In this post, IBM’s Director of Global Academic Programs and Head of IBM Studios Canada, Karl Vredenburg, defends Design Thinking (DT), claiming that those who find it lacking are doing so because they aren’t doing it properly. He contends that:
“Many of these organizations simply get people into a cool looking space with whiteboard walls, write things with sharpies on stickies, and put them on the whiteboard walls. They think by simply doing this, they're been creative, innovative, and modern. I say that they're simply performing what I call innovation theater. They're using what they're calling design thinking but its mostly all show and doesn't lead to substantive outcomes.” (Vredenburg 2018)
To encourage organizations to use Design Thinking in a more meaningful and significant way, Vredenburg outlines “seven essential habits” to go along with the use of IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking. These seven habits are as follows:
1. Empathize with users and carry out research with them.
2. Get the right skills and drive multidisciplinary collaboration.
3. Use design thinking but for more than workshopping.
4. Create Minimal Delightful Experiences.
5. You don’t have to fail fast and often.
6. Embrace technology but focus on the user experience.
7. It’s a team sport, deploy it pervasively within and intentional organization-wide system. (Vredenburg 2018)
Vredenburg concludes that while stickies and sharpies can be effective tools for DT, they are useless without the right habits and the right framework.
For more detail on Karl Vredenburg’s seven essential habits of DT, click here to access the original post.