How Management Consultants Can Benefit From Using Design Thinking

Conceptions of design may have once been limited to wrapping products in pretty packaging; however, today, it’s an incredibly broad discipline that encompasses everything from product development, branding, and business models, through to corporate strategy and designing services. The role that design plays in the contemporary world of management consulting is less obvious. In fact, it has even been described as contrarian and not co‐existent with Design Thinking Methods.(1) However, Design Thinking may be the missing tool that management consultants can employ to help clients disrupt a given industry through a human-­centered approach. By harnessing Design Thinking process expertise, management consulting firms will be better placed to help clients face the new era in which market developments take place at a rapid pace amid groundbreaking digital transformation. Organic growth is no longer sufficient, and more and more consultants and companies are recognizing the fundamental role that Design Thinking may play in evolutionary and revolutionary growth.

Management Consulting and Design Thinking: Two Different Approaches to Solving Problems

The toolkit that management consultants traditionally apply incorporates a primarily analytical approach. Consultants typically ground their thinking on data. Management consultants generally begin strategy projects by performing an “as­‐is” analysis through which they evaluate the current situation and identify meaningful insights that can inform the development of a future strategy. This stage of the process may include conducting an industry analysis to understand market dynamics, a value chain and profit analysis to ascertain where value is being created and captured, and competitive analysis to better understand the direct and indirect competitive forces that exist in a given market. Management consultants review customer data with the intention of understanding spending patterns, needs, wants, and behaviors, and they subsequently use the insights they have gained to segment the market into more attractive and less attractive customer groups.

Having performed this analysis and gained an understanding of the world as it is today, management consultants look for opportunities through which their clients can compete in the given market. This takes the form of a rigorous, deductive, and analytical approach by which the consultants focus on the development of robust recommendations that can be irrefutably defended using the data that was acquired during the initial investigative process. The consultant also employs an underlying mental model that perceives the world largely as a fixed canvas or map with his or her role being to identify the territory on which the client can feasibly compete.

Designers do not see the world as a fixed canvas. They typically take an optimistic approach by which they perceive the world to contain a vast range of possibilities that can be crafted and bent to their will. Design consultants commence a project by looking for inspiration that will drive their thinking and ideation about the world as it should be. This inspiration can come from within an industry or outside it. Sometimes, a societal trend will trigger an idea or could be driven by ethnographic research into potential customers. It is only when this creative, generative phase is complete that designers start to apply analytical tools to evaluate the ideas. For example, they may question how an idea can change industry dynamics or a competitive set. Traditional strategic tools are used to evaluate the ideas and get a sense of what actions need to be taken to progress the ideas from concept to reality.

On the one hand, as described above, it is easy for analytical approaches to kill ideas too soon because of past and existing patterns; worse still, analytical methods might be too constraining and impede the generation of truly radical ideas. On the other hand, analytical approaches may work extremely well for other business‐related problems that may not be solved by a Design Thinking approach.

So why not use the best of each approach to achieve a better client output?

How to Integrate Design Thinking into Management Consulting

Human‐centered design: Empathy, as gained through user research, is at the core of Design Thinking. Management consultants should strive to include all project stakeholders and customers in the process, starting from project initiation. The fundamental goal should be to access immediate and timely feedback from the customer and make changes and revisions along the way to realize the power of customer experience.

Collaboration: Communication is a common challenge across projects. Words, and the meaning behind them, are often misunderstood. Different people from different backgrounds and experiences use language differently. Design Thinking tools and methods, like sketching, mind maps or physical models, can be extremely useful. They force people to remove imprecise words and focus on a “synthesized” picture to describe the concept. Additionally, people are terrible at recall, but very effective at recognition. Management consultants should utilize the tools and methods that are available to bring people together and encourage them to work more effectively.

Being hands­‐on: Design Thinking is about taking ideas and concepts and quickly giving them form. Whether a napkin sketch, a prototype carved from ziplock bags and kids art supplies, or a digital mock­‐up, the quick and rough models that designers continually create are a critical component of innovation. When designers give form to an idea, they begin to make it real and can elicit emotional responses from end users and customers. To learn, designers and consultants have to put ideas into practice.

Iterative: As part of the project management process, consultants need to embed the cyclical process of prototyping, analyzing, and refining a product or service. The team needs to secure timely feedback from the customer to make iterative/incremental improvements along the way.

Reframing: The design process can help consultants to ask the right questions and break down some of the mental models that too often act as serious barriers to progression. Consultants should always follow Don Norman’s rule: “I never solve the problem I am asked to solve… because, invariably, the problem I am asked to solve is not the real, fundamental, root problem; it is just a symptom.” (2)

New Tool for Problem Solving: Design Thinking is underpinned by a holistic approach that can help management consultants develop a better methodology by which different problems can be solved. Design Thinking can be of great use whenever management consultants encounter an innovation and/or consumer­‐focused problem. It is not sufficient to add journey maps and post­‐it notes to an analytical process; consultants need to embrace a designer’s mindset to make the design process truly successful.

In Summary

Not every business problem is best solved by a product/service design or redesign. Sometimes the solution may lie in an acquisition, divestiture, or hedging strategy. Business leaders have a lot of strategies at their disposal: marketing, sales, operations, finance, IT, HR, strategy, customer service, etc. However, creative approaches can often hold the key to achieving real and sustainable revenue growth through increased acquisition and retention. Companies need to meet clients’ needs by creating something that is truly new, delivering value in a way that has never previously been available, and leading as opposed to following. The tools of design may be needed to reframe customer expectations.

The traditional analysis approach that is typically employed by management consultants complements creative, out‐of­‐the­‐box Design Thinking processes and principles. The two methodologies are not adversarial or mutually exclusive; rather, together, they shed new light on business situations that are becoming more and more complex and, through doing so, identify new opportunities and create new value. Well­‐rounded management consultants are those who understand all the basic principles, processes, tools and can adopt/adjust the best approach to the complexities of each situation.

References

Footnotes

1 https://www.edgeverve.com/finacle/blogs/management-consultants-contrarians-design-thinking/

2 Norman, D. The Design of Everyday Things.

Sources

Artto, K., & Kujala, J. (2008). Project business as a research field. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business.

Beckman, S., & Barry, M. (2007). Innovation as a learning process: Embedding design thinking. California Management Review.

Vanhemert, K. (2015). Consulting Giant Mckinsey Buys Itself A Top Design Firm. Retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/2015/05/consulting-giant-mckinsey-bought-top-design-firm/

Recuenco, J. (2015). Why mixing Design Thinking and Business Consulting May Bomb. Retrieved from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-mixing-design-thinking-business-consulting-may-bomb-g-recuenco/

Mishra, s. (2017). Are Management Consultants contrarians to Design Thinking? Retrieved from: https://www.edgeverve.com/finacle/blogs/management-consultants-contrarians-design-thinking/

Sturman, F. (2015). The intersection of design thinking, strategic consulting and customer centricity. Retrieved from Medium.