The Contributions and Criticisms of Design Thinking
By one estimate, 75% of businesses have tried design thinking, a human-centered, creative problem-solving method and philosophy. It has been applied to companies’ product, service, and experience design and innovation efforts, and the results have been largely impressive. McKinsey reported that “over a ten-year period, design-led companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 219 percent.” Thanks to these approaches, many companies have reorganized themselves to become more human-centered, focused first and foremost on creating relevant solutions to real human problems.
There are other clear gains from this popular design method. Design thinking has greatly enhanced businesses’ multidisciplinary collaboration, even more essential now that the customer experience of products or services is increasingly part of a complex, technologically integrated system. Rapid prototyping has encouraged more experimentation and increased creative confidence through hands-on involvement in the design process. Greater emphasis on fully investigating the problem to be solved has prevented companies from investing in irrelevant marketplace solutions.
More recently, however, a few of the downsides of this innovation and design practice have come to light. Indeed, a methodological post mortem is in full swing. Critiques of design thinking range from requiems to well-reasoned (and humorous) assessments—here and here and here. It’s worth taking a quick look at these criticisms to better understand how to move forward with new ideas and alternate approaches.
1. Design thinking has in a sense become a victim of its own “post-it” popularity. Well-publicized corporate-wide design thinking training, extensive media coverage, and online certificate programs have resulted in a somewhat superficial grasp of the method by many. The lack of truly skilled practitioners is cited as one of the challenges to an otherwise healthy projected CAGR of 7.38% for the design thinking market through 2031. The democratization of design thinking has led inadvertently to a devaluation (and occasional downsizing) of design professionals whose expertise has been honed over years of study and practice.
2. Innovation rates of failure specifically for new products remains stubbornly high at 95%. Companies practicing design thinking have become adept at incremental innovation—which is certainly valuable to companies—but not radical innovation, which promises exponential revenue gains. IDEO’s Tim Brown defines design thinking as “a human-centered approach to innovation.” Yet, design experts Donald Norman and Roberto Verganti have argued convincingly in MIT’s Design Issues that human-centered design leads to incremental innovation, not radical innovation. Norman, using a simple hill climbing metaphor, reasons that continually checking on possible designs or innovative ideas with the intended consumers gets you higher on your currrent hill but moves an innovation team no closer to a new, previously unimagined hill.
3. While truly design-led S&P 500 companies have twice the revenues and investor returns as their non-design-led competitors, the vast majority of companies are still struggling to reshape their business structures and processes to be fully design-focused. A design thinking project or two is relatively easy compared to the organizational mindset shift required for full-scale, sustained implementation.
4. Design thinking once fully adopted as a means to greater control and optimization of a company’s resources and design outcomes, can strip “judgment, intuition and experience” from design. It can lose precisely that which makes the practice of design by experts a singular (and in that sense, unpredictable) event: abstract thinking and imagination, a facility with metaphor, the ability to shift from general to specifics, the fine-tuning of the emerging idea with each iterative cycle. As one design theorist put it: “The cyclical, iterative process of designing is one of attending between the gestalt and the particular, always guided by a feeling for a goal.”
The VisioneeringTM Approach to Innovation
Ziba’s four-step experience innovation framework, VisioneeringTM, facilitates a seesawingfrom gestalt to particular, from discovery to reflection. It is designed to encourage dynamic shifts from real to abstract and from analysis to synthesis, creating a productive tension or “creative abrasion” that ensures the overall innovation process accumulates meaningful elements while eliminating irrelevant detail. Unlike design thinking, which typically remains in the tangible realm for its rapid prototyping-and-testing phase, Visioneering encourages design teams to go back and forth from the Information drawing board to abstract Knowledge and Insight activites as many times as is necessary to reach an epiphany. Product, service, or consumer experience (CX) innovation Ideas are enriched—and sometimes radically reconceptualized—with numerous abtract and imaginative exercises, from the identification of consumer and brand archetypes to the cognitive mapping of users’ perceptions and conceptions. The Clorox ReadyMop example below illlustrates Visioneering in action.
How Visioneering Led to the Radical Innovation of a Wet Mop
Clorox had developed a new cleaning solution that dissolved dirt and grease, dried quickly and didn’t harm surfaces. They wanted to bring it to customers in a product that could compete with the hugely popular Swiffer dry cleaning system, but had little experience manufacturing products, so turned to Ziba for help.
During the Information phase of Visioneering, Ziba conducted over thirty ethnographic home visits. Its multidisciplinary team then completed Knowledge exercises such as pattern mapping of various home cleaning rituals—what rooms in the house were covered, how much of the cleaning was wet vs. dry, how many cleaning exertions took place above or below the waist, etc. With several patterns identified, Ziba’s team proceeded to the Insights phase, where they played with various metaphors and themes, and did extensive cognitive mapping exercises. These steps enabled the team to identify three distinct types of cleaning: the Crisis Clean, the Weekly Wipe, and the Annual Assault within the opportunity space.
Purposely cycling back to the ethnographic research for what had been observed but not judged as pivotal, Ziba discerned that the main obstacle to mopping is quite simply the dreaded bucket of dirty water. “Kill the bucket” became the premise for a Values-Based Idea—Visioneering’s fourth step, where an idea must synthesize all key findings but also take “real” or tangible shape. Ziba began sketching something that would simplify the wet mopping process without a bucket and be a completely new tool for cleaner’s requirements and expectations of the Weekly Wipe.
The result was the Clorox ReadyMop, a quick, easy-to-use wet mop system that could clean floors effectively without a bucket. Its in-store retail placement set it apart from all competion, as it was on the shelf next to the cleaning products rather than far off in the housewares aisle. This was made possible by Ziba’s innovative design of a more compact and lighter (compared to the battery-powered Swiffer WetJet) mop, which was positioned next to a small, shelf-friendly box of Clorox’s new cleaning solution. The “mop and solution system” sold for less than half the price of the WetJet.
Customers didn’t just take casual note of the Clorox ReadyMop’s promise of a cleaning experience without a bucket or a heavy, expensive motor: they took it to the cash register. The quarter after the ReadyMop was introduced, Clorox reported a 79% growth in profits, and a 7% volume growth in its household products division alone. The ReadyMop eventually took the title of Clorox’s biggest product launch in history, with over $200 million in its first year, ranking among the top ten largest consumer products launches of the decade.
Radical Innovation’s Unruly Rules
Ziba’s Visioneering approach to radical innovation has been repeatedly tested and proven. But caveats are necessary. As it encourages multiple loops through its four phase—as required—to discover the entirely new innovation idea, it is often unrulier than the design thinking processes favored by management due to their relative predictability. It also requires experts who have honed their imaginative, abstract, and critical thinking skills and are adept at working through—and fitting together the results of—multiple design exercises.
For designers who want to gain more expertise in radical innovation, Ziba recommends developing the following four skills:
1. Conceptualization: Search unrelentingly for general principles, theoretical constructs, and overarching ideas; enrich work sessions with reference materials and experts from diverse disciplines.
2. Symbolism: Make liberal use of symbols, metaphors, maps and diagrams to represent ideas, illuminate relationships, and draw on symbols’ richly associative powers to reflect real-world complexity and context.
3. Metacognition: be alert to group think, and question yours and the team’s familiar assumptions and overly linear processes.
4. Critical Analysis: Develop multiple perspectives by deconstructing nascent solutions and emergent hypotheses so their underlying suppositions can be challenged; ensure the design challenge frame is wide enough, the context—social, technological economic, environmental, and political—is broad and multilayered enough.
To learn more about Ziba’s Visioneering model and our portfolio of innovative designs, contact: Megan@ziba.com.