Design Thinking Is Not Enough: Transform Your Business with these 2 steps (Part 1)

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If you are a C-level business leader or a middle-management manager, the chances are very high that you would have heard the phrase ‘Design Thinking’ at least 2ce in the last 5 years. The first time was probably while you were in the middle of a particularly thorny business review and one of your C-Suite leaders or very trend-savvy colleague suggested the company should try that ‘design thinking thing’ everyone is talking about as a way to re-think the business urgently.

So as a proactive leader, you may have authorised your people to set up a design thinking training session and got in an expert or two to review your business holistically and they ended up proffering either incremental changes or really radical and immediate solutions to turn around your business unit or the entire business. They would generally follow the format in the design thinking process flow below:

The challenge though is that design thinking as a method of evaluating business needs and determining direction is more often than not no longer enough due to the high level of complexity that corporations and businesses are facing today. As an innovation process design thinking is ok and has proven very useful in the past. The challenge is (and this article focuses on this) many organisations trying to adopt design thinking as a guide tend to ignore one crucial thing – the state and readiness of their organisation to implement. 

One of the articles I will recommend below uses the analogy of the iceberg suggesting that design thinking helps businesses today look at the effect - the iceberg but misses the causative factors or the huge underlying issues beneath the iceberg.

This is why top executives often complain these days that after several wonderful and exciting sessions on design thinking at which everyone ‘feels on track and energised’ the innovation ship just refused to set sail. Yet, everyone knows there’s something AMAZING that can be done but HOW do you go about it in this super-connected and constantly evolving world where consumers now have so much co-creative power?

I will be sharing a 2 step approach which such companies will find useful in adjusting existing mindsets by providing a clearer and more effective approach to innovating and transforming their businesses. Approaches that will also re-energizing their workforce with a renewed sense of purpose and mission by introducing collaborative innovation and rapid experimentation.

STEP 1: Adopt Systems Thinking.

As a management discipline, systems thinking may be misunderstood as being too complex and also often not get considered by mid-sized businesses who think it is only fit for behemoths like Oracle, IBM and the like. I recommend it for mid-to-large sized organisations seeking to understand why they are stuck and not innovating anymore. Startups too can find it useful as a guide if they appear to suddenly be stuck after a promising beginning.

Quoting liberally from Steve Vassallo’s article, Design Thinking Needs to Think Bigger; “Systems thinking…is a mind-set—a way of seeing and talking about reality that recognises the interrelatedness of things. System thinking sees collections of interdependent components as a set of relationships and consequences that are at least as important as the individual components themselves. It emphasises the emergent properties of the whole that neither arise directly, nor are predictable, from the properties of the parts.”

                                                    Stop and think about it a little.

Organisations often, unintendedly morph away from original intentions and silos emerge that grow stronger than the collective organisation. In trying to innovate it helps to understand the threat and innate opportunity of the silos in an organisation to know how to harness their power. Or put differently, how to unlock and unleash their positive creation power. 

The Iceberg Model

I referred to the Iceberg Model earlier as a key part of Systems Thinking.  Still quoting Steve Vassallo, “The Iceberg Model is a helpful way to explain the concerns that drive systems thinking. Events are at the top of the iceberg. They’re incidents that we encounter from day to day—the hurly-burly of life. Patterns are the accumulated habits or behavioural “memories” that result from repeated, unconsidered reaction to events.”

Ask yourself, why is a particular business unit always somehow underperforming? What is it that it repeatedly does or is allowed to do (patterns) that leads to a certain undesired result (event)? Design thinking tends to focus the analysis on the effect – the iceberg.

               Make no mistake, Systems Thinking is not a silver bullet.

It’s an analytical process that has been around for decades and is now more useful than ever in figuring out how a business got into a particular situation (good, bad or terrible) It encourages you to look not just at the parts but the effects on each other and the whole.

CAVEAT: The Systems Thinking process should be utilised in a way that your organisation can use as a springboard and not become something that bogs down your processes and takes too much time to conclude. Remember, People usually know the problems, they just need a structured way to articulate it.  Identifying and effective articulation are key benefits of system thinking that help you not only figure out what happened, when but also how and why they happened.

Do you think your business can benefit from systems thinking today?

You can read more about Systems Thinking at this link: Design Thinking Needs To Think Bigger It provides good insights into the basics of Systems Thinking with some good examples. Be sure to check out the associated articles there as well as the following links to some useful VIDEO content:

I love Peter Senge’s simple intro to systems thinking video. Peter Senge: Introduction to Systems Thinking - Peter Senge is author of The Fifth Discipline, Senior lecturer at MIT and Founder of the Society for Organizational Learning shares his perspectives on leadership and systems thinking with IBM.

Also, check out Eli Stefanski’s TEDx talk. Start from 1.50 TEDxDirigo - Eli Stefanski - Making Systems Thinking Sexy

Now, after you have used systems thinking to figure out the present, how do you go from where you are to your next destination as a business? What guided approach to innovation can you adopt and transform your business? The phrase “innovate or die” is ringing in your ears daily with each new player that disrupts your industry or sector or each new poor financial result your business posts.

In Part 2 of this article, I will share an approach that has been found to be useful and which I believe organizations at any stage of their development can adopt to reset, re-think and grow from ok to good and then to great. After all, every leader wants to achieve sustainable business innovation.

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Dayo is an experienced business leader and entrepreneur with extensive experience in marketing, technology for business transformation and business development.  Follow him on twitter @travelwithdayo or subscribe to his blog www.dayoadefila.blogspot.com for more of his views on business, innovation and humanity.