Design thinking (alone) won’t save you

In a 2009 article for Harvard Business Review, design leader Peter Merholz voiced his distress over the way in which design thinking had been “trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation,” recoiling against the limiting, fetishistic way in which discourse around design thinking had emerged in business management literature.

The main sources of the affront taken by Merholz seem to be not only the perpetuation of a separation between “business thinking” and “design thinking”, but a much broader neglect of other vital fields - while he acknowledges the importance of challenging the supremacy of “business thinking,” Merholz suggests that we need to bring as broad a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives to bear on the challenges we have in front of us. Shifting the focus only to “design thinking” is moving the pendulum too far back and in too narrow a direction, letting us miss out on countless other sources of knowledge, meaning and possibilities.

Merholz himself studied anthropology, and points towards how certain aspects and methods advanced by design thinking as central to its capabilities to be “human-centered” and “empathic” are, in fact, founded in the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. He also points beyond his own academic background to the plurality of backgrounds which allow people to bring distinct perspectives and insights that would not have been attained if we had drawn upon narrower backgrounds in the design field. Journalism, library science, history, fine arts and philosophy are just some examples of disciplines and their perspectives that should have room to make contributions to the kinds of problems we deal with in a wickedly complex world.

An ironic perspective on design thinking hype discourse

Where, then, does the fetishisation of design thinking come from? In a 2010 article titled How to Avoid Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater: An Ironic Perspective on Design Thinking, the authors Ulla Johansson and Jill Woodilla situate Design Thinking within the business management hype discourse which was then gaining attention (and Merholz was in part already responding to).

Johansson and Woodilla point out that design thinking was not the first fad to enter such hype discourse. As one example, they refer to the intense excitement and debate that surrounded Fredrick Taylor’s “revolutionary” ideas at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the backlash and critique in response to these ideas that propelled the discourse from scientific management into the area of human relations - today we see many of the ideas of Taylorism residual in taken-for-granted premises of "scientific management."

The claim in such discourse is most often “to save the world” of business, with one or another fad being presented as a universal tool for business development. “Try this and it will solve your problems,” is the rhetoric which propagates this hype. Such a claim can, however, be only an over-exaggeration - universal tools for every business problem do not exist - but the irony is that the claim is not entirely false either. Nuance is needed to recover what can be meaningful from the surrounding hype.

With this reading, the authors propose a paradoxical interpretation of design thinking - an ironic perspective (drawing on the work of philosopher Richard Rorty), which allows the move away from binary views of true or false, such as “design thinking is/is not a failed experiment,” to a view where multiple perspectives could be held in play simultaneously. This allows for a critical examination of the multiple dimensions in interpretation of events, in perception of identity, and in ways of speaking held together on an ironic platform, even as they are different.

An ironic perspective, in other words, allows us to embrace hyperbolae with some degree of reality. As the authors point out, there are many good arguments for the need of design thinking in organisations; although the hype around it often simplified the situations it was deployed in, upset expectations and, in turn, led to a backlash against design thinking, still the promises set by the hype discourse are not to be taken lightly. It is, however, not productive to interpret these promises as false or true, but rather as exaggerations of something worthwhile, applicable in part or to a different degree than promised. The irony resides in having to recognise and accept the exaggerated promises as such; accept that they are not possible in order to come to something that is possible.

The false dichotomy of “business thinking” and “design thinking”

Johansson and Woodilla warn that the ability to maintain a paradoxical interpretation of design thinking becomes particularly challenging as soon as it is taken for granted that “design thinking” has a specific meaning, and that this meaning is – or should be – the same for everyone. Such a false consensus seems to recurrently sweep into the concept of "design thinking" in its managerial discourse, making it difficult to engage effectively with the value that design thinking can offer quite apart from the hype (or hostility) surrounding it. On the other hand, these authors propose an approach to design thinking which involves engagement between academia, practitioners and business in the continued exploration of different ways design thinking can thrive within the managerial world. This is exactly where diverse perspectives and insights from fields outside of design - that diversity of thought Merholz argued in favour of - have a significant contribution to make to the development of design thinking as a powerful and enriched way of realising change where it is applied.

Design thinking isn't going to save you. But if the promise that it can is recognised and accepted as an exaggeration of what it can do, design thinking can play a critical role in coordinating the capabilities that can deliver on that promise.

References

Johansson, U. and Woodilla, J. 2010. How to Avoid Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater: An Ironic Perspective on Design Thinking. European Group for Organization Studies Colloquium, Lisbon, Portugal.

Merholz, P. 2009. Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You [WWW document]. URL https://hbr.org/2009/10/why-design-thinking-wont-save.html [accessed on 30 January 2021]