Design Thinking is dead. Long live Design Thinking.

One of the core methodologies we often use to help clients is Design Thinking, a human-centered process that traces its history back to the 1980s. The seeds of Design Thinking were created when Nigel Cross, an industrial designer and design researcher, began considering design as a third academic discipline to complement (and stand in contrast to) sciences and humanities.

Design Thinking coalesced as a product development and innovation framework through the 1990s and early 2000s at forward-thinking institutions like Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford’s d.school, as well as for-profit consultancies like IDEO.

One of the things we love most about Design Thinking is the way that it puts language and definition to the “good enough for now” thinking that most of us use daily. When done right, it creates a path to something new that actually works for users.

Sounds great right?

But Design Thinking has been the subject for a lot of dire headlines and self-important LinkedIn posts recently as IDEO, laid off 32% of their workforce (see one such article from Fast Company here).

When I log out of LinkedIn, I see the opposite of a dramatic collapse. Instead, I see organizations where Design Thinking fundamentals have been normalized as standard business processes, and a deep pool of experienced Design Thinking practitioners have achieved leadership roles at client orgs.

The same force that makes Design Thinking so powerful is the one that likely contributed to IDEO’s layoffs – it’s extremely accessible for innovators, and extremely effective for communicating innovation strategy to non-innovators. It’s one of the key differences between Design Thinking and (what I often think of as its tech counterpart), Agile.

Where Agile piles on lots of complicated adjunct processes, systems and taxonomy, Design Thinking stays simple and emphasizes plain, self-evident labels.

Empathy means you find out how customers feel.

Defining the problem means you pick what you’re going to do and everyone agrees to focus on it.

Prototypes are simple models to convey what you want to build.

Testing is putting the prototype through its paces to see if it works.

Historically, it’s not that the process doesn’t work or that the concepts are difficult to understand that have posed barriers to Design Thinking adoption. It’s been mindset.

With younger leaders who are less scared to take a human-centered approach, there’s less need for a big budget consultant to hold your hand through the process. Zooming in to a shorter timescale, there was a huge boom in consulting work through the pandemic as corporate leaders rethought just about every aspect of their company's existence. It's always concerning when an employer feels they need to let people go to meet profitability targets, but that doesn't automatically signal the implosion of an entire discipline.