The Problem With Design Thinking

Design thinking has really come of age in the last couple of years. As more companies begin to recognize that they must manage increasingly complex systems of customers, employees, data, and services, design thinking has emerged as the buzzword of choice for executives looking for a silver bullet to solve these problems.

At Metric Loop, we’ve been following the design thinking trend since its beginning. We’re big fans of its core tenets and the questions that it forces us to consider, but the more that we’ve tried to incorporate it into our business the more we’ve realized that design thinking is fundamentally flawed. We believe it’s flawed because it’s not the panacea to our problems that it claims to be.

For example, we recently started increasing our posts to social media. Before we started doing this we tried to use design thinking by asking ourselves, “how can we design our social experience?” Right away we dove into designing our social experience implementation without first asking ourselves what our social experience actually is.

For us, design thinking has always been rooted exclusively in the realm of implementation. And as we read more about it and look at how other companies have implemented design thinking, this seems to be a common theme. Design thinking provides an incredible toolkit for solving almost anything, but it fails to look at the bigger picture and understand what necessitated it in the first place. Going back to our social example, we designed an entire system of accounts, schedules, responsibilities, and content to create our social experience without looking at the bigger picture of what our social experience actually is.

When we took a step back and asked ourselves, “what is our social experience?” We realized that we needed to re-design our social experience because we had failed to understand it from the beginning. As we’ve approached new projects, we still use design thinking to come up with solutions to the problems we’re trying to solve. However, we have added another step to our process and now we set out to determine first what we are trying to solve before we set out to solve it.

Originally published at metricloop.com on March 11, 2016.