 Four years ago, I made a video called Why Do Design Thinking Projects Fail? You can check it out there if you're interested. I made it in a hotel room in Tokyo right after I'd run a workshop for a client. And before the workshop, the client contacted me and told me, just make sure this is not a design thinking workshop because we hate design thinking. And I've heard this from clients over the last 10 years, non-stop. Almost every client I go to or every client we work with, they always tell us, hey, you guys can do this workshop-y stuff if you want, but we don't want to see any design thinking stuff because we already did it and it didn't work. Now, when I hear that, I don't think, yeah, you're right, design thinking doesn't work. I think one of two things has happened. One, they worked with another consulting firm who told them that design thinking was going to solve everything for them. Or two, they themselves believed that design thinking was going to solve all their innovation problems. And if they just go to some sort of design thinking course, then all their employees will be able to make amazing products and do all the innovative stuff and be super creative. Those two things are just completely false expectations. Design thinking in itself is not going to solve a company's innovation problems. Design thinking is basically a process, a mindset, some tools that are going to help you validate and test products. But that in itself isn't going to actually solve the core deeper issue at a company that isn't being innovative. And this is really the core issue with how design thinking is sold. Essentially, design thinking is sold as this all-in-one, really nicely packaged innovation process. And of course, I'm someone who runs a company that sells workshops and sells innovation processes. And it's great for us to be able to package this thing up and say, if you do this training, you will be more innovative. But the truth is the absolute dark truth of all of this, and that's maybe not that dark. The dark truth behind all of this is that just teaching a team how to do design thinking is kind of like teaching somebody how to cook one dish, but not teach them how to cook. That's basically the way I think about it. I'm always talking about recipes here at AJ & Smart. I'm always using that as a metaphor for learning workshops. But design thinking is essentially just teaching you one part of the innovation process and one very specific thing that is useful to know when it comes to being creative, when it comes to being innovative, but not knowing the underlying principles of all of that kind of make it difficult to internalize. And also just means that a lot of people are going to know a lot of surface level stuff after taking a design thinking workshop or after taking a design thinking course. That's not necessarily going to translate into the realistic day today at working at a corporate or working at a company. If you're working at a company and you're watching this video and you've been through a design thinking course or you've been through a design thinking training, even if it was six months long or one year long and you're like, wow, that was cool. That was fun. We had some post-its. We made a wallet. We did all the cool design thinking stuff, but it didn't change anything about our company. Then you're not alone because that's basically what happens with every company. When I go into a company pretty much every time because they see the post-its, they're like, ah, great. We're doing design thinking stuff again, but we already did design thinking. And I have to explain to them that design thinking is one very small part of this bigger picture of workshopping, this bigger picture of problem-solving and facilitation and decision-making and design thinking is just sort of one brand name that's behind all of this. There's also design sprints. There's also agile. It all comes under this one umbrella of facilitation and workshopping, but most companies know and specifically focus in on design thinking. But does design thinking work at all? Does it have any value? Absolutely, yes. It's a really great recipe. It's a really great tool set. It's a really great mindset for coming up with new ideas, for testing new ideas, for iterating on ideas, for prototyping. And it's essentially the baseline and foundation for a lot of really, really useful workshops and useful systems like the design sprint or even things like the business model canvas have design thinking elements in them. So I do think it deserves a lot of respect for being the first system for being creative. It's literally like a systemized creativity process or whatever, but it's not going to solve a company's innovation problems. And therein lies the problem with design thinking is that companies think this is the silver bullet that's going to solve everything, but it never really is. So let me tell you what I've seen working at companies instead of just ranting about design thinking. And design thinking is part of what works at companies. It's just one part of it. So here are the three things I've seen that work really well for companies trying to become more innovative, trying to make their staff more innovative and try to empower their employees to be more creative and test out products. Here are the three things that I've seen work really well. Number one, training a dedicated team of process facilitators, basically taking three to five to 15 people at the company and really focusing on giving them all of the tools and all of the skills they'll need to facilitate creative problem solving workshops and decision making workshops at the company that they are at. So tailored workshops, tailored tools, tailored mindsets to the company that they're working at. Not just a generic, here's this system, here's this system, just run with it and somehow squeeze that into your company. They need to be trained on tailored workshops and tailored knowledge to the company they're working at. So the first thing I've seen work is really creating a facilitation team that can be booked by other teams in the company when they want to get something done. And these facilitators are constantly training themselves on every possible type of collaboration tool. Design thinking, design sprints, agile scrum, everything that they can find. This team is just constantly being educated on collaboration. Often they're called collaboration coaches or facilitators or in many companies they still call them design thinking coaches or maybe they're agile coaches. It doesn't really matter as long as this team is specializing in just learning as many processes as they can and then tailoring these processes to the company they're working at. So it's a facilitation team or a collaboration team at a company that can be booked out by other teams. And I've seen this work really, really well at companies. Number two is that a company shouldn't try to do a top-down innovation approach, especially a large corporate. It's very, very, very difficult. What we've seen work well is starting with a small team. So like really taking one example team or two example teams, getting them really, really good at working in these new processes and then just having them prove that these processes work better and have that virally spread throughout the organization for a while. What we often see at companies is they'll, you know, the leadership team will do a design thinking course. They'll bring in a big consultancy. They'll create all these design thinking guidelines and these innovation guidelines and then the rest of the company receives them and just goes, oh cool and then closes it and never looks at it again, these design guidelines. But what we've seen in successful companies who are going from let's say being more traditional to becoming more innovative is they'll train a small team or multiple small teams at the same time and have these teams prove that this really works. In the innovators dilemma, the book that probably if you're watching this video, you've seen it, they talk about creating a separate team, separate from the environment that can really be as fast as it wants and doesn't necessarily have to work with the rules of the corporate. And you don't even need to do that in this situation. You can take a team that already works in the company that has to stick to the rules of the company and just start layering on some of these collaboration tools to what they already do and just really try to improve one team's process or two team's processes and have them show how successful that can be and let that slowly spread throughout the organization. And the third thing really fits with that, expect that this will take time. A company booking another company to do a six month design thinking course or whatever and then expecting to be innovative within six months, especially if they're like a 70,000 person telecommunications organization, it's just completely unrealistic. This sort of thing takes a long time. And that's why often we recommend to clients that if they're going to do this, if they want to actually change their processes and make their systems more efficient and more innovative, that they really focus on just nailing it with one important team. Maybe a team that's working on an important product or an important future looking product rather than trying to do this over the entire company because if they, like I said in point two, if they can prove it with one team, then they can prove that out for the rest of the team. That team sort of acts as like a case study. So the third thing is really for companies to expect that changing anything in a company takes an extremely long time and bringing in these types of processes is something that is a multi-year transition versus a multi-week or multi-month transition. And it's a really boots on the ground situation. It's the individual employees who are going to be learning this stuff. Like I said in point one, building maybe this facilitation or collaboration team and having them virally spread that throughout the company rather than trying to do this full top-down approach. I think I'm getting sweaty. So yeah, really for me, when a company says to me, hey, design thinking doesn't work or design thinking sucks, I hope you guys aren't doing that. What I say back to them is, well, what did you do? And they're like, oh yeah, we did it, you know, one week boot camp on design thinking and our company is still not innovative. And I just say, well, your expectation is just completely wrong when it comes to how this sort of thing can be integrated into a company. Design thinking is not this silver bullet. You can't just stamp design thinking or apply design thinking to a company and now it's suddenly innovative. That's just not how it should be perceived. And if it is perceived like that, it will fail. And then people at the company will hear design thinking and they'll hate it. Design thinking isn't broken. Design thinking doesn't suck. Like everyone seems to say, even I probably wrote an article called design thinking sucks. So I better say that because someone will find it otherwise. But the truth is design thinking doesn't suck. It's a system that works and has its merits. It's just that companies, companies have way too high expectations of it and people selling it want to sell it. Of course, you know, I'll sell a couple of design thinking workshops to you if you're watching this video. But you know what? It's mainly going to be for fun. It's mainly going to be like a team building thing for your team to have a laugh, have a good time. But if you expect it to change your entire business overnight, that's just not going to happen. So I hope this video was somewhat useful. And actually, if you've watched this far and you're interested in this idea of becoming one of those facilitators or collaboration coaches that can pretty much run any type of workshop for any type of team at any type of company, I've made a one hour free training. There's going to be a link down below. It will say like free training that's going to teach you how to actually pretty much run anything, whether it's design thinking, design sprints. It doesn't really matter. So that could be interesting to you. And the final thing I'll say is let me know in the comments if you have any questions about design thinking workshops. I've been running them for 10 years. If you have any questions about how to bring that sort of innovative practice into a corporate the right way, just ask me anything in the comments. We always reply. Thank you so much for your time. And have a lovely day. Bye.