressed using Design Thinking? Educators across the nation have been using Design Thinking to solve challenges in their work. Projects range in scope and scale including design solutions- from curriculum, to space, to processes and to systems- addressing p