Recognizing Key Insights That Make Design Thinking Valuable to Strategy

TLDR: In recent years, design thinking has become a buzzword for disruptive user-centered innovation and addresses diverse shortcomings of analytical strategy development methods in a dynamic and fast-paced business environment.

Abstract: In recent years, design thinking has become a buzzword for disruptive user-centered innovation. Design thinking is an abductive and iterative approach transforming observations and related insights into practical validated solutions. Abductive reasoning starts with a set of abstractions, that is, an incomplete set of observations, and seeks for the simplest and most likely solution. The initial solution is then improved upon through inference until it becomes a robust solution. Design thinking addresses diverse shortcomings of analytical strategy development methods in a dynamic and fast-paced business environment. It aims at learning from methodologies used by designers, such as architects, artists, or creative directors, to solve problems which are incomplete by nature and cannot be solved by traditional linear problem-solving approaches. Design thinking in the context of strategy development proceeds in four steps, that is, observing, learning, designing, and validating, by iterating through divergent and convergent thinking. This leads to unique value design thinking offers towards developing strategies that work by taking a customer-centric viewpoint.