I have seen many firms and yes, large and publicly quoted firms are different from SMEs, but also the corporate culture in large firms can be very different. It can range from entrepreneurial spirt to pure technocratic and bureaucratic management. Design thinking is a good way to open your eyes to things you haven’t thought about. But while design thinking is a more procedural approach or process, business model thinking is more about thinking about the things that make up a firm. It is a think tool E.g. most managers take their revenue model as given, but that is a huge area for innovation. The marriage of design thinking (process) with business model (mental frameworks for the right questions) is very helpful. I have added “Value & Culture” to my business model canvas since that can be a spot for innovation as well. Business Model Innovation and Change have to go hand in hand, and culture is the most difficult thing to change.

“Since the invention of the computer chip, we have been moving from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, where the nature of work is changing. In an industrial society, workers are expected to fit standardized job descriptions and perform their duties according to clear policies, procedures, and prescriptions. Knowledge work is fundamentally different: workers are expected not so much to perform standard roles but to generate creative, innovative results that surprise and delight customers and colleagues. They are expected not only to perform a function but to design new and better products and services, and even to provide dramatic, breakthrough results.”

Marry this with what Russ Ackoff was saying and we immediately have a stalemate: you can’t get there from here. Squishy outputs require squishy techniques. Design Thinking is just too squishy for many.

I bring chocolates, crayons and playdough. We need to adopt a little Pixar along the way: http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2009/11/09/why-fill-in-the-blank-fails/

One word: complexity. Due to the accelerated rate of change, truth is fleeting. As the business game changes at a more rapid pace, what was known yesterday becomes less relevant tomorrow. There are many critical contributions that Design Thinking brings to the table to ameliorate these challenges, if used effectively.

Question Everything
Beliefs are grounded on certain facts. With so many things in flux in the industry, long-held beliefs may now have underlying facts that are no longer valid.

Collective Expertise
The breadth of expertise needed to see and understand the larger whole requires multiple people and perspectives — this is not for solo acts.

Synthesis
While multiple perspectives are critical, they often conflict with one another. This is where solo act skills do come to play — in the shaping of what’s relevant and what’s not and how they fit together. This is where science meets art: in removing what’s not relevant for the statue to emerge from the block of marble.

Immersive Possibilities
This is particularly relevant. In a recent piece ( http://twurl.nl/880oy7 ) I speak about issues of mental gaps that individuals cannot cross themselves. All learning has to be grounded against something we already know. More and more we’re dealing with things we have nothing to ground it to — or nothing obvious to ground it to. The grounding has to occur by immersive experiences. The collective discovery elements of Design Thinking is invaluable for bringing these gaps.

Non-Linearity
Most business operational practices evolved from the manufacturing era. The control required for mechanizing something is achieved through linearity — removing variability. This makes things repeatable. It also makes things repeatable by others — which minimizes market differentiation. Market differentiation now comes through embracing non-linearity — shifting from the machine to leveraging the full potential of human wetware. In this way Design Thinking is the machine floor mechanism for tapping that human potential.

Why vs. How?
Circling back to challenging all assumptions, the operative word in Design Thinking is “why”. We are far too often solving the wrong problems or symptoms of the problem, but not the problem itself. Also a huge issue in current business models is the budgeting mechanisms — when money is divided into departmental pockets, problems are often neither viewed or solved across departments. While most associated with the realm of Systems Thinking (which has relevant DT practices and perspectives), Russ Ackoff is a champion of good DT practices. He points out that creativity is discontinuous — most businesses are embracing practices that thwart, rather than enhance creativity (tying back to the issues of linearity and variability) http://twurl.nl/r41p61 (video of Russ with some of his key thoughts).

Services vs. Products
This is where I’ve watched the evolution of IDEO in the grand “aha” — the true potential of Design Thinking is not with products but with services. The greater majority of commerce today is not products, but services — and yet businesses continue to embrace business models designed to optimize products as output. Again, we introduce the distinctions between fixed and variable. The more human interaction involved the more variability required. Most business operations are just not good at striking a balance between fixed and variable. Even the term ‘management’ implies control — but all indications are that there is a false belief that more control is desired.

We have a lot of long-term beliefs to unravel and new operational models to explore. DT is one means to help us explore those possibilities and tap the potential.

While written to a specific topic, see if you can find hints of most of these things in this piece http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2009/09/16/e2-0-unleashing-the-potential/