This clear, organized process can help teams break free of a variety of human tendencies that get in the way of innovation....
It's safe to assume that accelerated change is here to stay. At the core of today's frequent disruptions is ambiguity: situations where the available information is incomplete, contradictory, or constantly shifting, and clear answers are impossible. Navigating ambiguity requires a new skillset'one that leans into our humanity rather than bypasses it. Unlike machines, we bring a biological response to change. And that response, if understood and harnessed, can become a powerful advantage....
On the first day of a required class for freshman design majors at Carnegie Mellon, my professor stood in front of a lecture hall of earnest, nervous undergraduates and asked, 'Who here thinks that design can change the world'' Several hands shot up, including mine. After a few seconds of silence, he advanced to the next slide of his presentation: a poster by the designer Frank Chimero that read, Design won't save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck. My professor wasn't the first person to deliver such discouraging news. In 1971, the design educator Victor Papanek began his best-selling book, Design for the Real World, with a similar message. 'There are professions more harmful than industrial design,' he wrote, but 'very few.' By designing and popularizing products that 'pollute the air we breathe''including cars, which are responsible for 'murder on a mass-production basis''he argued, 'designers have become a dangerous breed.' But design was capable of inflicting such harm, he wrote, only because it had so much potential, and therefore also the capacity for immense good. For Papanek, it was 'the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environment (and, by extension, society and himself).'...
Design thinking is a powerful method for understanding customer needs and developing new solutions to meet them.1 It has been used by innovators to invent consumer products like electric toothbrushes and to develop business-to-business services such as customer relationship management software. A key advantage of the design-thinking process over other innovation methods is its emphasis on the user experience. Whether a team is imagining a car dashboard, a tax declaration app, or an electric lawnmower, each step relies on repeated, personal interactions among team members, end users, and other stakeholders. To facilitate such interactions, observational workshops are typically conducted onsite in end users' familiar environments or in carefully arranged design studios. In recent years, however, with the rise in hybrid work, we have seen some innovation processes shift to the digital realm.2 Design-thinking practitioners now frequently watch consumers use products through videoconferencing and discuss their observations on digital conference boards and in group chats. Using these kinds of digital tools is certainly more convenient than getting people into the same room. But by shifting away from in-person interactions, are companies sacrificing the essence of what makes design thinking so powerful in the first place'...
