Design Thinking Case Study

“Design Thinking” in my workplace.

Why Introduce Design Thinking?

The question shouldn’t be “Why introduce Design Thinking into the workplace?” It should be “Why wouldn’t you introduce Design Thinking into the workplace?”

Design thinking is another way to solve problems and can be described as another tool in your tool belt to be used in conjunction with other powerful methods, such as scientific analysis. Design Thinking uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines different methods and tools (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2012) to find solutions to customer problems. This collaborative approach, can involve the customer and individuals from different areas and disciplines within the organisation. The consequence of this approach is often an

I’m not really surprised by this as they weren’t invited to participate in the development or rollout of the project and they felt as though it was “thrust upon them”. Comments from both the Growers and the scheduling team are that the system is difficult to interpret, is inaccurate, requires spreadsheets to be run in parallel to check the numbers and has actually added more complexity to a job that used to be relatively simple.

In my opinion, if the organisation wants to make the scheduling system more effective, a Design Thinking strategy should be introduced as it places the customer at the centre of the design process, identifies innovation and continual improvement opportunities that can help to make the businesses offering more desirable for the clients. (Stefan Moritz, 2005)

Ideally the company should build a genuine understanding of the customers’ needs, use the Design Thinking process to investigate how to improve the touch-points to ultimately find an outcome that aligns with what the customer wants. Next the solution should be proven so that it becomes widely

There is a wide range of design thinking methods and tools that can be used to help work towards a final solution, for example the HCD (Human Centred Design) where the steps are prototyping, testing, analysing and refining or the iterative four step approach as outlined by Marc Stickdorn, (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2012) where the steps are: exploration, creation, reflection and implementation. Another idea might be to analyse the current scheduling system to identify the good components that can be incorporated into a new system. The key point is that Design Thinking is an iterative process; if it doesn’t work, then try