Designing for Growth

Design thinking can do for organic growth and innovation what TQM did for quality—take something we always have cared about and put tools and processes into the hands of managers to make it happen.

Design thinking demystified. Design thinking is not magic or exclusive to designers. It's a systematic problem-solving approach accessible to all managers. It starts with understanding customers deeply and creating a better future for them, acknowledging that the first attempt may not be perfect.

Key principles of design thinking:

• Empathy: Deeply understanding customers' needs and experiences

• Invention: Creating novel solutions to meet those needs

• Iteration: Continually refining ideas based on feedback and learning

Design thinking complements traditional business analysis, bringing a human-centered, creative approach to innovation. It helps managers move beyond incremental improvements to create breakthrough growth opportunities.

Design starts with empathy, establishing a deep understanding of those we are designing for.

The four questions framework. The design thinking process can be broken down into four key stages, each centered around a critical question:

1. What is? - Explore and understand the current reality

2. What if? - Imagine new possibilities and alternatives

3. What wows? - Identify the most promising concepts

4. What works? - Test and refine ideas in the real world

This framework provides a clear roadmap for innovation projects, ensuring teams thoroughly explore the problem space before jumping to solutions. It balances divergent thinking (generating many options) with convergent thinking (narrowing down to the best ideas).

Journey mapping leads you through your customer's current experience, facilitated by data gathered through observation and interviewing.

Seeing through customers' eyes. Visualization techniques help teams capture and communicate complex information about customer experiences. Journey mapping, in particular, provides a powerful tool for understanding the entire customer experience, including emotional highs and lows.

Key visualization techniques:

• Customer journey maps

• Personas

• Empathy maps

• Storyboards

• Photo and video ethnography

These tools help teams develop empathy for customers, identify pain points and opportunities, and communicate insights effectively within the organization. They provide a shared understanding that fuels innovative thinking in later stages.

Creating new concepts depends a lot more on discipline than on creativity.

Structured ideation. Effective brainstorming requires more than just free-form idea generation. It demands careful preparation, clear ground rules, and a structured approach to capturing and building on ideas.

Key elements of successful brainstorming:

• Diverse team composition

• Clear problem framing

• Trigger questions to stimulate thinking

• Building on others' ideas

• Quantity over quality initially

Concept development takes the raw output of brainstorming and transforms it into coherent, fully-formed solution concepts. This involves clustering related ideas, identifying themes, and combining elements to create robust proposals that can be evaluated against design criteria.

Prototyping uses an affordable loss calculation: What is learning worth?

Learning fast and cheap. Assumption testing helps teams identify the critical unknowns that could make or break a new concept. By explicitly stating assumptions and designing experiments to test them, teams can quickly validate or invalidate ideas before investing significant resources.

Rapid prototyping brings concepts to life quickly and inexpensively. Key principles include:

• Start simple (e.g., paper prototypes)

• Focus on learning, not perfection

• Iterate rapidly based on feedback

• Test specific elements as well as whole concepts

This approach allows teams to explore multiple options, fail fast, and refine ideas based on real-world feedback, significantly reducing the risk of large-scale failure later in the process.

Any time you introduce an unfamiliar concept, you can expect to get it mostly wrong. That is why co-creation, using low-cost, low-fidelity prototypes, is so essential to reducing the risks and improving the speed of successful innovation.

Partnering with customers. Co-creation involves engaging potential customers in developing new offerings. This collaborative approach ensures solutions truly meet customer needs and builds buy-in early in the process.

Learning launches take promising concepts into the market for real-world testing. Key principles:

• Set clear learning objectives

• Define success metrics upfront

• Constrain time, geography, or customer segments

• Design for fast feedback cycles

• Be prepared to iterate or pivot based on results

These approaches bridge the gap between concept and full-scale launch, providing valuable data to inform go/no-go decisions and refine offerings before major investments are made.

As long as a project is clicking along and people feel productive, there is a positive buzz. The number one momentum builder is speed.

Building for success. Implementing design thinking in organizations requires more than just learning the tools and process. It demands careful attention to team composition, project selection, and maintaining momentum.

Key considerations for successful implementation:

• Start small with manageable projects

• Select diverse, cross-functional teams

• Secure executive sponsorship

• Create dedicated project spaces ("war rooms")

• Establish regular check-ins and clear decision-making processes

• Celebrate small wins and learning from failures

By focusing on these elements, organizations can create an environment where design thinking thrives, leading to sustained innovation and growth.