Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation: What They Can't Teach You at Business or Design School

Discontinuity is causing chaos. It’s now the norm. Traditional hierarchies will not survive long. The next generation of leaders need to know how to roll with change. They also have to mobilize people who are resistant to change or don’t know how to successfully adapt to an ever-evolving business environment. In this chapter we explore strategic business challenges familiar to most organizations and demonstrate how design thinking approaches can be applied to those challenges. Complex business problems today demand new leaders to manage change effectively, reinvent business models and practices rapidly enough to keep up with the competition, and outinnovate them while balancing the management of change with rapid growth. The adaptability of any organization depends on the effective handling of other key strategic challenges: developing adaptable strategies, avoiding commoditization, creating sustaining differentiation, developing innovative culture, engaging customers and employees, responding to technological disruptions, and balancing short- and long-term strategies. For each of these business problems we apply a design thinking lens to raise new questions and shape creative ideas. Each subsection is complemented with an activity. The basic illustrative design thinking implementations serve as useful examples of how to approach business problems with empathy, creativity, foresight, ...