Design Thinking: Management Consulting for the Startup Era
During management consulting’s heyday, productivity was going to lead us to salvation. In 2020, innovation is the church and design thinking is our savior. But who is design thinking really saving?
Design thinking rose to prominence in tandem with the tech industry. It is now such a big business for consulting agencies and universities that challenges to its methods are rare. Instead of engaging with criticism, design thinking’s proponents simply re-explain what design thinking is supposed to do, with little regard for what it actually does. It is time for candid reflection on how design thinking developed into an inflexible dogma. Drawing attention away from the promise of design thinking’s methods to discussion about specific case studies allows for a more comprehensive analysis of design thinking in-use. By illustrating how changes in work and education allowed design thinking to develop and solidify, I will argue that a more expansive criticism of design thinking is valid and necessary.
What is Design Thinking?
At its core, design thinking is a set of methods, grounded in an ethos of creativity, that can be applied to nearly any problem. Its origins lie in both professional product design and academic theories about design methods. Design thinking’s contemporary definition stems from its two largest proponents: leading design agency IDEO and the Stanford d.school. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, defines design thinking as a “human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” The d.school defines design thinking as a “methodology for creative problem solving.” Both definitions emerged from product design, but as currently practiced, it typically supports business strategy and development.
In plain speak, design thinking is a five step process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. The steps are usually represented as hexagons, as graphic designer Natasha Jen highlights in her Design Thinking is Bullsh*t critique. At its core, design thinking takes a human-centered approach. The first step, empathy, starts with the user, or the client’s target customer, and it is the user that is supposed to guide subsequent steps. As the designer weaves through the hexagons, design thinking employs brainstorming and iteration to unlock solutions that would not have been visible otherwise. Solutions, by and large, mean improving business success, as outlined by Brown.
Design thinking is intentionally universal. As sociologist Ruha Benjamin suggests in Race After Technology, perhaps one of the reasons design thinking is so successful is it manages to “fold any and everything under its agile wings.” If it can be applied to nearly any problem, it can be applied to a wide range of clients. A few of the sectors IDEO works in include energy, education, retail and hospitality, finance, government, non-profit and medicine. Universality is a brilliant growth strategy. But is its universality too broad? Referencing an old Saturday Night Live skit, data scientist Bill Schmarzo points out design thinking is like Shimmer Floor Wax: it’s hard to tell if it’s a Floor Wax or a Dessert Topping.
Teaching an Old Dog New UX Tricks
Design thinking’s methods are not that new. The newness lies in design thinking’s great UX, navigated via tidy flowing hexagons. Management consulting’s core tenet was to help organizations (businesses) improve their performance. Sound familiar? In adopting design thinking, the business world is parsing concepts they’ve seen before, repackaged for the shift from productivity to innovation. Science, Technology and Society(STS) professor Lee Vinsel points out in Design Thinking is a Boondoggle, design thinking’s five step process also looks alarmingly similar to a freshman writing class. Consider your audience, pick a topic, think, come up with a first draft, have someone edit. It is also very similar to the SDLC model, or System Development Lifecycle a model from management consulting that predates design thinking. It is perhaps prior familiarity, guided by contemporary graphics that allows design thinking to be so widely embraced.
Arguably the most innovative thing about design thinking is its semantics. Design thinking is a toolkit to innovate, move fast, fail fast and break things. It is agile. It can sprint and disrupt. It is practiced using previously unremarkable objects that now unlock creativity and innovation: whiteboards and post-it notes. It gave a generation of workplaces keen to become the next Google an opportunity to buy into a new lexicon.
Design Thinking and the New Corporate Bohemia
Chronologically, the development of design thinking as a tool to support business and strategy development mirrored broader changes in work rendered through the growth of an emergent technoculture. In Venture Labor, sociologist Gina Neff highlighted how jobs in the technology sector in the late 1990s, often lacking the security of earlier corporate jobs, were becoming among the most appealing in the restructured U.S. labor market. This environment was ripe for a new orthodoxy, one that prioritized risk and innovation. Journalist Steve Lohr suggested in the late 1990s that as the technology industry became more prominent, the broader focus on improving workplaces within corporate America shifted from debates around offices and cubicles to discussing work process and practice.
The language of empathy and “helping” allowed design thinking to divorce itself from earlier versions of management consulting, despite the Taylorist focus on efficiency still coursing through its veins.
Enter design thinking, stage right. According to design researcher Lauren Williams in The Co-Constitutive Nature of Neoliberalism, Design, and Racism, around this time, design had to reinvent its own “value proposition”. Contemporary design thinking emerged from dialogues between design methods in academia and practicing product designers in the 1990s. IDEO began as a product design firm, developing products like the iconic Apple mouse. Communication and science studies professor Lilly Irani pointed out in a brilliant ethnography on IDEO, in response to shifting demands in the mid-2000s, IDEO pivoted from product design to business and service design. Nearly twenty years later the focus remains largely the same. Through reinventing its value proposition design thinking became management consulting couched in innovation terminology.
As journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus highlights in The Rise of the WeWorking Class, the climate of earlier decades was perceived as “aesthetically dour, economically inefficient and morally retrograde.” Drawing on this sentiment, the new blueprint for work became a “hybrid of corporate and Bohemian values in one organization”, as outlined by sociologist Andrew Ross in No-collar. Design thinking was the perfect reframe of management consulting for the new corporate Bohemian overlay. As the doldrums of grey carpeted cubicles shifted into open plan Googleplex lookalikes, consulting, too, made a commensurate shift. Design thinking addressed both aesthetic dourness with a focus on sharp visual communication, and the morally retrograde, leveraging its focus on human-centered design and empathy.
Management consulting draws from Taylorist theory, the first formal attempt in the late 1800s to improve organizational efficiency by analyzing and optimizing workflows. Drawing from its focus on human-centered design, the language of empathy and “helping” allowed design thinking to divorce itself from earlier versions of management consulting, despite the Taylorist focus on efficiency still coursing through its veins. Pulling from the “we are all designers” slogan, fields increasingly framed as stuffy tapped into the alluring ethos of creativity and innovation — with none of the challenges of actual design work, which can be messy, frustrating, and often leads to unexpected outcomes. Take automotive design, which suffers from countless product launch delays, frustrating elements like cup holders that never seem to fit, and for history buffs, the Edsel, Ford’s notorious mid-century flop. Borrowing an intangible ethos without concrete work processes oversimplifies design and does design as a profession a disservice. In fact, many of design thinking’s most vocal critics, including Jen, are professional designers.
The Bobs, from Mike Judge’s cult classic movie Office Space, represent everything the new corporate Bohemia rejected: they are “aesthetically dour” and “morally retrograde”. Released in 1999, Office Space captures the doldrums of the corporate American workplace brilliantly. The now meme-worthy Bobs were management consultants hired to make software company Initech save money, ultimately laying off experienced (expensive) engineers and bringing in cheaper entry level staff. The Bobs, with their dad jokes and dull grey suits are a stark contrast to hip millennial design thinkers. Despite their differences in attire and tools they both begin their process with the question “What would you say you do here?”
Management consulting became less desirable for a reason: it did little to mask its focus on restructuring through “morally retrograde” tactics like laying off talented software engineers. IDEO aims for “positive impact through design”. As a theoretical construct, design thinking did try to improve upon management consulting. It shifts the focus from the negative, and the bottom line, to the positive, improving ROI and unlocking innovation through engagement with human-centered empathy.
Unfortunately, enthusiasm for innovation and the runaway success of the tech industry obscured issues in emerging workplace and consulting practices. The seeming egalitarianism and autonomy the new corporate Bohemia proclaimed effectively obscured downsizing and insecure work contracts. Earlier employer obligations like job security and good health insurance were replaced by juice bars and mandatory employee retreats. Corporate hierarchies were not dismantled, employees were just tethered through different devices. The open plan office persists because it saves money on real estate, despite overwhelming evidence it does not work. Ping pong tables and the comfort of casual attire obscured grueling hours. Design thinking became the perfect window dressing for the tech industry’s ascendency: its candy-colored Post-Its obscured substantive problems with the new corporate Bohemia.
Borrowing Legitimacy from Academia
While design thinking draws its allure from tech and creative fields, it builds its legitimacy from academia. Drawing on social science methods is not in and of itself objectionable. A focus on participant observation and interviews as a way to understand the user are valid frameworks. The problem is, as design thinking is practiced, it bears no resemblance to the rigorous methods used to conduct research in the social sciences, as Lucy Kimball, Vinsel and Irani highlight. Drawing on ethnography lends a whiff of rigor without sound engagement.
Maybe when design thinking formalized as a department at Stanford in 2004 it became more difficult for academics and designers to critically evaluate its methods and efficacy? Critical discourse is foundational to academia, making the lack of reflection on design thinking just…odd. Historically, design methods have gone through seminal shifts as more scholars engaged with the field. Design thinking’s origins lie in debates in the 1960s and 1970s between scholars including Herb Simon, Horst Rittel and Bruce Archer. They built upon and revised each other’s theories as the academy intersected with professional designers, constantly workshopping methods. As design thinking is currently practiced as a universal theory, it is difficult to pinpoint analysis across disciplines like product design, management consulting, higher education and public policy. What axis do you use to critique a now universal theory?
Design thinking has some critics within the academy, but their voices are drowning in a sea of d.school replicas. Design thinking often sits within business schools. It is not wrong, per se, to try and add creative exploration into business schools. In fact, it is probably long overdue. But when design thinking landed in business schools it became a branch severed from its foundational origins in engineering, architecture and industrial design. Critical discourse stagnated. Pockets of criticism from other fields including Science and Technology Society (STS) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have contributed to debates but have yet to form a substantive group of scholarship. They remain overshadowed by the d.school boilerplate. Twenty years after IDEO orchestrated design thinking’s pivot, it is still largely written about favorably within scholarly journals and the popular press.
Staffers at both IDEO and the d.school have acknowledged problems with design thinking. However, their criticisms feel like the Emperor’s New Clothes, as they ultimately put the onus on clients that implement design thinking incorrectly instead of its practitioners or the methods themselves. As Benjamin points out, “if design as a branded methodology is elevated, then other forms of generic human activity are diminished.” The irony is that despite design thinking’s central focus on the user, its purported shortcomings tend to lie with users, not practitioners of design thinking.
In 2018, around the same time in the critiques from IDEO and the d.school emerged, an external challenge to design thinking’s dogma was met with dismissive indignance by the d.school. Vinsel, a professor at Virginia Tech, leveled a sharp critique on Medium that went viral and was later published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Clearly Vinsel’s critique struck a chord. Vinsel managed to get access to an internal email the d.school issued titled “FYI — negative piece on design thinking in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.” in response to his article, outlined in a further critique of design thinking. The d.school was dismissive of Vinsel, suggesting his article wasn’t fact checked (it was) and lacks evidence.
“We are sorry to see that the issue he has with design thinking has distracted him from the countless examples where thinking and acting like a designer has helped people create new, powerful solutions to improve outcomes for the people they are serving.”
Since the d.school does not mention any specific examples of positive outcomes in their letter, I went to their website to find evidence to support their claims that design thinking helps people. Under Our Impact the d.school breaks down their contributions on campus, in the world and in education. On campus, they draw on student quotes like “this changed my life,” which hardly constitutes evidence based support for design thinking. More tangibly, in “the world”, they do provide evidence of startups and projects founded by d.school alums. To be fair, some of the companies they list have been successful and do seem to be focused on projects that could create meaningful change. However, it is unclear how the list of companies differs from hundreds of startup incubators with a social impact focus.
One of these projects, the GE adventure series, is actually in Jen’s critique of design thinking. She highlights putting cartoons on the walls of an MRI room for children is simply common sense. In fact, in their email the d.school argues design thinking should be common sense as per Vinsel and Jen’s critiques, but that so many projects in “business, in government, in healthcare, and in education,” lack common sense design thinking is necessary. I find this train of thought confusing. Is design thinking theoretically common sense and only necessary because clients are dumb? Or, is it as Benjamin suggests, a way to diminish other generic forms of human activity.
Even more alarming, the d.school strategically did not issue a formal rebuttal on Chronicle so as to draw less attention to the critique, illustrating just how much design thinking is not an organic process, but one that is performed and marketed by those that benefit from it the most. It is easy to be distracted by optimism for its promise through extraordinarily vague language. As the current version of design thinking has been practiced 20 years, future promise is a distraction from concrete evidence.
Intervening with municipal government in a racially divided city, or with career colleges that historically defrauded students, come with serious long-term implications that should not be glossed over with sharp graphic design.
Instead of fostering the scholarly tradition of critical discourse, academic design thinking is now an institutional cash cow that does not engage with criticism. From other prestigious universities like MIT to non-accredited, very expensive bootcamp courses, the d.school model is simply making too much money. The d.school holds a four day bootcamp for executives that runs a cool $13,000 per head. As they remain industry leaders in design thinking, the d.school has played a large role in the replication of their model. They even have a section on their website for how to replicate their model: “10 key ingredients for a tasty d.school.”
Case Studies: Design thinking in use
Do we all need tasty d.schools? Who are they really helping? And is it really possible that the same methods provide the same level of efficacy across such wide ranging industries such as government, finance and medicine?
Gainesville Florida’s run-in with IDEO presents a disturbing foil to design thinking’s often unquestioned success. A 2016 article on Fast Company outlines an IDEO project in Gainesville’s municipal government: How One City is Reinventing Itself with UX Design. The goal was to make the city more competitive, making Gainesville an ideal place to live and work. IDEO created a Department of Doing with an entrepreneurial focus, replete with Action Officers to engage local residents. A new visual identity for the city’s rebrand and “doing” pop-ups at farmer’s markets tied it all in a tidy Instagram-friendly bow.
Only it turned out to not be very tasty. Especially for Gainesville’s Black residents, who were largely excluded from the city’s redesign. As Maggie Gram points out in a detailed critique of that project three years later: IDEO’s project in Gainesville simply did not succeed at its aims. Gainesville is a university town, but it is also poor and extremely segregated. The new City Manager Anthony Lyons strengthened ties with the University, but managed to alienate the city’s Black employees, and did little for its Black residents. A NAACP complaint was filed. As complaints mounted that Lyons was firing or forcing resignations from longtime Black administrators, and support eroded from people of color, Lyons resigned. During the three-year project, Gainesville lost Black municipal staff and largely replaced them with White candidates from out of state.
Interestingly, IDEO’s website still links to the Fast Company article, ignoring the fallout. IDEO was in Gainesville for eight weeks. In hindsight, it is silly to put the onus on design alone to solve complex problems via five hexagons. Social justice, redlining, and negotiating an entrenched city bureaucracy are beyond the scope and budget of an eight-week intervention. But the project showed a glaring lack of empathy for Black residents, supported by a rigid adherence to the dogma of design thinking. Lyons simply fired “those who questioned him”. In doing so, Lyons lost much of the city staff that had worked to address affordable housing, raise high school graduation rates and improve food deserts. The inability to question design thinking, or acknowledge its failures, is antithetical to its origins as part of a critical discourse on design, but it aligns perfectly with how design thinking generates income for IDEO and the d.school’s many imitators.
Another curious case study is IDEO’s work for the ECMC foundation — described on IDEO’s site as a foundation for career colleges. ECMC is actually a student loan debt collector. With no experience running colleges, ECMC acquired the embattled Corinthian Colleges in 2015. Corinthian was a group of for-profit colleges that were convicted of large scale fraud before going belly up, leaving many vulnerable students with huge debts, no job placements and sometimes not even transcripts. ECMC decided to run the schools as non-profits under a newly formed subsidiary Zenith Education Group. ECMC claimed their acquisition intended to improve educational outcomes and reduce debt burdens. As part of their reshaping of the career college landscape they sought IDEO’s help developing a better business model. A Washington Post report in 2018 by Daniel Douglas-Gabriel suggests IDEO’s 2016 model did little to improve educational outcomes. By November 2018 Zenith closed all but 3 of the 50 Corinthian colleges it acquired in the 2015 sale.
Instead of a focus on how these projects actually impacted their users lives, IDEO and the d.school’s websites prominently display project materials that supported their projects. According to Williams, design thinkers “leverage visual design to convey the scope of the problem and the effect of their solutions.” The focus on graphic design provides logical support to an approach rooted in design, but it obscures how little substantive information there is about how IDEO’s business model actually worked for its users, in this case primarily low-income students. Intervening with municipal government in a racially divided city, or with career colleges that historically defrauded students, come with serious long-term implications that should not be glossed over with sharp graphic design.
IDEO, and many advertising, digital and consulting agencies, present their previous work in the form of case studies to garner new business. The ECMC case study is on IDEO’s website, titled Reimagining Career Colleges for the 21st Century. It features the graphic design as shown above, and describes what they planned to do, but does not divulge a single detail about how the project actually worked. In part by favoring elements like dynamic visuals, case studies support enthusiasm for the ideas of design thinking. The problem with case studies is the format makes them seem like rigorous editorial reporting, not #sponsored content. The case study moniker adds an additional layer of misleading faux-academic legitimacy to IDEO’s work.
Can we do better?
The application of design thinking to virtually any problem sits in sharp contrast with the expertise required within design as a bounded profession, or other professions for that matter. Everyone is not an apparel designer, architect, truck driver, or as we’ve recently learned, epidemiologist. As the two case studies above indicate, interventions could benefit from industry specific expertise. Arguably, if IDEO had relied on people with municipal government and career college experience, design thinking may have worked better. But design thinking often promotes precisely the opposite. In fact, the d.school argues municipal governments don’t use common sense. In devaluing the generic experience of longtime civil servants, design thinkers are able jump in and unlock creativity, peppering a project with multi-colored post-it notes to innovate and disrupt. A d.school bootcamp course exercise includes redesigning the San Francisco airport experience. Instead of experience, users guide the project.
Focusing solely on users is a paltry substitute for experience. As the Gainesville study indicates, the city only focused on some residents, or users, while deliberately ignoring Black residents. In addition to a myopic focus on users, design thinking in a general sense excludes the labor supply chain and the environment. This echoes a more general critique of human(user)-centred design. One need not look further than Uber for an example of superb UX that ignores their drivers’ need for living wages. If design thinking were just a tool to fulfill client’s needs its business savvy would warrant less criticism. But as it is touted as a universal paradigm where everyone wins, it seems like those winning the most are expensive consulting agencies and prestigious universities in the Global North.
The tech industry has long benefited from marketing its own successes. The critic versus Chef divide present in other industries never really existed. Early proponents of technology intersected with the platforms marketing it like Wired magazine. Design thinking suffers the same fate. David Kelley, for example, was one of the founders of IDEO and the d.school. In the absence of critical, empirically focused inquiry, there are ridiculously circular calls to use design thinking to fix design thinking! But what does fixing it really mean? New revenue streams for agencies that make a lot of money touting design thinking? More innovation centred university departments? The academy and industry can and should critically evaluate design thinking on a larger scale. As evidenced by the two case studies outlined above, there is plenty of data ripe for investigation. There needs to be room for this discourse.
As design thinking moved out of the design sphere into a business device that supported the tech industry’s reconfiguration of American work, it became increasingly rigid. While we do not steadfastly adhere to Horst Rittel and Bruce Archer’s earlier paradigms, they remain part of design methods history. Design thinking did make some valuable contributions and most certainly should remain part of a discourse on design methods, but it is time to explore new paradigms. Design thinking’s methods may have been well-intended but now have visible shortcomings. Williams suggests maybe what we need are more “unsettling design modalities”, which would, among other things, require rejecting design thinking’s optimism. As design thinking continues its unfettered expansion into business, education, and increasingly public policy, this call to action cannot come soon enough.
